Newsroom Stories

Recent university alumna Emma Riley is a proud graduate of Clayton High School, but her perceptions of her hometown changed after she started studying Clayton’s history. Her documentary, “Displaced & Erased,” explores how city leaders zoned Clayton’s once-thriving black neighborhood out of existence to expand the central business district.

Washington University’s McDonnell Genome Institute has received $10 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to sequence the DNA of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, in an effort to identify the genetic roots of COPD and other lung disorders.

It’s easy to make up a story to explain an evolved trait; proving that’s what happened is much harder. Here scientists test ideas about cooperative breeding in birds and find a solution that resolves earlier disagreements.

Heather Woofter, co-director of the St. Louis-based firm Axi:Ome llc, has been promoted to director of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, both part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Frequent measurement of a quantum system’s state can either speed or delay its collapse, effects called the quantum Zeno and quantum anti-Zeno effect. But so too can “quasimeasurements” that only poke the system and garner no information about its state.

A new study from the School of Medicine has found that a molecular decoy can target and reduce UTI-causing bacteria in the gut. With a smaller pool of disease-causing bacteria, the researchers say the risk of having a UTI goes down.

In a study of predominantly African-American women — who have a much higher rate of delivering babies early compared with other racial groups — researchers at the School of Medicine showed that a decrease in the diversity of vaginal microbes of pregnant women between the first and second trimesters is associated with preterm birth.

The School of Medicine has received a $10 million gift from the Harry Edison Foundation to support the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology. The gift will help to advance the center’s innovative research programs, including its substantial work in understanding the gut microbiome.

Ross Brownson, the Bernard Becker Professor and director of the Prevention Research Center at the Brown School, has been awarded a $2.9 million grant from National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute for a five-year project aimed at promoting physical activity in rural communities.

An experiment designed by an engineering team at Washington University in St. Louis soon will be performed in space. The experiment, called Flame Design, was on board a SpaceX Dragon rocket that launched into orbit June 3.