Walking down the narrow hall on the third floor of Paul Creative Arts Center is like flipping a radio dial and finding that music has trumped talk shows on every station. The escalating warm-up scales of a soprano give way to flute trills, followed by halting--but persistent--piano chords and then a saxophone jazz riff. You want to close your eyes to better absorb this amazing cacophony. But if you do, you might trip over a student camped out in the hall waiting to use one of 13 tiny practice rooms.

It's the fires that give it away. The cluster of rolling green hills in Rochester, just visible from Route 125, are actually three giant piles of garbage—more than a million tons come to rest here each year. And down at the bottom of each hill, two candle flares burn steadily. The flames are fueled by methane, a byproduct of decomposing garbage—and a greenhouse gas. Waste Management Inc., the company that runs the landfill project, burns the gas before it hits the atmosphere where it can do damage.

Pathologists with the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UNH have identified the first reported virus in chimney swifts, an adenovirus called Chimney Swift Adenovirus 1, which may represent the first member of an entirely new group of adenoviruses.

To win the Congressional seat in New Hampshire's first district, history dictates that you have to capture Manchester, or at least break even. Carol Shea-Porter '74, '79G knew that as she stood near the doorway of the Rimmon Club that Friday evening before election day. She'd done her best, escorted by a few locals to the new Manchester senior citizen center and the Rotary Club breakfast, confidently marching door to door in the previous weeks asking for support in her quest to become the state's first Congresswoman.

When UNH glaciologist Mark Fahnestock heads north to conduct field research on the Greenland ice sheet, he travels 2,300 miles up and 10,000 years back. Dropped by helicopter to camp in tents on the rocky shoreline near the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier outside the town of Ilulissat, Fahnestock and his colleagues are on the edge of a 630,000-cubic-mile sheet of ice that blankets the world's largest island in all directions--a living remnant of Earth's last ice age.

"Have you noticed the range of footwear?" asked Dana Hamel, watching from the bleachers as the Class of 2007 took their seats on a soggy football field for commencement ceremonies on May 19. "It's quite amazing."

The presidents enter Cowell Stadium

accompanied by Secret Service agents and

Meagan Wilson, 13, center left, the

A recent paper co-authored by Carsey School of Public Policy demographer Kenneth Johnson, along with Daniel Lichter of Cornell University and John Cromartie of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows that as population increases occur in rural counties over time, the counties transform into metropolitan areas, changing the make up of what was formerly "rural America." In addition, according to the paper, recent rural county population declines are being driven by out-migration and a national decrease in birth rates.

U.S. non-metro populations added about 37,000 residents from 2017 to 2018 to reach 46.1 million people. According to Carsey School of Public Policy demographer Ken Johnson, that increase is just slightly higher from the increase of 33,000 non-metro residents from 2016 to 2017.

Chicago lost an estimated 7,000-plus residents from 2017 to 2018, according to recent U.S. Census data. Carsey School of Public Policy demographer Ken Johnson offers perspective on population declines in inner-ring suburbs and how it's not just an issue specific to Chicago.