Newsroom Stories

Freshwater fish are an important part of the diet of many peoples around the world, but it has been unclear when fish became an essential part of the year-round diet for early humans. A new study by an international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, shows it may have happened in China as far back as 40,000 years ago.

DornGerald W. Dorn II has been named the Philip and Sima K. Needleman Professor of Medicine at the School of Medicine. The professorship was established to support a faculty member holding a key leadership position within the BioMed 21 initiative, a multidisciplinary imperative to rapidly convert research findings into effective, individualized treatments.

The 11-story, 700,000 square-foot BJC Institute of Health at Washington UniversityThe exterior of the BJC Institute of Health at Washington University is almost a wrap. The building is enclosed in 24,000 square-feet of insulated metal panels, 20,800 square-feet of brick, 99,000 square-feet of limestone panels and 75,000 square-feet of glass. The focus now continues inward as crews prepare the building for a December 2009 opening.

President Barack Obama met this week with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev. While the two sides did not see eye-to-eye on all topics, they did mutually agree to dispose of 34 tons each of weapons-grade plutonium, an initiative started in the 1990s and never completed. It’s a step in the right direction, says an expert on Russian identity at Washington University in St. Louis.

MichalskiJeff M. Michalski, professor of radiation oncology, has been named vice chair and director of clinical programs of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the School of Medicine. He will oversee clinical operations at all treatment facilities, clinical and translational research, and all training and education.

*St. Louis Post-Dispatch* imageIt sounds like something from a science fiction movie: Sensors are surgically inserted in the brain to understand what you’re thinking. Machines that can speak, move or process information — based on the fleeting thoughts in a person’s imagination. But it’s not completely fictional. Researchers at Washington University have developed ways of tying humans and computers together.

A photo exhibit at the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center this summer just goes to show that some things run in a family. The father-son photography duo of Edward and Josh Geltman will be on display beginning at 5:30 p.m. July 24 in the hearth area of the FLTC. The show runs until September 20.

While the St. Louis Cardinals decide whether to re-sign baseball’s best hitter, Albert Pujols, following the 2010 season, they might want to consider a new study by a business professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Mike Lewis, assistant professor of marketing at the Olin Business School, claims that small market teams can get as many as four times more incremental wins by signing a high-level pitcher over an all-star hitter.

Cancerous tumors sometimes form at the site of chronic wounds or injury, but the reason why is not entirely clear. Now researchers at theSchool of Medicine have engineered mice with a persistent wound-like skin condition, and the mice are helping them understand the tumor-promoting effects of long-standing wounds and injuries.

An international collaboration of 390 scientists reports the discovery of an outburst of very-high-energy gamma radiation from the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87), accompanied by a strong rise of the radio flux measured from the direct vicinity of its supermassive black hole. The combined results give first experimental evidence that particles are accelerated to extremely high energies in the immediate vicinity of a supermassive black hole and then emit the observed gamma rays. The gamma rays have energies a trillion times higher than the energy of visible light. Washington University in St. Louis physicists helped coordinate this cooperative project, the results of which appear in the July 2 Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.