Newsroom Stories

In remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work will host the fourth annual “Financial Freedom Seminar: Tying Loose Ends — Becoming Financially Secure,” from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 23, in Brown Hall, Room 100. The seminar, free and open to the public, is designed for St. Louis community youth and adults interested in building wealth, repairing and maintaining good credit, purchasing a home or starting and expanding a business.

An international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D. professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has reanalyzed the complete immature dentition of a 30,000 year-old-child from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal. The new analysis of the Lagar Velho child shows that these “early modern humans” were modern without being “fully modern.”

Artillery shells crash, sewage pipes thump, a stack of vintage oil cans booms across the stage. Welcome to the world of ScrapArtsMusic, the outrageously kinetic percussion ensemble, which performs on hand-made instruments built entirely of salvaged and recycled materials. On Saturday, Jan. 23, ScrapArtsMusic will bring its unforgettable “action percussion” to Edison Theatre as part of the 2009-10 OVATIONS Series.

Nearly 40 years after the Apollo astronauts first brought samples of the Moon to Earth for study, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis are leading an effort to return to the Moon for samples that could unlock secrets of the early Solar System. Known as MoonRise, the proposed Moon mission is one of three finalists now bidding to become NASA’s next big space science venture, a $650 million mission that would launch before 2019.

David Windus has been named associate dean for medical student education at the School of Medicine. He also is a professor of medicine and assistant medical director of the school’s Chromalloy American Kidney Center.

Obesity researchers at the School of Medicine are recruiting families with overweight children for a study to help those kids, and their parents, lose weight. The two-year study, called COMPASS (Comprehensive Maintenance Program to Achieve Sustained Success), will involve families with one or more children between the ages of 7 and 11 who are at least 20 percent above their ideal weight.

It may seem a small consolation from either point of view, but a new study has affirmed that patients with cancer are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and patients with Alzheimer’s disease are less likely to get cancer.

NASA’s robotic rover Spirit, bogged down in the loose soil of a Red Planet crater for months, has helped make an important scientific discovery just by spinning its wheels. “We’ve found something supremely interesting in the disturbed soil,” says WUSTL’s Raymond Arvidson, deputy principal scientist on the mission. Sulfate minerals churned up by the rover’s wheels offer evidence that this area “could have once supported life,” he explains.

Having trouble figuring out what to get that high school senior on your gift list this holiday season? Or parents, want to make sure your 17-year-old keeps his or her mind on the right track while on winter break? A book might provide a simple solution. Washington University in St. Louis faculty offer their suggestions for the one book — in a few cases two or three — that a high school senior should read before heading off to college, whether to be better prepared for the college classroom or for living away from home or simply to be a more well-rounded person.

Many of the same genes influence both alcohol and marijuana use as well as dependence on those substances, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. Together, these genes make some people more likely to drink alcohol or use marijuana. As consumption of alcohol or use of marijuana increases, risk of dependency rises.