Humanities & Society

The Monsanto Fund has awarded Washington University $3.7 million to develop, build and operate two custom mobile classrooms. Washington University will lead a partnership, including the St. Louis Science Center, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Saint Louis Zoo, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, to create and provide programming on the vehicles. The program will help young elementary school students develop enthusiasm for learning and doing science, through interactive experiences and exhibits.

Morris Fiorina, author of a new book on the perceived deep divide between America’s “red” and “blue” states, will lead a discussion on “Polarization, Tolerance, and the State of American Public Opinion” in a community forum at 7:30 p.m. March 28, in May Auditorium, Simon Hall. James L. Gibson, Ph.D., the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University, will join Fiorina for public discussion of his comments.

Thanks to a major gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, postdoctoral fellows in Arts & Sciences are now available for graduate students in the humanities and the social sciences.

Bipolar disorder is often hard to diagnose in children, and it is easy to mistake the disorder’s manic phase for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, warns Joan Luby, a child psychiatrist at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Learn more about pediatric bipolar disorder in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

Initial results from an ongoing study evaluating the benefit of prostate cancer screening practices demonstrate that the combined use of both standard tests—the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test and the digital rectal exam (DRE)—is optimal for detecting cancer.

Child psychiatry researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are investigating the effectiveness of several therapies for children with bipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive illness.

The rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes among children in the U.S. is rapidly rising. Many children with Type 2 diabetes don’t even know they have the disease. Neil White, a pediatrician at WUSM and St. Louis Children’s Hospital, outlines symptoms and risk factors for diabetes in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

HackerAward-winning poet Marilyn Hacker will read from her work at 7 p.m. Friday, March 18, at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The author of 11 books of poetry and essays, Hacker is a cancer survivor and prominent lesbian activist as well as an influential literary editor and a gifted translator. Much of her work details her own struggles with breast cancer and the loss of friends to AIDS. The talk sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum’s Inside Out Loud: Women’s Health in Contemporary Art.

Photo by Robert BostonA fossil of a diminutive human nicknamed “the Hobbit” likely represents a previously unrecognized species of early humans, according to the results of a detailed comparison of the fossil’s brain case with those of humans, apes and other human ancestors.

WUSM researchers have developed new risk estimates for premature babies.If a woman goes into labor before her baby is full term, her obstetrician must make a crucial recommendation: delay labor or allow it to continue. Delivering the baby prematurely may increase the risk of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome (RDS), a potentially fatal condition. Now medical researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have generated new risk estimates for RDS that allow physicians to make delivery decisions with far greater confidence.