Newsroom Stories

In America, helium is running out of gas. The element that lifts things like balloons, spirits and voice ranges is being depleted so rapidly in the world’s largest reserve, outside of Amarillo, Texas, that supplies are expected to be depleted there within the next eight years.

The Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Structural Engineering has begun a series of seminars and workshops on the topic of reducing the damage that would occur if a strong earthquake strikes the New Madrid fault area again.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll, chlorophyll d. Chlorophyll d absorbs “red edge,” near infrared, long wave length light that is invisible to the naked eye. In so doing, the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina, competes with virtually no other plant or bacterium in the world for sunlight.

Photo by Jerry Naunheim, Jr.Sheba Wadley (left), a student at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and co-chair of the Society of Black Student Social Workers, greets Bessie House-Soremekun, Ph.D., founder and CEO of the National Center for Entrepreneurship Inc., in Goldfarb Hall Commons Feb. 2.

Photo by David KilperFormer congressman Richard A. Gephardt gave his personal insight into the current state of presidential primary affairs to a group of students and faculty who braved an icy, snowy afternoon Feb. 11 to hear him in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Critically ill patients who need a ventilator to breathe face a high risk of pneumonia. The lung infection, however, is exceedingly difficult to diagnose because a patient’s underlying condition often skews laboratory test results and masks pneumonia’s symptoms – a reality that can delay appropriate antibiotic treatment. Using gene chip technology, scientists at the School of Medicine demonstrate for the first time they can distinguish pneumonia associated with ventilator use from other serious illnesses.

Courtesy photoSamir Kaushik and Andrew Nash receive the final trophy from six judges of the Bombay High Court.Andrew Nash and Samir Kaushik, third-year law students from Washington University in St. Louis, won the prestigious D.M. Harish Memorial International Law Moot Court Competition (DMH), held in Mumbai, India. The two defeated teams from around the world en route to the championship and eventually defeated a team from Cornell Law School in the championship round. In addition, Nash took individual honors, winning second-best oralist in the Competition. This marked the first year that a United States school has competed in the DMH, which has historically been limited to schools from former members of the British Commonwealth.

Jane Hammond, detail from *Fallen,* 2004-ongoing.The News & Information Web site at Washington University in St. Louis provides the images below for free use by media for purposes of news coverage of the exhibition On the Margins, on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Feb. 8 to April 21. All other uses are prohibited. Please read the full Image Use Policy below.

John Zaborszky joined Washington University in St. Louis in 1954, where he developed the Department of Systems Science and Mathematics. He chaired this department, which emphasized control and systems engineering, until 1989.

Biomed Radio is the weekly radio service from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. All episodes are available for free download as podcasts in the iTunes Store.