Newsroom Stories

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton installs the Brown School’s Sean Joe as the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development during a ceremony Jan. 26 in Brown Lounge.

Since 1968, the United States has been represented by 28 secretaries of state. But only 25 vocalists have had the chops to call themselves King’s Singers. At 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, the celebrated British ensemble will bring its peerless polyphony to Washington University in St. Louis’s 560 Music Center.

Washington University in St. Louis is launching the Quick Start License, a new tool that helps clear the path for faculty and staff to launch startup companies and accelerate the pace of bringing innovations to the marketplace.

​Class Acts takes a look at John Schmidt, a senior in Arts & Sciences and the white playwright behind this weekend’s Black Anthology. Schmidt also is an editor for Student Life, writer and director for Lunar New Year, a residential advisor and opera singer. Schmidt says his “listening ear” helps him in his various roles. Black Anthology takes place at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 6 and 7.

A three-dimensional seismic image of the mantle beneath the Lau Basin in the South Pacific just published in Nature has an intriguing anomaly. The image showed the least magma where the scientists expected to find the most. After considerable debate, they concluded that magma with a high water content was flushed so rapidly that it wasn’t showing up in the images.

The Eliot Trio — pianist Seth Carlin, professor of music in Arts & Sciences, violinist David Halen and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, both of the St. Louis Symphony — will play the music of Beethoven, Bruch and Mendelssohn for its annual concert at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6, in Holmes Lounge on the Danforth Campus.

In our increasingly digital world, the balance between privacy and free speech is tenuous, at best. But we often overlook the important ways in which privacy is necessary to protect our cherished civil liberties of freedom of speech, thought and belief, says Neil M. Richards, JD, a privacy law expert at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the new book, “Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age,” published Feb. 2 by Oxford University Press.

Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been elected president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. She begins her three-year term as an officer and member of the AAAS Board of Directors’ Executive Committee on Feb. 17.

The top prize in the 2015 Olin Cup competition was awarded to Love Will Inc., a developer of virtual currency-based financial tools, at an awards ceremony held Jan. 29 at Washington University.

Cyanobacteria are attractive organisms for the bio-production of fuels, chemicals and drugs but have the drawback that most strains in common use grow slowly. This week scientists at Washington University reported that they have recovered a fast-growing strain of cyanobacteria from a stored culture of a cyanobacterium originally discovered in a creek on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in 1955.  The new strain grows by 50 percent per hour, the fastest growth rate ever reported for this type of bacteria.