Newsroom Stories

Warren M. Shapleigh, former president of the Ralston Purina Co. and an emeritus trustee of Washington University in St. Louis, died Sunday, Nov. 1, 2009, at McKnight Extended Care. He was 89.

Yale historian Benedict Kiernan to speak on the history and telltale warning signs of genocide on Nov. 11 for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture.

A tiny cage of gold covered with a smart polymer responds to light, opening to empty its contents and resealing when the light is turned off. The smart nanocages could be used to deliver drugs directly to target sites, thus avoiding systemic side effects.

Olivier and Tony Award-winning actor Roger Rees is probably best known to American audiences for his work on the small screen — as the dashing English tycoon Robin Colcord on Cheers, as British Ambassador Lord John Marbury on The West Wing and, most recently, as Dr. Colin Marlow on Grey’s Anatomy. But next month Rees, a 22-year veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), will return to the stage with What You Will, a side-splitting one-man-show that combines the Bard’s greatest soliloquies with colorful observations about the acting life and offbeat (and occasionally bawdy) tales of theatrical disaster.

The architects of the National Research Council’s roadmap for the next decade, “America’s Energy Future: Technology and Transformation,” will meet with top officers of energy companies today to discuss this capstone report that recommends investing in clean energy technologies. The meeting will be held from 12:30 to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2, 2009, at Washington University’s May Auditorium in Simon Hall.

Holidays and tables full of delicious food usually go hand in hand, but for nearly half of the children in the United States, this is not guaranteed. “49 percent of all U.S. children will be in a household that uses food stamps at some point during their childhood,” says Mark R. Rank, Ph.D., poverty expert at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. “Food stamp use is a clear sign of poverty and food insecurity, two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child’s health.” Rank’s study, “Estimating the Risk of Food Stamp Use and Impoverishment During Childhood,” is published in the current issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Video available.

The annual health open enrollment period for the health/dental or dental-only plans, the health- and child-care flex spending plans, the Health Savings Account and the Retirement Medical Savings Account has begun. It will continue through Nov. 30.

Scholars from across the United States and Canada will gather at Washington University Nov. 6 and 7 for the inaugural International Creole Corridor Symposium. The public is invited to attend the symposium, sponsored by WUSTL and Les Amis (The Friends), the region’s Creole cultural heritage preservationist organization, located in St. Louis. The Creole Corridor, located […]

Researchers at the School of Medicine have linked mutations in a gene to a benign pediatric brain tumor, a finding that will help scientists seek drug treatments that block growth of the tumors, they report in the journal Neurology.

Critic and curator Yve-Alain Bois, a widely recognized expert on 20th-century European and American art, will present a lecture titled “Chance Encounters: John Cage, François Morellet, Ellsworth Kelly” at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 9, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. The talk — held in conjunction with the exhibition Chance Aesthetics, on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum through Jan. 4 — is cosponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series and the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences.