Newsroom Stories

Service First,one of Washington University’s biggest and most beloved community service programs, returns Aug. 31. Some 1,1oo first-year students plus many more staff and faculty will paint murals, pull weeds and organize libraries at 12 St. Louis schools.

Pop culture is obsessed with youth. Or rather, given the true ages of many of the stars involved, one might say that pop culture is obsessed with the appearance of “youth.” In Precocious Charm: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Gaylyn Studlar, director of Film & Media Studies in Arts & Sciences, examines the work of six stars who helped to define American ideas about girls and girlhood.

The first of five policy briefs — the hallmark of an ongoing, multi-disciplinary study titled “For the Sake of All: A Report on the Health and Well-Being of African Americans in St. Louis — has been released to coincide with the Aug. 28 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Titled “How Can We Save Lives — and Save Money — in St. Louis? Invest in Economic and Educational Opportunity,” the brief focuses on the need for a multidisciplinary approach to improve health by focusing on education and economic opportunities.

​Graduates of the Community Research Fellows Training program learn the language of academic researchers and how the two groups can work together to improve community health. Shown are recent graduates at a ceremony to recognize the achievement.

​Created 60 years ago, the Assembly Series is Washington University’s premiere lecture series. Its chief mission is to present interesting and important voices, and it is designed to spark meaningful discussion and lead to greater understanding of our world today. Assembly Series programs are free and open to the public. The fall 2013 schedule, below, opens with First Year Reading Program author Eula Biss on September 9.​​​

The newly renovated Whispers Café introduced frozen yogurt. Other new dining options include a sushi happy hour at Ibby’s, gyros at Ursa’s and Asian street food at the Bear’s Den.

As encrypted email services like Lavabit shut their doors, the importance of email privacy becomes even more clear writes Neil Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, in a recent CNN opinion piece.

Much of modern agriculture relies on biologically available nitrogenous compounds (called “fixed” nitrogen) made by an industrial process developed by German chemist Fritz Haber in 1909. Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, thinks it should be possible to design a better nitrogen-fixing system. His idea is to put the apparatus for fixing nitrogen in plant cells, the same cells that hold the apparatus for capturing the energy in sunlight. The National Science Foundation just awarded Pakrasi and his team $3.87 million to explore this idea further.

School of Medicine scientists have found a way that corrupted, disease-causing proteins spread in the brain, potentially contributing to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other brain-damaging disorders. Pictured are clumps of corrupted tau protein outside a nerve cell, as seen through an electron micrograph.

In the Aug. 6, 2013, online edition of Chemical Science, a team of scientists describes a testbed for light-harvesting antennas, the structures that capture the sun’s light in plants and bacteria. Prototype designs built on the testbed soak up more of the sun’s spectrum and are far easier to assemble than synthetic antennas made entirely from scratch. They offer the best of both worlds, combining human synthetic ingenuity with the repertoire of robust chemical machinery selected by evolution.