Newsroom Stories

Can’t get enough Elton John, Weego the dog, Matthew Broderick or babies in slingshots? Plan to relive all your favorite Super Bowl commercials during the annual SuperAd Bowl, sponsored by the Olin Marketing Association, at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9 in the Knight Executive Education Center.

American Airlines’ plan to lay off more than 13,000 employees and eliminate all four of its pension plans as part of its bankruptcy reorganization could eventually spell the end of the airline and leave its pilots with dramatically reduced pensions, say two experts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Puppets and marionettes are among the world’s oldest entertainments. Though today often associated with humorous children’s programming, they are equally capable of evoking the tender and moving. This month, master puppeteer Joseph Cashore and his Cashore Marionettes will present Simple Gifts — a series of quiet, everyday vignettes set to classical music — as part of Edison’s ovations for young people series.

In a move reflecting the wave of entrepreneurial activity happening in the region, an unprecedented three teams were selected to receive up to $50,000 each at the annual Olin Cup awards ceremony Feb. 1. The annual competition is sponsored by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

The East Loop and West Loop Special Business districts and Washington University in St. Louis have released the Delmar Loop Area Retail Plan & Development Strategy, the results of a study that found potential for retail growth in the Delmar Boulevard Loop area. The study was led by a steering committee of area property and business owners, residents, local government representatives and WUSTL administrators.

Freedom of assembly has become the forgotten constitutional right, with courts’ attention focused more on freedoms of association and speech. Both the Occupy and Tea Party movements, however, are reminders of how the right to assemble has been “at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history: antebellum abolitionism, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement,” says John Inazu, JD, PhD, associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. In his new book, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly, published last month by Yale University Press, Inazu examines why freedom of assembly has become “a historical footnote in American law and political theory,” and what has been lost with the weakening of protections for private groups.

The 2012 RecycleMania contest, which pits WUSTL against other U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities to see which campus can keep the greatest amount of waste materials from landfills, begins Sunday, Feb. 5. It lasts eight weeks and ends Saturday, March 31. Last year, the university community recycled approximately 278.3 tons of waste during the contest to launch WUSTL into a top 5 percent finish.

The same gene mutations linked to inherited, early-onset Alzheimer’s disease have been found in people with the more common late-onset form of the illness. The discovery by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may lead doctors and researchers to change the way Alzheimer’s disease is classified.

Frédéric Moynier, PhD, 33, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and a member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named the recipient of the 2012 Houtermans Award and the Nier Prize, both given for exceptional work by a scientist younger than 35.

People of all ages can develop winter blues or seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of clinical depression which occurs typically during the fall and winter and resolves itself by spring. Eric Lenze, MD, professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, says bright light therapy, sometimes called phototherapy, is the treatment of choice for seasonal affective disorder.