Newsroom Stories

​Recalling long lists of random words, numbers and playing cards will be the challenge this weekend as two dozen of the world’s top memory athletes square off in San Diego for the 2015 Extreme Memory Tournament, an annual competition sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis and Dart NeuroScience.

​Washington University will present a special screening of the documentary “The Hunting Ground” for faculty and staff Wednesday, May 6 at 3:15 p.m. in Room L006 of Seigle Hall. The event is free and no advance registration is required.​

Student-designed hand-launched gliders will soar across the Washington University Field House in the Boeing Engineering Challenge to determine which has the farthest flight, the straightest path, the longest hang time, and highest quality of flight. The event begins at 4:30 p.m. Friday, May 1, in the field house.

​Longtime Washington University in St. Louis benefactors Stephen F. and Camilla T. Brauer were presented with the Search Award at the university’s 48th annual William Greenleaf Eliot Society dinner April 22 at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis hotel. ​

Carrie Pettus-Davis, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has been tapped to serve as executive director for the Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice, the research initiative of a new public, private and academic partnership aimed at lowering incarceration rates in the United States.

This spring, the schools of Engineering & Applied Science, Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis launched “The Sustainability Exchange,” a unique course bringing students from across campus together to work on interdisciplinary teams to tackle real-world challenges in energy, environment and sustainability.

A demographic study of two endangered plants at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco shows that they favor  recently disturbed open areas over areas that have established plant cover. The study strengthens the case for removing the beachgrass originally planted to stabilize the dunes and allowing the sand to move in response to storm surges and strong tides.

Tax-time savings programs help low- and moderate-income families save significantly more of their refunds than those who choose not to participate, finds an analysis of such a program called $aveNYC. The study was co-authored by Michal Grinstein-Weiss, PhD, associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Brown School and associate director of the Center for Social Development.

​By training a type of grasshopper to recognize odors, a team of biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis is learning more about the brain and how it processes information from its senses.

Fragile X syndrome, an inherited cause of autism and intellectual disability, can have consequences even for carriers of the disorder who don’t have full-blown symptoms. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a potential target for treatment for fragile X carriers.