Newsroom Stories

Close to 3 billion people in the developing world rely on biomass combustion — burning fires in rudimentary stoves — for cooking and heating needs. As a result, 4 million people die each year, and the large amount of black soot created has a staggering negative impact on the poor. This fall, Gautam N. Yadama, PhD, professor and director of international programs at the Brown School and photographer Mark Katzman are taking that issue to a broader audience with the publication of Fires, Fuel and the Fate of 3 Billion: The State of the Energy Impoverished (Oxford University Press 2013), a 152-page collection of photos and essays that tell an eye-opening, insightful story about energy access in the rural villages of India, where the hunt for safe, affordable energy is often a matter of life or death.

A master’s degree program at Washington University in St. Louis specifically designed for high school science teachers nationwide is helping them learn techniques for inspiring not only the brightest and most motivated science students, but also those with other interests. The two-year program through University College in Arts & Sciences offers teachers online courses during the school year and an on-campus summer institute for three weeks each summer.

Construction is moving quickly on the two new Olin Business School buildings — Knight Hall and Bauer Hall, located next to the Knight Center on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The $90 million project includes two innovative buildings united by a soaring three-story glass atrium.

The annual Leaders in Business Summit, held Sept. 25 at Knight Center, featured several panel discussions with prominent local business leaders and Olin Business School faculty members about the evolving global economy and where it might be headed.

Washington University in St. Louis graduates Jeff Doyle, Matt Gomric, Michael Lauber and Tim Runnalls sat down with Bear Sports for a question-and-answer session to discuss their four years on the Danforth Campus and what it meant to be named an All-American.

The Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has received a full, six-year term of accreditation from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board.

In Green and Gray, his fearlessly experimental second collection, Geoffrey G. O’Brien fashions poetry from neighborhood flyers and political speeches, mixing phrases from Dante, the Patriot Act and Jean Genet. That audacious mingling of personal and political continues to inform People on Sunday, O’Brien’s latest, and most autobiographical, collection. On Oct. 10, O’Brien will read from his work for The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series.

The controversy and legal battles surrounding the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act have led to a new – and worrisome – legal concept: the idea of a “corporate conscience,” warns Elizabeth Sepper, who teaches at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

On Saturday, Oct. 19, Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor at Cornell University, will deliver the American Mathematical Society’s 2013 Einstein Public Lecture in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis. Kleinberg will discuss “Bursts, Cascades and Hot Spots: A Glimpse of Some Online Social Phenomena at Global Scales.” The talk, which begins at 5 p.m., is free and open to the public.

The slow rebound of the bedrock as ice melts can be used to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet. Calibrating rebound will make it possible to measure how much mass the has lost since the ice sheets reached their maximum extent more than 20,000 years ago and how much it is currently losing. Two National Science Foundation grants will fund the installation of seismographs to calibrate crucial parts of the Antarctic ice-weighing machine.