Newsroom Stories

Summertime marks the height of ATV season.Most parents would never consider letting their 6-year-old child ride on the back of a motorcycle, yet many adults don’t think twice about letting kids ride all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). “Parental supervision is a key element to childhood safety,” explains Dee Hodge III, M.D., a pediatric emergency medicine specialist and associate professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “And when it comes to ATVs, parents literally hold the key to their child’s safety. Injuries and death caused by ATVs are a serious and increasing problem in the United States, and it is critical that all riders understand the importance of safe and responsible ATV use,” adds Hodge, who is also associate director of clinical affairs for emergency services at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Summertime marks the height of ATV season.Most parents would never consider letting their 6-year-old child ride on the back of a motorcycle, yet many adults don’t think twice about letting kids ride all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). Injuries and death caused by ATVs are a serious and increasing problem in the United States, and it is critical that all riders understand the importance of safe and responsible ATV use, says Dee Hodge, pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

MaconesGeorge A. Macones, M.D., M.S.C.E., has been named head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Elaine and Mitchell Yanow Professor at the School of Medicine. Macones will replace James R. Schreiber, M.D., who has served as head of obstetrics and gynecology since 1991.

The Gateway Festival Orchestra will continue its 42nd annual season of free summer performances with a concert entitled “The French Connection” at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 17, in Washington University’s Brookings Quadrangle.

The retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor from the Supreme Court will probably be the first of many changes in the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court. “These changes would undoubtedly have an impact on how the Court decides its cases,” says Neil Richards, former law clerk for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “In choosing future justices, I think that it’s important to focus not just on the outcomes of cases, but on how the Court does its business more broadly.”

For nearly a quarter century, Murray Weidenbaum has said little about what it was like to serve as the first chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, a role in which he was a primary architect of policies later known as “Reaganomics.” Now, one year after Reagan’s passing, Weidenbaum has issued a brief memoir detailing his years as the president’s chief economic adviser.

“Let’s talk about condoms.” Whether or not that conversational topic is introduced in a budding romantic relationship may depend on what type of condom-promotion messages the partners have heard. The way messages promoting condom-use are framed influences the effectiveness of the messages, according to a recent study co-authored by Dee Lisa Cothran, Ph.D., who conducted extensive research on the topic as a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoAngenent and He’s microbial fuel cell may be scaled up for industrial use.An environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has created a device similar to a hydrogen fuel cell that uses bacteria to treat wastewater and create electricity. Lars Angenent, Ph.D., assistant professor of Chemical Engineering, and a member of the University’s Environmental Engineering Science Program, has devised a microbial fuel cell which he calls an upflow microbial fuel cell (UMFC) that is fed continually and, unlike most microbial fuel cells, works with chambers atop each other rather than beside each other.

A modification to an “ace” gene prediction program now enables scientists to predict the very beginnings of gene transcription start sites, thereby defining the first exon of the gene. The modification to the gene prediction software TWINSCAN is called N-SCAN. Michael Brent, Ph.D. professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, together with Samuel S. Gross, then an undergraduate at Washington University, and Randall H. Brown, Ph.D., a research scientist, report their results in the May 2005 issue of Genome Research.

Some species still prey on humans to this day.Early man was more wary than war-like, more intelligent, agile, and cooperative than aggressive, predator or killer, and he co-evolved as the prey of many species. Moreover, in the old days, woman wore the pants in the family and men were basically expendable, not the brightest bulbs on the tree when it came to tools, and functioning best as sentinels wary of predators in edge environments between the forest and savannah. Those are the primary themes of a new book, “Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution”, co-authored by Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.