A budget administrator in the chemistry department at New York University is accused of submitting $409,000 in fraudulent reimbursement requests over five years using receipts pilfered from a liquor store trash bin. John Runowicz faces up to 15 years in prison if he is convicted of grand larceny, the New York Daily News reports.

"He put them as requests for petty cash," Robert Morgenthau. district attorney for Manhattan, told the newspaper. "Nobody would look to see that the receipts came from a liquor store."

In the end a suspicious student worker brought the receipts to the attention of university officials, who reported him to Mr. Morgenthau's office and fired him.

A musician on the side, Mr. Runowicz recorded a CD in 2007, "How Am I Here?" under the name John Michael Hersey. Among the tracks: "Things Are Not as Bad as They Seem" and "The Darkest Hour." He pleaded not guilty to...

Every spring and fall, professors try to one-up their colleagues by exchanging unintentionally hilarious sentences from students' exams and final papers. Some of our readers have been kind enough to share the best ones on a lengthy thread in our Forums section. Below, a few gems:

• Marie Curie invented oxygen.
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• The Glorious Revolution was when John Donne changed religions so he wouldn't have to have any more children.
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• Olympia has a cat near her, which was shocking to people because cat has a similar word for a woman's love center.
  
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• The Restoration fixed the Greek manuscripts and stuff.
  
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• Monasticism are monk's who enter a monastery for the soul purpose of God.
  
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• Officer Ryan pulled over Cameron who was a black man riding with his white wife Christine who appeared to be performing flatulence.
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• But dealing with technology I have realized that you have to be patient and both...

It's not his heart. The poor creature's just depressed, says Cynthia Bulik, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Santa Claus would be a better role model if he lost the jiggly belly and ditched his sleigh for a bike, according to a public health expert who takes the jolly old elf to task for his unhealthy ways in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.

Nathan J. Grills, a public health fellow at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, says images of a rotund Santa smoking a pipe promote smoking and obesity, while the tradition of leaving a brandy for him alongside the traditional cookies and milk encourages drinking and driving.

He'd be much better off, the author suggests, if he traded in the mince pies and brandy for the carrot and celery sticks he feeds his reindeer. "Santa only needs to affect health by 0.1 percent to damage millions of lives," the scholar writes.

Even if he slims down, Santa could pose a direct threat to thousands of children if he hasn't had his H1N1 shot. ...

It's almost Christmas. Please, people, pitch in and buy these poor kids some clothes.

Students in an administrative-law course at the University of Oregon Law School got a shock last week when the school accidentally posted the entire text of a forthcoming exam on an electronic bulletin board, reports the legal blog Above the Law.

The professor, John Bonine, who was in Copenhagen for the U.N. climate conference at the time, declared the incident "a moment in academic ethics" that would define the students' legal careers. Citing the school's honor code, he instructed them to delete the test immediately. Those who had read it were to confess how much of the exam they had read.

"I explained that they can be denied admission to the Bar for engaging in dishonest activity, including failing to delete the exam or failing to tell me whether they read all or part of it," Mr. Bonine told Above the Law. And even though the professor ended up giving them a different exam, he said, "...

The Eggo waffle shortage could not have come at a better time for Stephen Akbeg.

The dearth of the Kellogg breakfast staple, which came as a result of the flooding and temporary closure of an Atlanta factory, coincided almost perfectly with the opening of the Hampshire College student’s own waffle house on wheels.

Simply Waffles, a Belgian waffle shop run out of a renovated mail-delivery truck, is open about 15 hours a week, and provides people at Hampshire with thick, gooey-on-the-inside crispy-on-the-outside Belgian waffles (both the dough and the irons are imported from Belgium) that can be covered in any combination of chocolate, powdered sugar, and whipped cream.

It took about a year for Mr. Akbeg to get his project up and running. Simply Waffles might have opened during a time of waffle abundance if not for a few setbacks — like when Mr. Akbeg's fellow students couldn’t figure out...

Errol T. Muzawazi, whom we wrote about here last week, is still walking and talking after five days in front of a classroom at Jagiellonian University, in Krakow, Poland. His feat, which is to end today at the 130-hour mark (4 p.m. ET), can be seen live on the Web.

As with all such endeavors, Mr. Muzawazi's marathon mark will not be official until Guinness World Records declares it so, but at noon local time (6 a.m. ET), he crossed over the previous record of 120 hours. He is seeking to raise money for a trans-African educational journey. 

Congratulations, Mr. Muzawazi! Now get some sleep. 

A drama instructor at the University of California at Davis was arrested last week and jailed for several days after some students thought he was going to set off a bomb in class, The Sacramento Bee reported Thursday.

The instructor, a graduate student in the university’s theater and dance department who taught acting, referred to his students’ end-of-semester instructor evaluations as a "bomb" before throwing the papers on the floor and running out of the classroom, according to a statement issued by the campus police.

"I have a bomb, this is the last time I am ever going to see you," said the instructor, James Marchbanks, according to the statement. "I am going to leave class before the bomb goes off, but you are all going to stay here until it’s done."

One student subsequently reported what was considered a threat to the campus police, who said two other students corroborated the...

Via Reddit