Newsroom Stories

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton has announced a $20 million commitment from Life Trustee John F. McDonnell to support scholarships and fellowships as part of Leading Together: The Campaign for Washington University. This is one of the largest single scholarship gifts in the history of the university.

Most organisms share the biosynthetic pathways for making crucial nutrients because it is is dangerous to tinker with them. But now a collaborative team of scientists has caught plants in the process of altering where and how cells make an essential amino acid.

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis and Princeton University developed a new way to dive into the cell’s tiniest and most important components. What they found inside membraneless organelles surprised them, and could lead to better understanding of fatal diseases such as cancer, Huntington’s and ALS.

The U.S. Senate’s proposed overhaul to the health-care system, released last week, will cause more than 24 million Americans to lose coverage, estimates a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

NASA’s senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is examining rocks at the edge of Endeavour Crater for signs that they may have been either transported by a flood or eroded in place by wind.

Washington University’s Office of Sustainability is partnering with the Danforth Campus Facilities Planning and Management to roll out a new thermostat setpoint policy, designed to take the chill out of campus office temperatures during the summer.

At the recent Washington University in St. Louis Board of Trustees meeting, some faculty members were appointed with tenure or promoted with tenure, effective July 1.

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.