Newsroom Stories

David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoEliot Residence Hall during implosionIt took two years to build and mere seconds for it to come down, floor by floor. The last remaining high-rise on Washington University’s South 40, Eliot Residence Hall was demolished just after 10 a.m. Saturday, June 21, to make way for new student housing. As hundreds of Washington University students, faculty, staff, neighbors and alumni — including some who once lived in Eliot — watched, the 12-story, 38-year-old brick structure was imploded, leaving behind a dust cloud that quickly dissipated and a heap of rubble. A new residential hall will be built in the same place and will retain the Eliot name, which honors William Greenleaf Eliot, the university’s co-founder.

WUSTL archivesEilot Residence Hall, 1965Eliot Residence Hall on Washington University’s South 40, the student residential area between Forsyth and Wydown boulevards, will be imploded by Spirtas Wrecking Co. at 10 a.m. June 21 to make way for new student housing. The new residence hall to be built in the same location will retain the Eliot name and comprise 53,500 square feet as part of the Phase II B housing construction on the South 40. The new hall, which will be four stories tall and include 170 beds, will be ready for the fall 2004 semester.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, examines a Neandertal skull.New scientific evidence challenges a common perception that Neandertals — a close evolutionary relative to modern humans that lived 230,000 to 30,000 years ago — possessed exceptionally long faces. Instead, a report authored by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that modern humans are really the “odd man out” when it comes to facial lengths, which drop off dramatically compared with their ancestral predecessors.

A team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., the Harvard School of Public Health and several other clinical centers around the United States has found that treating depression and social isolation in recent heart attack patients does not reduce the risk of death or second heart attack. Results from the Enhancing Recovery in Coronary Heart Disease Patients Study (ENRICHD) are published in the June 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Photo by Patrick ShoreAnatahan eruption yields spectacular images, seismic data trove.Washington University geophysicists were fortunate to observe the May 10 eruption of a long dormant volcano on the uninhabited island Anatahan, part of the U.S.-administered Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas in the western Pacific. A seismograph they deployed there only a few days before the unexpected eruption has captured a trove of important seismic data — a detailed chronology of pre- and post-eruption rumblings. While the team’s primary focus is exploring the tectonic forces in the region, the chance capture of detailed volcanic eruption data may offer new avenues of research, perhaps providing tools to help access volcanic and seismic hazards to the people of the Marianas.

Few MBA classes have ever headed into so much oozing opportunity as the Class of ’98. But their education, it seems, was only beginning, and the hard lesson ahead was that five years, or even 18 months, can seem a lifetime. But the Olin School of Business MBA Class of 1998 is a standout. The Olin School class is featured in a special cover story survey in the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, USA Today.

Workshops will be held weekdays from 9:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. The teachers — John Dalton in fiction, Ruth Ellen Kocher in poetry and Rockwell Gray in creative nonfiction — will provide both instruction in the genre and constructive criticism of participants’ work.

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