Newsroom Stories

​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.

Here’s a sobering fact for millions of young women:  The more alcohol they drink before motherhood, the greater their risk of future breast cancer. School of Medicine research links increased breast cancer to drinking between early adolescence and first full-term pregnancy.

​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.

Part of the risk for alcohol dependence is genetic. The same is true for eating disorders. Now, School of Medicine researchers have found that some of the same genes likely are involved in both. They report that people with alcohol dependence may be more genetically susceptible to certain types of eating disorders and vice versa.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers and students from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis is working to create a more sustainable future for the university. Over the last year, teams have developed an experimental framework for testing environmentally friendly redevelopment strategies in a group of University-owned apartment buildings north of the Delmar Loop.