Newsroom Stories

A physical therapy doctoral student from New Orleans takes her classmates home for spring break to help the city rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

After opening the week April 2 with a 10-9 loss against Edgewood College, the baseball team bounced back for a 5-0 win at Westminster College April 5, giving coach Ric Lessmann his 1,300th career win.

The fifth annual International Business Outlook Conference will take place Friday, April 20 from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. This year’s conference, “International Business in Action”, will showcase several Olin School of Business M.B.A. students who have provided leadership in finding international business solutions for global organizations.

An international consortium of researchers, including scientists at the Genome Sequencing Center, has decoded the genome of the rhesus macaque monkey and compared it with the genomes of humans and their closest living relatives – the chimps – revealing that the three primate species share about 93 percent of the same DNA. Washington University scientists also recently completed the raw sequences for the orangutan and marmoset genomes.

Photo by Kevin LowderIngyu Moon, first-year student at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, blasts through boards as part of a tae kwon do demonstration at the 13th annual International Festival March 31 in Room 300 of the Lab Sciences Building.

Scientists have untangled two similar disabilities that often afflict stroke patients, in the process revealing that one may be treatable with drugs for Parkinson’s disease. Researchers at the School of Medicine showed that stroke damage in a brain region known as the putamen is strongly linked to motor neglect, a condition that makes patients slow to move toward the left side.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • ADHD risk factors (week of Apr. 4) • Fixing flat feet (week of Apr. 11) • Nanoparticle tracking system (week of Apr. 18) • DHA and Alzheimer’s (week of Apr. 25)

Hugh Foley, Ph.D., associate professor of communications and fine arts at Rogers State University, will present “Savage Country: American Indian Mascots in Sports,” from 2-4 p.m. on April 12. This lecture is part of American Indian Awareness Week at Washington University in St. Louis. Foley is available for interviews before the lecture.

Smoking while pregnant combined with genetic factors greatly increases the risk of severe ADHD.Past research has suggested that both genes and prenatal insults — such as exposure to alcohol and nicotine — can increase the risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But the identified increases in risk have been very modest. Now, a team of Washington University scientists has found that when those factors are studied together, risk of a severe type of ADHD greatly increases.

English physician David Barker noticed an interesting phenomenon during the Dutch famine in the mid-1940s. He found that babies from that era — although small for their gestational age — had a much higher incidence of diabetes, heart disease and obesity when they grew up. Barker hypothesized that the health of a pregnant woman could affect whether her child develops chronic diseases. That hypothesis has been confirmed in a number of studies since, and now, WUSM researchers are investigating in mice the link between diabetic mothers and their offspring.