University Of California At San Diego

With a dozen high-def cameras and a couple of camcorders, plus pens, notebooks, sketch pads and laptops, more than 40 people spent three recent weeks in a black-box theater on the campus of UC San Diego documenting what was occurring there. The object of their study was notoriously elusive: dance and the process of choreographic creation. What happens, they wondered, when choreographer Wayne McGregor creates movement on (through? with?

SAN DIEGO -- Marine Staff Sgt. John Klacza, who took part in the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and will soon deploy to Okinawa and beyond, had a question about the potential negative side of multinational alliances in Asia. If the U.S. keeps encouraging alliances among Asian nations, he asked, couldn't that mean that if we went to war with one nation, we might have to go to war with all of that nation's allies, a scenario sort of like World War I?

Teresa Reynolds, daughter Kelsea, son Tyler and their miniature dachshund Sable settled into chairs Saturday morning at the San Diego Supercomputer Center for an early Christmas present. A satellite connection was established, and soon Marine Master Gunnery Sgt.-select Kenneth Reynolds was on the screen from the air base at Al Asad, Iraq, as part of a program to keep military families in touch with deployed loved ones through teleconferencing.

Most of us probably think of the acoustical tile as a humble artifact from Home Depot. But not so Emily Thompson. To the UC San Diego history professor, it is an icon of modern civilization, belonging on a pedestal along with Cubist art, Einsteinian physics and James Joyce's "Ulysses." Introduced just before World War I, the sound-absorbing tile represents humanity's new ability to manipulate the built environment and avoid the sonic assaults of other modern inventions, Thompson says.

It took two years of planning, a month of construction and then just four 30-second bursts of shaking. And from that shaking, academics and building-industry specialists hope to add to their knowledge about how to prepare California, and the nation, to withstand the killer earthquakes thought to be slouching toward us.

Blake Cole, 19, of Redondo Beach emerged from the surf Saturday morning, longboard under his arm, and professed himself satisfied. "Having fun and doing science," he said. "That's what it's all about." Indeed, the essence of the Physics of Surfing, a 1-unit course for freshmen at UC San Diego, is to mix physical exertion and intellectual rigor.

A La Jolla man was sentenced Monday to 15 months in federal prison for making hoax bomb threats to UC San Diego. Richard Sills, 55, conceded making the calls and planting a fake bomb in an effort to disrupt animal research on the campus. District Judge Larry Burns also ordered Sills to pay $10,419 in restitution to the campus and to a research firm targeted by his late 2007 hoax. -- Tony Perry

UC San Diego is investigating whether a student-produced TV show violated campus regulations by broadcasting a 10-minute segment showing a male student having sex with a woman, officials said. The segment appeared this month on Koala TV, a 90-minute program carried on the university's Student Run TV, a closed-circuit station viewed only on campus.

More than 100 volunteers in San Diego were intentionally exposed to a pesticide in one of two dozen scientific experiments worldwide that have come under attack by California members of Congress who are urging the Bush administration to stop accepting data from human testing they call unethical and dangerous.

Inspired creators fashioning worlds at will, artists are often likened to God, the ultimate bake-from-scratch visionary. A new addition to the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture on the campus of UC San Diego suggests a supernal being with a silly streak, one who's been fooling around in a rock pile, daring gravity with tenuous stacks of stones and assigning fanciful identities to inert matter.