Newsroom Stories

The Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will mark its 100th anniversary with a month-long series of events in October, including lectures and a symposium featuring some of today’s most visionary scientific thinkers.

The No. 2 volleyball team ran its record to 14-0 — the team’s best start ever — by winning the Molten Colorado College Invitational Sept. 16 and 17. Updates also included on men’s and women’s soccer, cross country, football, tennis and women’s golf.

Japanese body art, elaborate tattoos, fashion and pre-modern pornography are among topics to be explored as the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis opens its fall seminar series. The Japan Embodied: New Approaches to Japanese Studies seminar series opens at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, in Room 18, Busch Hall, on the Danforth Campus with a free, public program on body ornamentation in Japanese culture.

The voice is commonly understood as a vehicle for communicating meaning and, alternatively, as a source of aesthetic pleasure — approaches personified by the military commander and the opera singer. But in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar proposes a third paradigm: psychoanalysis. In October, Dolar, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor, will lead a three-day series, titled “From Hegel to Freud and Kafka,” exploring the linguistics, metaphysics, ethics and politics of the voice, as well as its use by Sigmund Freud, Georg W.F. Hegel and Franz Kafka.

Washington University in St. Louis’ Center for New Institutional Social Science (CNISS) Fall 2011 Seminar Series kicks off Wednesday, Sept. 21 with a lecture by noted social policy expert John Gal, PhD. He is dean of the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gal will present “Immigration and the Categorical Welfare State in Israel” at 1 p.m. Sept. 21 in Seigle Hall, Room 301.

Jeffrey Gordon has been awarded the 8th Danone International Prize for Nutrition in recognition of his outstanding contributions to research on the human gut microbiome, diet and nutritional status.

The Career Center at Washington University in St. Louis encouraged students to network with each other and talk about their summer travels, internships and community service during an event near Danforth University Center Sept. 8. After filling out a career interest survey, students were treated to free ice cream and given a shirt that says ‘Just Ask Me About My Summer’ on the back — along with Sharpie pens to write their answers.

Art, of course, can be challenging, engaging, uplifting and enlightening. It also can be fun. On Saturday, Sept. 24, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will host Community Day, an all-ages afternoon of games, storytelling, art-making, workshops and tours led by museum curators and Washington University student docents. The event, which runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., is free and open to the public.

Food activist Ellen Gustafson, a former United Nations spokesperson for the World Food Program, will give the annual Olin Fellows Lecture as part of the Assembly Series at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23. Her talk “A New Understanding of Hunger, Obesity and the Food System.” will be held in the Law School Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom in Anheuser-Busch Hall.

The Mars rover Opportunity, which was designed to operate for three months and to rove less than a mile, has now journeyed more than seven years crossing more than 21 miles. Today, it is poised at the edge of a heavily eroded impact basin, the possible location of clay minerals formed in low-acid wet conditions on the red planet.