Newsroom Stories

The Olin School’s Claus Langfred found that too much trust could actually be bad for business — when it comes to working on team projects.

The illustrated lecture stems from her recent book, 100 Best Books for Children, an in-depth survey of children’s literature.

Each spring, four student plays — two full-length works and two shorts — are selected by blind jury and work-shopped the following fall.

Antibiotics are not the answer to curing the common cold.The sniffles. A runny nose. A cough. That’s right — the cold season is upon us. But before you head off to your doctor demanding antibiotics to lessen your symptoms, be aware that those drugs don’t always work and can have serious side effects, say two physicians at Washington University in St. Louis.

Pitchers often lose range of motion in their pitching elbows.Now that the Chicago White Sox have swept the Houston Astros in the World Series, most baseball players are taking some time to rest. Time off is especially important for pitchers because throwing a baseball overhand is both an unnatural motion and a burden on the shoulder and elbow. Now a research team led by Washington University sports medicine specialists has found that professional pitchers have significantly decreased range of motion in their throwing elbows. But that limited range of motion doesn’t seem to be influenced by the age of the pitcher, how many innings he has pitched or whether he has a history of injuries.

A dotted line indicates the former position of the thyroid in this child.When a child inherits an abnormal gene that leads to thyroid cancer, surgical removal of the thyroid gland before the cancer spreads is the only sure cure. Now a new study shows it is best to take out the thyroid before a child turns eight to guarantee a life free of thyroid cancer. The researchers tracked the effectiveness of preemptive thyroid removal in 50 at-risk children ranging in age from three to 19 years. All patients were followed for at least five years at Washington University School of Medicine and at Duke University School of. The surgeons found that none of the 22 children who were under eight at the time of surgery showed signs of thyroid cancer five or more years later. However, they did find indications of thyroid cancer in six of the 28 children who were older than eight when they had surgery to remove the thyroid gland.

SmithBy invoking a little known procedural rule to force a closed session of the Senate on Tuesday, Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid put Republicans on notice that Democrats are prepared to use similar tactics, such as the filibuster, in pending Supreme Court nomination battles, suggests WUSTL congressional expert Steven Smith. Reid’s move “was a shot across the bow,” says Smith.

Antibiotics are not the answer to curing the common cold.The sniffles. A runny nose. A cough. That’s right — the cold season is upon us. But before you head off to your doctor demanding antibiotics to lessen your symptoms, be aware that those drugs don’t always work and can have serious side effects, say two physicians at Washington University in St. Louis. “People need to remember that antibiotics are used for bacterial infections. A common cold is a virus. Antibiotics simply won’t work on viral infections,” says David C. Mellinger, M.D., associate director and chief physician at the university’s Student Health Service. “Antibiotics are drugs prescribed to kill bacteria, not viruses.”

Tales of corporate scandal and political misdeeds have made spectacular headlines in recent years — just the mention of Enron or Bill Clinton conjure up memories of those offenses. But on a day-to-day basis most people don’t deal with such large-scale scandals. Instead, they are confronted with relatively innocuous mistakes — the kinds of mistakes that eventually break down trust and possibly even derail a career. There’s a reason that a simple apology doesn’t always re-establish the trust that colleagues once enjoyed, according to new work by Kurt Dirks, associate professor of organizational behavior at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. People’s reactions to apologies vary widely depending on the nature of the transgression.

Courtesy photo*Delta Primer*Is California vulnerable to a New Orleans-style levee break? The land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where California’s two great rivers drain into San Francisco Bay, lies as much as 20 feet below sea level, warns Jane Wolff, author of Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta (2003). A breach on the scale of that in New Orleans would prove catastrophic for California — the world’s sixth-largest economy, home to approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population. In addition to property destruction, salt water from San Francisco Bay would migrate upstream, contaminating the water supply for much of Southern California, including major cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego.