Newsroom Stories

This fall Joan Strassmann, PhD, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences taught a course in behavior ecology that was also an official Wikipedia course that required students both to edit an existing Wikipedia entry and then either add 25 references and 2500 words to a second entries or to create new ones. “No work by students as good as Washington University’s students should ever end up in a professor’s drawer,” said Strassmann. “It was their responsibility as smart people who were getting a great education to help others.”

Late Friday, Feb. 2, an overcast day in St. Louis, the twitter feed for the Super-TIGER cosmic ray experiment burst into life, as the Super-TIGER team received word that NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which provides operations support for scientific ballooning in Antarctica, had decided to terminate the flight of the balloon carrying their detector aloft in the polar vortex.

WUSTL students living in on-campus housing on the South 40, the north side of the Danforth Campus and in fraternities are shutting off lights, sharing refrigerators and setting their laptops on power save mode to try to win the annual Green Cup. The Green Cup recognizes the team in each area of campus that garners the most points during the four-week competition, Feb 1-28.

Timothy McBride, PhD, professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on healthcare policy and health economics, has been named chairman of the MO HealthNET Oversight Committee for the state of Missouri.

Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (“Winter Journey”) opens on a melancholy note. Memories of warmth and spring vie with cold anticipation of the road to come. It’s an apt metaphor for Schubert himself, who would die at age 31, shortly after completing the cycle. On Sunday, Feb. 10, musicians from WUSTL and the St. Louis Symphony will present an evening of late works by this most romantic of Romantic composers.

People who grew up in states where it was legal to drink alcohol before the age of 21 are more likely to be binge drinkers later in life. Washington University researchers found that people who lived in states with lower minimum drinking ages weren’t more likely to consume more alcohol overall, but when they did drink, they were more likely to drink heavily.

Two new studies from the School of Medicine suggest ways to improve surgical treatment for a debilitating condition caused by compressed nerves in the neck and shoulder. The condition, neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome, causes pain, numbness or tingling in the shoulder, arm or hand and is perhaps best known for affecting baseball pitchers and other athletes.

Dining Services debuted a new environmentally friendly to-go program that includes both a compostable to-go box and a redesigned reusable box. Dining Services also recently began offering take-home heat-and-eat meals for four, aimed at busy campus faculty and staff.

The Brown School has appointed three new assistant deans. Cynthia Williams has been promoted to assistant dean for field education and community partnerships; Nancy B. Mueller has been named assistant dean for planning and evaluation; and Freddie Wills Jr. has been named assistant dean for strategic implementation. The appointments were effective Jan. 2.

Three teams, including the first all-undergraduate team to place, earned a total of $140,000 during the annual Olin Cup commercial business plan competition finals Jan. 30 in Simon Hall.