Newsroom Stories

It’s been two years since New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer’s crackdown on the securities industry spawned the “Global Analyst Research Settlement.” Spitzer targeted analysts and bankers from the same company for getting a little too cozy with each other. Recently, two professors from Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin School of Business released a report indicating that the Global Settlement is successfully eliminating the apparent conflict of interest.

As our brains mature, the red regions are used more frequently, and the blue areas are used less.Children activate different and more regions of their brains than adults when they perform word tasks, according to investigators at the School of Medicine. Reporting in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the researchers say those changes in regional brain activity from childhood to adulthood may reflect the more efficient use of our brains as we mature.

Drawing by an autistic childA research team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has identified regions of DNA that may be related to risk for autism. The researchers are learning how autism is inherited, and to identify genetic factors, they’re studying families and looking for traits that normally aren’t considered autistic but have connections to autism risk. Several studies have demonstrated that autism has a strong genetic component. If one child in a family is autistic, there’s about a 10 percent chance that a sibling also will have autism.

A look at the activity of 24 genes in 52 patients as those genes respond to the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorourancilOncologists aren’t sure exactly why patients with the same cancer often respond very differently to the same treatment, but a growing body of evidence suggests the answer lies somewhere in the genes. Now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have become the first to profile the activity of whole sets of genes involved in processing chemotherapeutic drugs.

As our brains mature, we tend to use the red regions more frequently for these certain tasks, using the regions represented in blue less.Children activate different and more regions of their brains than adults when they perform word tasks, according to investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Reporting in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the researchers say those changes in regional brain activity from childhood to adulthood may reflect the more efficient use of our brains as we mature.

Adolescence can be a trying time for the whole family.Adolescence is characterized by dramatic physical changes as young people grow from childhood to physical maturity. During adolescence, we gain 50 percent of our adult weight and 20 percent of adult height while going through puberty and developing the ability to reproduce. With so many physical and emotional changes occurring at the same time, Washington University adolescent medicine researchers at St. Louis Children’s Hospital say it’s important for parents to be prepared for change. They also must be ready to listen to their children at any time, day or night, and do as much as possible to stay involved in their lives.

This is *C. elegans*. Its genome was thought to have been completed until a WUSTL computer scientist found otherwise.A computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has applied software that he has developed to the genome of a worm and has found 150 genes that were missed by previous genome analysis methods. Moreover, using the software, he and his colleagues have developed predictions for the existence of a whopping 1,119 more genes.

Carinne Blank has a method she uses to date ancient life forms that could be helpful for specimens from Mars.A geologist from Washington University in St. Louis is developing new techniques to render a more coherent story of how primitive life arose and diverged on Earth – with implications for Mars.

Mars Exploration Rover mission scientists remind us that the amazing success of the rovers *Spirit* and *Opportunity* is a harbinger for the day when humans inhabit the Red Planet.The major drawback to a human mission to Mars is preparing for the one to two years of radiation and microgravity exposure that astronauts must endure. While that is a large hurdle, enabling technologies are emerging that should be able to make this goal a reality over the next couple of decades, and America should go for it. That’s the theme of a report from NASA’s 2002 Astrobiology Academy appearing soon as a paper in Acta Astronautica.

Male Bahamas mosquitofish (left) chasing a female (right).A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that for some fish species, females prefer males with larger sexual organs, and actually choose them for mating. That does not exclude males with an average-sized sex organ, called a gonopodium. These fish out-compete the larger-endowed males in a predator-laden environment because they have a faster burst speed than the males with larger genitalia, thus avoiding predators and staying in the mating game.