Humanities & Society

Older workers enrolled in a computer training class.Some economists predict that by 2030, the United States could experience a labor shortage of 35 million workers. Many businesses, including retail giants such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds, have responded to a looming labor shortage by encouraging older workers to remain in the workforce. But a recent study issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office finds that many of the government’s existing employment assistance programs are not providing computer training and other high-tech skills to workers over the age of 55, a demographic that may soon constitute roughly one-third of the entire American workforce. Nancy Morrow-Howell, Ph.D., a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis and a leader in the emerging field of productive aging research, contends that America’s economic future may well hinge on our ability to help older adults continue making contributions to society.

Photo by David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoErik Herzog, Ph.D., and graduate student Rachel Huckfeldt attach electrodes to a multielectrode array.Getting over jet lag may be as simple as changing the temperature —your brain temperature, that is. That’s a theory proposed by Erik Herzog, Ph.D. assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Herzog has found that the biological clocks of rats and mice respond directly to temperature changes.

O’SullivanAn electrical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has devised a theory that sets the limits for the amount of data that can be hidden in a system and then provides guidelines for how to store data and decode it. Contrarily, the theory also provides guidelines for how an adversary would disrupt the hidden information. The theory will have a major impact on homeland security applications.

Experimental economics — a fast-growing branch of economics that involves the creation of a microeconomic environment in a laboratory — is being widely used at the John M. Olin School of Business. Applications of the experimental research have multiplied, spanning many industries and producing results that have impacted everything from how airlines price their tickets to how companies manage their employees. Ronald R. King, Ph.D., is helping to lead the burgeoning new area of research at the business school.

Carrying backpacks the right wayAs parents and kids make their lists for the August back-to-school sales, one item to consider should be a backpack — on wheels, says Nancy J. Bloom, Ph.D., a physical therapy instructor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Kids backs are primarily bearing the weight of their schoolbooks. Bloom says that because young bones are growing all the way through high school, heavy backpacks need to be a major concern. She notes that there are a few important things that kids can do to avoid injury, including carrying their backpacks over both shoulders to balance the load.

Lowry explores the dynamics behind efforts to restore rivers.As America celebrates the bicentennial of Lewis & Clark’s epic journey up the untamed Missouri River, the nation finds itself on the verge of a new era in modern river management, one in which proponents of environmental protection and ecosystem restoration stand on equal footing with those of the hydropower, barge and boating industries. In a new book, Dam Politics: Restoring American Rivers (Georgetown University Press, 2003), noted environmental politics expert William R. Lowry explores the dynamics behind recent efforts to restore American river systems to a more pristine state. The politics of river restoration run deep, and it is politics, argues Lowry, that will ultimately dictate the success or failure of future efforts to restore and preserve the nation’s riverways.

Sophisticated brain imaging reveals that several brain regions can become overactivated when people with Tourette Syndrome perform tasks related to memory.Neuroscience researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are studying the brains of patients with Tourette Syndrome (TS) to see whether they can use sophisticated imaging techniques to identify differences in the dopamine system of people with the tics that characterize TS. A team of researchers, led by Kevin J. Black, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry, neurology and radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, is using PET imaging to see what the brain does in response to levodopa, a natural amino acid that has been used for many years to treat movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. With PET imaging, the researchers can measure the boost in the brain’s dopamine levels in response to the drug both in people with Tourette Syndrome and in those who do not have tics. By identifying differences, they hope to isolate the causes of tics and to help people with TS control or eliminate them.

Illustration from a Hans Christian Andersen story.What is “children’s literature?” As we pause between the perfect, all-ages storms of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film adaptation, the answer seems less clear than ever. In the current issue of Belle Lettres, a bi-monthly publication of Washington University’s International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences, a culture critic and a director of teacher education explain that the genre, always hard to define, remains poorly understood and frequently underestimated.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, examines a Neandertal skull.New scientific evidence challenges a common perception that Neandertals — a close evolutionary relative to modern humans that lived 230,000 to 30,000 years ago — possessed exceptionally long faces. Instead, a report authored by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that modern humans are really the “odd man out” when it comes to facial lengths, which drop off dramatically compared with their ancestral predecessors.

A team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., the Harvard School of Public Health and several other clinical centers around the United States has found that treating depression and social isolation in recent heart attack patients does not reduce the risk of death or second heart attack. Results from the Enhancing Recovery in Coronary Heart Disease Patients Study (ENRICHD) are published in the June 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.