Newsroom Stories

<img src="/news/PublishingImages/4048_t.jpg" alt="Pretty fly — for a fruit fly. The areas stained blue are regions in the fruit fly where the spineless gene is expressed.” height=”211″ width=”150″ />Pretty fly – for a fruit fly. The areas stained blue are regions in the fruit fly where the spineless gene is expressed.A team of researchers that includes biologists from Washington University in St. Louis has discovered that a gene involved in the development and function of the fruit fly antenna also gives the organism its color vision. Claude Desplan, Ph.D., professor of biology at New York University, and his students made the discovery and provided the data. Ian Duncan, Washington University professor of biology, and his wife, research assistant Dianne Duncan, provided the Desplan laboratory fruit fly (Drosophila) clones and mutants and technical assistance that helped locate where the gene, called spineless, is expressed in the retina. More…

Unraveling the mysteries of the human brain, and the mind it gives rise to, is within the reach of modern science, suggests a forthcoming issue of the journal Neuroscience. The special issue explores how sophisticated working memory processes — from the firing of a single neuron to the activation of multiple brain regions — help shape our understanding of the world, says issue co-editor Grega Repovs, a visiting post-doctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. More…

Successful strategies are innovative. They combine resources or businesses in unique or complex ways that other firms may fail to recognize. Yet research from the Olin School of Business at Washington University finds that the market tends to undervalue companies with complex or unique strategies. The reason: they receive less analyst coverage. More…

Current levels of defense spending represent less than 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), says Murray Weidenbaum, the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that the cost of today’s war pales in comparison to military outlays of about 35 percent of GDP at the peak of World War II; 15 percent of GDP for the Korean War; 10 percent for Vietnam and 6 percent for the Gulf War. More…

David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoThreat of injunctions can be beneficial in cases like eBay and BlackBerry, says WUSTL expert F. Scott Kieff.The threat of an injunction to protect patented technology, as seen in eBay v. MercExchange, is what drives infringers and patentees to strike deals — sometimes on the steps of the courthouse — because shutting down the business would lose money for both sides, says F. Scott Kieff, J.D., an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. These deals, he points out, are what drive innovation. More…

Jon Cook, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m., Thursday, April 13. Cook is the author of Romanticism and Ideology (1981), William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (1991), Poetry in Theory (2004) and the forthcoming Hazlitt in Love.

Finalists for the inaugural Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Competition have been selected after a half-year of preparation. The eight finalists include entirely new business proposals and existing non-profit organizations. The winners will be announced at a special presentation May 11.

“Da police are not here to create disorder; dere here to preserve disorder.” — Richard J. Daley, Chicago mayor, explaining to the media the role of the police during the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention. David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoThe order team.Police keep order. That’s why, for example, they issue tickets for “disturbing the peace.” Thus the only logical conclusion to Mayor Daley’s famous quote above — other than dismissing it as the result of a tangled tongue — is sometimes disorder spawns order. Sounds impossible, right? Wrong. According to a computational study conducted by a group of physicists at Washington University in St. Louis, one may create order by introducing disorder. More…

In its fourth annual International Business Outlook Conference (IBOC), the Olin School of Business will once again provide the St. Louis business community with a chance to explore the most pressing challenges to conducting international business. The MBA student-organizers chose to highlight intellectual property rights and international finance for this year’s conference. IBOC takes place Friday, April 7, from 7:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. in the Knight Center on Washington University’s Hilltop Campus

African-American entrepreneur Earl G. “Butch” Graves, Jr. will deliver the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture at 11 a.m. Wednesday, April 5th in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “The Media History and Portrayal of Black America,” is free and open to the public. Graves is the chief operating officer and president of the Earl G. Graves Publishing Company, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine.