Newsroom Stories

At its fall meeting Thursday and Friday, Oct. 1 and 2, the Washington University in St. Louis Board of Trustees heard special reports on the university’s endowment and the plan to transform the east end of the Danforth Campus. The board also received a report from Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton that included updates on administrative appointments, admissions, athletics and construction.

The Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis has bestowed its 2015 World Peace Through Law Award on former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz.

Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is a recipient of the 2015 Keio Medical Science Prize.

A bipartisan groups of United States senators announced Oct. 1 legislation that would overhaul the country’s criminal justice system, giving judges more leeway in sentencing and reducing sentences for some nonviolent offenders. A move in the right direction, said Carrie Pettus-Davis, PhD, an expert on criminal justice system reform at the Brown School, but the bill doesn’t go far enough.

NASA announced earlier this week that dark streaks that appear on Martian slopes in the summer, lengthen and then fade as winter approaches are seeps of salty water. The news that Mars still has surface water again raised hopes that it may have life. It will take thoughtful mission planning to find out, says Washington University in St. Louis Mars expert Ray Arvidson, PhD.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was among the most popular American composers of the 19th century. On Oct. 4, pianists Mark Tollefsen and Jae Won Kim will perform one of Gottschalk’s most enduring works in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

With “Boîte-en-valise,” Marcel Duchamp created an artistic retrospective the size of a salesman’s sample case. Now the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has acquired for its permanent collection an early example of this important work by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists.

What is the relationship between art and activism? How should artists engage questions of racial justice? Have events in Ferguson changed those equations? On Oct. 3, four St. Louis-based artists will discuss these questions and more as part of the Greater St. Louis Humanities Festival.

Johannesburg is a modern global city, the second-largest in Africa. Last summer, the students and faculty in the Sam Fox School traveled there to study new efforts to overcome the legacy of apartheid design.

A new test efficiently detects virtually any virus that infects people and animals, according to research at Washington University School of Medicine, where the technology was developed.