Parents and Families

Farmers in the “heart of tobacco country” are trying to grow chickpeas, the Wall Street Journal reports, to satisfy American’s growing appetite for hummus. Evidently, the Middle Eastern staple appeals to consumers who want to dip into a healthy snack.

“Sabra Dipping Co., a joint venture of PepsiCo Inc. (PEP) and Israel’s Strauss Group Ltd., wants to cultivate a commercial crop in Virginia to reduce its dependence on the legume’s main U.S. growing region—the Pacific Northwest—and to identify new chickpea varieties for its dips and spreads,” the Journal reports.

Sales of “refrigerated flavored spreads”—a segment dominated by hummus—totaled $530 million at U.S. food retailers last year, up 11% from a year earlier and a 25% jump over 2010, according to the Journal.

Memorial Hall

This summer, August 8-11, Bowdoin College will present the Alumni College program, “The Afterlife of the American Civil War” — a study of culture, music, art and poetry following the Civil War.

As a part of this sesquicentennial commemoration, the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives is writing a blog, On this Day in Civil War History…, as a daily reminder of what occurred 150 years ago. The posts derive from Special Collections’s historical resources: a passage from a letter to a soldier, a soldier’s diary entry, a note of condolence, a daily surgeon’s morning report, an account of activities on the home front.

Thursday [April 30, 1863]. In forenoon finished the case of Theodate Melancon….I felt obliged to vote “Not guilty” on both charged & specifications, there appearing to be ground for a very reasonable doubt in regard to his guilt, & I felt bound to give him the benefit of it.” — From the Diary of Isaac Winslow Case [Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection]

Cambodia exchange students Rada Chhorn and Kimsrung Lov

As young girls growing up in Cambodia’s countryside, both Kimsrung Lov and Rada Chhorn faced steep odds in obtaining a college education.

Lov’s father, a small business owner in a town 57 miles outside of Phnom Penh, believed that because girls were only destined to become housewives, it was a waste for them to receive an education.

Chhorn was raised on a small farm in a village with no electricity or plumbing, and her family could not afford to pay for college.

Despite these obstacles, Lov and Chhorn not only earned undergraduate degrees, but they became two of just a handful of Cambodian students to study abroad in the United States.

Read the full story here.

Zillow.com is a real estate search site that reveals prices paid for homes and  names of homeowners. Arrests.org lists mug shots by state. These are only two of the endless amount of websites that have access to your personal information including your name, birth date, address and more. While yes, this information has always been public record, the web is making it more accessible and more public.  Mashable describes what personal details are circulated online and what is being done to regulate it.

From watching TV before bed to working out late at night, we seem to have developed many sleeping habits that are counterproductive to catching a quality slumber.  Huffington Post exposes what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to these 12 sleeping myths.

Bowdoin Green Athletes Alex Tougas ’14, Tricia Thibodeau ’13 and Emma Chow ’15

The Green Athletes, a group of students dedicated to making athletics at Bowdoin more sustainable, have hooked up with Michael Aronson ’83 to collect discarded shoes and send them to merchants in West Africa.

Aronson runs a for-profit business called Rerun Shoes, based in Amherst, Mass., that collects wearable used shoes — kid’s shoes, cleats, sneakers, sandals, dress shoes for men and women — and supplies them to micro-entrepreneurs in Mali, Guinea and Liberia. The merchants refurbish the shoes and sell them at local markets.

Donated shoes can be dropped off in boxes at the Buck Center and Farley Field House.

Read the full story here.

Using the Twitter data from the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) scare, researchers at Penn State University found that negative tweets about children’s vaccines were more likely to be shared than positive ones.  By collecting 318,397 tweets about positive, negative and neutral feelings toward the swine flu, the study more generally found that a high volume of both positive and negative tweets seemed to be contagious, both encouraging users to tweet more negatively.

Students were treated to nonstop sun this weekend for the annual Ivies celebration. Guster, Hoodie Allen and Bowdoin student group Phar\os played at Saturday’s concert.

Continue here for slideshow.

Are the eyes on the back of your neck just in your imagination? Possibly. New studies have shown that in cases of uncertainty — such as when someone is wearing sunglasses — we tend to favor the notion that they are looking directly at us… even when they’re not.

“It’s a quirk of evolution, the researchers suggest: Given the possible threat that another poses, better to assume he’s lookin’ at you than to suppose he’s just benignly looking in your direction,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sebastian Smee writes in the Boston Globe that the current Per Kirkeby show in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art contains big paintings with “a restless, unsettling aura” and a “peculiar charge.”

“Kirkeby’s flickering color — one minute earthy and dun, the next bejeweled, opalescent — plays strange tricks, inducing second and third glances,” he writes.

Smee also commends the “good folk at Bowdoin” for setting up a  simultaneous smaller exhibition about color and structure in the earth, organized by the college’s Earth and Oceanographic Sciences and Mathematics Department.

Painting shown: “Mordet I Finderup Lade (Regicide at Finderup Barn),” 1967, mixed media on Masonite, and, below, “Untitled (Horses),” 2009, tempera on canvas by Per Kirkeby.

While the melting of ice caps is bad news for polar bears, a few have been looking at the financial benefits of climate change: namely, the uncovering of oil and tusks.

The Arctic could contain about 13 percent of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the remaining undiscovered natural gas. And, “in Siberia, the tusks of long-dead mammoths, which have been encased in ice for centuries, are now becoming exposed. That’s bringing along tusk hunters and ivory poachers,” NPR reports.

Sammy Shane ’13

After apprenticing in the kitchen of a popular Brunswick restaurant this year, Samantha (Sammy) Shane ’13 will be attending a unique culinary arts program next year at Boston University.

Shane plans to earn a master of liberal arts in gastronomy, studying in a program co-founded by Jacques Pépin and Julia Child. “It’s really one of the only programs of its kind — since it offers both culinary arts and gastronomy — in the U.S.,” Shane said. Once there, she added she plans to concentrate in communications.

Read full story here.

While chronic stress has always proven to be a bad thing for the body and mind, a new study has confirmed prior postulations that low levels of stress might actually be healthy. The research suggests that short-lived stress promotes the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory. “You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but it’s not,” says Daniela Kaufer, lead author of the study. “Some amounts of stress are good to push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance.”

Bowdoin Raises More Than $42K at 8th Annual Relay For Life from Bowdoin College on Vimeo.

This year, 462 participants raised $42,419.60 at Bowdoin’s 2013 Relay for Life, an-all night fundraising event that took place April 19 in Farley Field House.

The Relay is an annual event sponsored  on college campuses by the American Cancer Society to raise money for cancer research and cancer patients. Participants log laps around a track to honor those who have succumbed to cancer. The College’s relay — which started at 6 p.m.and wrapped up the following day at 6 a.m. — offered plenty of entertainment to keep up the walkers’ spirits, including a hypnotist, Zumba class, Taiko and a cappella performances, DJs, raffles, ping-pong tables, snacks and lots more.

Top participants were co-chairs Matthew Mathias ’14 and Laurel Varnell ’14, followed by Sherry Guerette. Top teams were Bowdoin’s housekeeping team Angels For Hope, Swimming and Diving and Men’s Basketball.

Video by Sean Martin, Bowdoin video intern

The Bowdoin Alpine Team this winter returned to the slopes again as a College club after an 11-year hiatus. In its first official season, the team qualified for its first USCSA Eastern Collegiate Skiing Championships, held at Mt. Abrams last February.

This was a particularly sweet victory for a team that has had a trying past. The alpine ski club in 2001 was nixed as a varsity team for financial reasons, according to Alex Fogarty ’13.

Missing the slopes, a group of students came together in 2009, led by Duncan Masland ’11 and Fogarty, to try once again to charter an alpine ski club. The College at the time couldn’t support it, and “rather than taking no for an answer,” Fogarty said, “Duncan and I incorporated a company and filed for non-profit status. [Under the name] Polar Skiing, we ran an independent team who competed in the College racing league (USCSA) against Bowdoin’s rival schools.”

The program was successful, and the team didn’t lose sight of its ultimate goal “to bring ski racing back to Bowdoin,” Fogarty said. This December, after approaching President Barry Mills and receiving his support, the team brought alpine skiing under the Bowdoin name once again.

Next year the team will be lead by Alex Daniels ’14, with the assistance of Christa Villari ’15 and Josh Friedman ’15. Fogarty credits Masland, Hannah Levy ’12 and Katherine O’Brien ’12 with helping strengthen Polar Skiing. “We also owe many thanks to Daniel Schmoll ’13, Joshua Givant ’13 and Johnny Bohorquez ’13, our graduating seniors,” Fogarty added.

The team’s individual highlights this year:

Women

• Hannah Sherman ’15, 7th, Mt. Abrams slalom, Jan. 26
• Alex Fogarty ’13, 3rd, Lost Valley slalom, Feb. 3
• Adriana Pellegrini ’15, 12th, Lost Valley slalom, Feb. 3
• Christa Villari ’15 , 4th, Titcomb Mountain dual giant slalom, Feb. 17
• Sivana Barron ’15 and Liz Carew ’15 tied for 11th, Mt. Abrams giant slalom, Jan. 27

Men

• Alex Daniels ’14, 3rd, Mt. Abrams slalom, Jan. 26
• Alex Butler ’14, 17th and Alex Cheston ’16 18th, Mt. Abrams slalom, Jan. 26
• Josh Givant ’13, 14th, Mt. Abrams giant slalom, Jan. 27
• Josh Friedman ’15, 11th, Lost Valley slalom, Feb. 3
• Jerrod Dobkin ’15, 11th, Lost Valley, slalom, Feb. 3
• Danny Schmoll ’13, 8th, Lost Valley, slalom, Feb. 3
• Johnny Bohorquez ’13, 12th, Lost Valley, slalom, Feb. 3

Women’s Tennis — The Bowdoin College women’s tennis team closed out its regular season in style with a 6-3 win over Tufts on Saturday.

Softball — Melissa DellaTorre pitched a shutout for the Bowdoin College softball team in a 3-0 opening win before eventually splitting a doubleheader with Brandeis after a 5-2 loss in game two on Saturday.

Men’s Lacrosse — Quentin DellaFera scored the game-winning goal with 1:21 remaining in overtime to lift the Wesleyan University men’s lacrosse team to a 8-7 win over Bowdoin in the NESCAC Quarterfinals on Saturday afternoon.

Women’s Lacrosse — The Hamilton College women’s lacrosse team built a three-goal lead in the second half and held off Bowdoin 10-9 in a NESCAC Quarterfinal game Saturday afternoon at Ryan Field.

Baseball — The Bowdoin College baseball team shut out Tufts, 4-0, in the opener of Saturday’s twinbill in Massachusetts, clinching a bid to the 2013 NESCAC Baseball Tournament.

Track and Field — Behind first-place performances by Coby Horowitz, Michele Kaufman, and the Distance Medley Relay team, the Bowdoin College men’s and women’s track and field teams both took fifth at the NESCAC Championships Saturday at Tufts University.

All five living U.S. Presidents were on the stage together in Texas on April 25 for the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, sitting in “Harpswell” chairs crafted by Maine’s Thos. Moser Company. Thos. Moser built more than 50 pieces for the new facility but the company was unaware its work would play such a prominent role in the dedication until Aaron Moser noticed them during the television coverage.

Mort Soule, Class of 1968, will recite the famous 52-line poem by Ernest Thayer, “Casey at the Bat,” tomorrow at Fenway Park for the Red Sox’s annual Maine Day. Except, the Portland resident has been asked to cut the long poem, which typically takes him six minutes to complete, to three minutes, the Portland Press Herald reports.

Mort was inducted into Bowdoin’s Athletic Hall of Honor in 2004 along with his father, Bill ’36, and three brothers, Paul ’66, Jim ’77, and Phil (who was a UMO grad and long-time Bowdoin coach of football, wrestling, and freshman baseball). Mort is also a member of the Maine Sports Hall of Fame and Maine Baseball Hall of Fame.

Students recently gathered at the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center to see photos and hear tales of canoeing, camping and alligator-spotting from this year’s Beyond the Pines Fellowship recipients, who spent a week in March paddling down the Suwannee River.

The Beyond the Pines Fellowship, which is funded by a gift from the Benson family to the Outing Club, is awarded annually to students who propose and plan an outing that will take them far beyond the bounds of Brunswick.

Read the full story by Lidey Heuck ’13 and see more photos here.

Illustration credit: Abby McBride

A Red-tailed Hawk family in Ithaca, N.Y. has its own reality show thanks to cameras mounted on its nest, which sits at the top of a light pole on the Cornell University campus. This week three eggs hatched into fluffy chicks as thousands of people watched the video stream online, meriting a writeup in the Wall Street Journal.

The action will continue over the coming months as the hawk parents bring tasty morsels of food to the nest and care for their growing chicks. Curious viewers can ask questions about what they’re seeing in a live chat stream, which appears alongside the video and is moderated around the clock by knowledgeable nest watchers.

Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Bird Cam site is in its second year of operation. The Lab has other cameras trained on a nest of Great Blue Herons (whose five eggs should be hatching within the next few weeks) and features additional bird cams from partner programs elsewhere in North America.

The goings-on at the hawk and heron nests can also be followed, appropriately, on Twitter.