Newsroom Stories

According to the United Nations, nearly 10 million people in Africa are experiencing  one of the worst droughts in 60 years. Drought conditions are now leading to famine. Michael Galvin, a second-year student at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, is in the east African countryside as part of a team testing the effectiveness of KickStart, a social enterprise selling low-cost technologies such as irrigation pumps to help alleviate poverty. Galvin is blogging about the farmers and families he and team members are visiting through stories, video and photos (http://kickstartblog.wordpress.com/ ). His entries give a powerful look at how the drought is impacting lives.

Discussion of the federal debt ceiling has dominated the front page recently. Several Washington University in St. Louis faculty experts, all members of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, have offered their opinions to the news media on the history of the debt ceiling and what may happen if a deal is not reached.

High-dose vitamin D relieves joint and muscle pain for many breast cancer patients taking estrogen-lowering drugs, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

WUSTL women’s basketball coach Nancy Fahey, who has guided the Bears for 25 seasons and won five national titles, has been chosen for induction into Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. Besides Fahey, the Hall of Fame Class of 2012 includes players Nikki McCray, Pam McGee, Inge Nissen, and Dawn Staley, and contributor Robin Roberts. Fahey is the first NCAA Division III player or coach to be chosen for such an honor.

After a yearlong renovation, Cupples II is now home to the College of Arts & Sciences, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Office of Undergraduate Research, as well as eight state-of-the-art pooled classrooms.

Analysis of new images of a curious “hot spot” on the far side of the Moon reveal it to be a small volcanic province created by the upwelling of silicic magma. The unusual location of the province and of the surprising composition of the lava that formed it offer tantalizing clues to the Moon’s thermal history. The discovery has just been published in Nature Geoscience.

Sponsored by WUSTL’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, with support from the National Science Foundation Partners for Innovation program, “Diversity as a Catalyst for Innovation in the Sciences: Connecting Women and Underrepresented Innovators to Regional Resources” begins at 7:30 a.m. Monday, July 25, in the Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center on the Danforth Campus.

Giving children intravenous fluids early in the course of an E. coli O157:H7 infection appears to lower the odds of developing severe kidney failure, according to Christina Ahn Hickey, MD, and other researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and other institutions.

Dzenana Mruckovski, former public works director for the city of Crestwood, Mo., is the new director of facilities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, announced Gary S. Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

There’s a better way to help banking customers than the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that opened for business July 21, says a banking expert at Washington University in St. Louis.