Newsroom Stories

The third African Film Festival will be held March 27-30. The series consists of four feature films and four short films from eight different African nations, touching on themes of love, gender, family and the effects of globalization. It also will include a new youth program March 26-27.

British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell will describe her landmark work in discovering the first pulsars at the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. on Wed., March 19 in Graham Chapel.

Anesthesiology researchers at the School of Medicine have found that a device used to ensure that surgery patients have no memories of their operations may not lower the risk of the phenomenon known as anesthesia awareness — an extremely rare but distressing occurance.

Human diseases and social networks seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, along with his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, has published an algorithm (a recipe of computer instructions) to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

A team of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University has found that women who walk for at least two hours a week are less likely to get colon cancer than those who don’t exercise regularly. The new finding builds on earlier evidence suggesting that physical activity decreases the risk of colon cancer in women.

Ancient donkey skeletons at Abydos, Egypt.An international group of researchers, led by Fiona Marshall, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought.

What does former Washington University biochemist Gerty Cori, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine, have in common with chemist Linus Pauling, astronomer Edwin Hubble and physicist John Bardeen? The four American scientists have been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a set of postage stamps recognizing their achievements.

Washington University will host its third African Film Festival March 27-30. The series will consist of four feature films and four short films from eight different African nations. This year’s themes include love, gender, family, and the effects of globalization. It will also include a new youth program March 26-27.

*Cloudless*The work of Susan Marshall, hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most significant choreographers working today,” combines explosive athleticism with subtle yet familiar movements drawn from daily life. This month her troupe, Susan Marshall & Company, will present Cloudless, an evening-length collection of solos, duets and small group pieces, as part of the Edison Theatre OVATIONS! Series.

U.S. Air Force Major and NASA astronaut Robert L. Behnken, Ph.D., will make the first space flight of his career as Mission Specialist 1 aboard the spacecraft Endeavor, scheduled to launch to the International Space Station Tuesday, March 11. Behnken graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992 with bachelor of science degrees in mechanical engineering and physics from the School of Engineering and Applied Science.