Humanities & Society

The MySci Resource Center, the new hub of the Institute for School Partnership in University City, Mo., launched Feb. 18 to great fanfare. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, a chemist by training, donned goggles and a lab coat to demonstrate to student visitors how much fun science can be. Video highlights of “Magic” Mark Wrighton are included.

Washington University in St. Louis administrators are urging Congress and the White House to reach a compromise to avoid wide-ranging, across-the-board federal spending cuts that would take effect March 1.

Olin Business School’s fourth annual Olin Sustainability Case Competition challenged students to propose plans for developing more than 10,000 vacant properties in St. Louis. From solar panels to community service projects, students came up with creative ideas to combat “Blight, Plight, and Urban-Flight: Stimulating the Sustainable Development of Vacant Land in the City of St. Louis.

A new study, led by Jenine K. Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the use of social media by state health departments in the United States. The study, published Feb. 7 in the journal Frontiers in Public Health Services and Systems Research, found use of web-based sites such as Facebook and Twitter a growing trend.

Washington University in St. Louis and the City of St. Louis have announced the eight teams selected to move to the final round of the Sustainable Land Lab competition. The competition is the first of its kind in St. Louis where anyone can compete for the opportunity to create a two-year demonstration project to transform a vacant lot into an asset that advances sustainability.

Sustainability and economic growth: two desirable goals which should demonstrably complement one another, especially in our cities. But how? On Feb. 21, the Sam Fox School and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., will present The Innovative Metropolis, a daylong symposium (and web simulcast) on fostering economic competitiveness through sustainable urban design.

Holden Thorp, PhD, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and a highly respected research scientist and academic leader, will become provost of Washington University in St. Louis on July 1, according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. He will succeed Edward S. Macias, PhD, who has served as chief academic officer for the past 25 years.

An undergraduate student at WUSTL helped create and launch a mobile app that helps students track the campus circulator shuttle. It’s called the “WUSTL Circulator,” and on its first day, it had up to four times as many downloads as typical new university apps.

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates recently adopted a resolution recommending that the federal government expand its protections against conflicts of interest among government contractors. The resolution was based in part on a report Kathleen Clark, JD, ethics expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).“In recent decades, the federal government has greatly expanded its use of contractors to perform services, and spends hundreds of billions on services every year,” Clark writes. “While an extensive array of ethics statutes and rules regulate government employees to ensure that they make decisions in the interest of the government rather than a private interest, only a few of these restrictions apply to contractor personnel.”

Scientific efforts to explain feeblemindedness, delinquency and racial inferiorities date to the Spanish Inquisition. And while the horrors of Nazi Germany exposed fatal flaws in science’s quest to build the master race, the ethical dilemmas posed by the science of eugenics are far from behind us, warns an anthropologist from Washington University in St. Louis.