Newsroom Stories

The closing session of CGI U at Washington University has just concluded and the enthusiasm and passion in the room is still very much on my mind. We ended CGI U with a rousing, entertaining and deeply inspirational session featuring Comedy’s Central’s Stephen Colbert and CGI U’s namesake, President Bill Clinton.

In Contemporary German Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will highlight 16 large-scale works, all completed within the last 12 years, by artists living and working in Germany. The exhibition compliments the opening of a major expansion to the Saint Louis Art Museum, which will showcase its own holdings of postwar German art.

The Clinton Global Initiative University opens at Washington University in St. Louis with inspiring words from President Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and a panel of innovative thinkers. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton offers his thoughts on the first day.

Thomas J. Bernatowicz,  professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 105, Steinberg Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis. He will discuss what cosmic dust carried to Earth by meteorites has revealed about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae. The St. Louis community is cordially invited to the lecture, which is sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Yearly expeditions to explore the lava tubes on the famed archipelago will culminate in an international symposium to be held there next year. In the meantime we may all be able to participate as well, if only vicariously. WUSTL’s Aaron Addison, who has traveled to the Galàpagos repeatedly to map the tubes, apppears in a new IMAX film called Galàpagos 3D. Not yet released in the United States, it stars David Attenborough as well as the archipelago’s fantastic geology and biology.

A strange stone found in the Moroccan desert was the talk of the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The stone has highly unusual chemistry, suspiciously like that found by the Messenger space probe, which is currently surveying the surface of Mercury. If it was from Mercury, it would be the first meteorite from that body ever found. The prospects was thrilling but doubts crept in. WUSTL’s Randy Korotev, a lunar meteroite expert, explains the arguments for and against Mercurian origin.

Holden Thorp, who will become WUSTL’s provost in July, has been named chair of a new National Research Council committee tasked with establishing and promoting a culture of safety in academic laboratory research.

A gene with a colorful name – mindbomb 1 – plays a key role far beyond the brain. New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that mindbomb 1 may be involved in repairing cells injured by infection or inflammation in the stomach and pancreas. Researchers also found hints that mindbomb 1 may have connections to cancer in those organs.

Researchers at Washington University have identified a new set of genetic markers for Alzheimer’s disease that point to a second pathway through which the disease develops. Much of the genetic research in Alzheimer’s centers on amyloid-beta, a key component of brain plaques in people with the disease. But the new study identified several genes linked to the tau protein, which is found in tangles.

Stephen H. Legomsky, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services chief counsel, plans to discuss the evolving topic of immigration law at Washington University in St. Louis on Thursday, April 11. Legomsky will present the 2012-13 Tyrrell Williams Lecture, “Immigration and the Role of the Government Attorney.”​