Newsroom Stories

The Source looks back at some of our most read and most shared stories of 2018. Highlights include good news (a new chancellor), bad news (even light drinking increases risk of death) and who knew news (“collective narcissism” is real and Virginians have it).

A new study from the School of Medicine shows that the common acne medication isotretinoin alters the microbiome of the skin. The study raises the possibility of developing microbiome-based acne treatments.

An international team, including faculty from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has used genetic phenotype to determine which patients would benefit the most from a commonly used drug treatment.

Washington University in St. Louis announced that its SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument, which studies the origin of cosmic rays, successfully launched today from Williams Field at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

Chris Kielt, vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will become vice chancellor and chief information officer at Washington University. Kielt, who has more than 30 years of experience in higher education, will join the university by March 1.

While many historians have explored the bitter court-ordered desegregation of public schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, the equally dramatic story of the voluntary desegregation of prestigious, traditionally white, private schools remains largely untold. A new book, “Transforming The Elite,” sets out to fill that void by telling the firsthand stories of the young black students who broke the color barrier at the South’s most prestigious private schools in the fall of 1967.

A new breed of American farmers are being drawn to the field by factors such as higher education, personal politics, disenchantment with urban life and the search for an authentic rural identity, according to new research by anthropologists from Washington University.

Lisa Bulawsky, professor of art at the Sam Fox School, offers a guided tour of the Dubinsky Printmaking Studio, home to the nationally renowned print shop Island Press.

Gabbie Eyler won the People’s Choice Award in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Holiday Cookie Contest for her chocolate turtle cookies, a chocolate sugar cookie rolled in toasted pecans and drizzled with chocolate and caramel. It is the second straight year a senior has won a top prize in the annual contest. Eyler learned how to bake from her mother, Amy Eyler, associate professor of public health at the Brown School.

An international team of researchers, led by the School of Medicine, has found that a lone mutation in a single gene that causes an inherited form of frontotemporal dementia makes it harder for neurons in the brain to communicate with one another, leading to neurodegeneration.