Newsroom Stories

The FDA, through the new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, is considering banning outdoor tobacco product advertising at various distances from schools and playgrounds. The tobacco industry is challenging these rules on First Amendment grounds, arguing that they would lead to a near complete ban on tobacco advertising in dense urban areas. A new study by the Center for Tobacco Policy Research (CTPR) at Washington University in St. Louis found that a 1000-foot buffer would still allow for tobacco ads. Smaller buffer zones of 350 feet may result in almost no reduction of outdoor tobacco advertising.

Hillary A. Sale, JD, the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Washington University in St. Louis, organized this year’s DirectWomen Board Institute, an annual national program designed to develop and position an elite group of exceptional senior women lawyers for service as directors of major U.S. corporations. The institute is being held this week, Feb. 9-11, in New York City.

Anyone who cares about the rule of law has to acknowledge that illegal immigration has serious social costs that cannot be casually dismissed, says immigration law expert Stephen Legomsky, JD, DPhil, the John S. Lehmann University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “When millions of individuals violate any law — whether it’s immigration, taxes or exceeding the posted speed limit — the rule of law takes a hit. But sometimes, mass violations reveal flaws in the law itself. At any rate, the rule of law also means that the penalties should not be disproportionate to the wrongdoing.”

BBC News | Health (UK) Chromosome fault linked to sleepwalking 2/8/2011 A genetic link to sleepwalking has been identified by researchers. They studied four generations of a family of sleepwalkers and concluded that the condition is associated with a fault in a section of chromosome 20, BBC News reported. Just one copy of the defective […]

Like listeners adjusting a high-tech radio, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have tuned in to precise frequencies of brain activity to unleash new insights into how the brain works. “Analysis of brain function normally focuses on where brain activity happens and when,” says Eric Leuthardt, MD. “What we’ve found is that the wavelength of the activity provides a third major branch of understanding brain physiology.”

What happens to young adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) once they graduate high school and are no longer entitled to services? In a first-of-its-kind study, Paul Shattuck, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at rates of service use among young adults with an ASD during their first few years after leaving high school. He found that 39.1 percent of these youths received no speech therapy, mental health, medical diagnostics or case management services. Shattuck also found that the odds of not receiving any services were more than three times higher for African-American young adults compared with white young adults and more than five times higher for those with incomes of $25,000 or less relative to those with incomes over $75,000.

UPI
 Bills to restrict abortion to get hearings
 02/07/2011 Expanded restrictions on federal funding of abortion get separate committee hearings this week in the U.S. House of Representatives, but observers don’t foresee the measures making it through the Senate. “They can’t expect this legislation to go beyond the House of Representatives,” said Steve Smith, a […]

WUSTL sports updates for the week of Feb. 7, 2011.

The Pitch
 Carmon Colangelo to speak at Epperson Auditorium, Kansas City 02/04/2011 Carmon Colangelo, a pioneering printmaker whose work combines surrealism and abstraction with the exploration of art history, science and technology, will speak as part of the Current Perspectives Lecture Series at 7 p.m. Feb 24 in the Epperson Auditorium in Kansas City. Colangelo […]

Washington University engineering students Nalin Katta and Matthew MacEwan, who also is a School of Medicine student, won the Olin Cup business plan competition Feb. 3 and $50,000 in seed investment for an invention that can replace the protective covering of the brain. With 49 entrants, this year’s competition was the largest group of ventures yet.