Newsroom Stories

While lead pipes were banned decades ago, they still supply millions of American households with water each day. A team of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a new way to track where dangerous lead particles might be transported in the drinking-water supply during a common abatement procedure.

William B. McKinnon, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, March 29, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

Two new studies led by the School of Medicine aim to clarify the genetic underpinnings of Alzheimer’s disease. Funded by grants totaling $7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers seek to find ways to predict who will develop the disease as well as new targets for therapies. 

A bill pending in the Missouri Legislature would make it more difficult for workers who experience discrimination or lose their job because of whistleblowing to hold their employers responsible, says an expert on employment law at Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University School of Medicine researchers have found that socially contagious itching is hardwired in the brain. Studying mice, the scientists identified what happens in the brain when a mouse feels itchy after seeing another scratch.

Pedro Pitarch has won the 2016-17 James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture. The $50,000 grant, which supports international travel for research, is one of the largest such architecture awards in the United States. Pitarch, who was chosen from a field of 100 applicants, will use the grant to explore the intersection of public and private spaces in cities across Europe, Asia and the United States.

Without public spaces for debate and discussion, our ideas and our expressions stay in our private spaces and we don’t have opportunities to engage with each other, argues John Inazu, the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law & Religion.

Cancer prevention experts, led by Washington University School of Medicine’s Graham A. Colditz, MD, PhD, are calling for education efforts and expanded programs to help people improve their health and halt cancer development.

While President Trump and a Republican controlled legislature look to make good on campaign promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, political reality is kicking in, says a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Nearly 5,000 years ago, the foundations for the vast east-west trade routes of the Great Silk Road were being carved by nomads moving herds to lush mountain pastures, suggests new Arts & Sciences research published in Nature.