Newsroom Stories

Sports updates for the week of Feb. 21, 2011.

Scientists have decoded the DNA of the parasitic worm that causes trichinosis, a disease linked to eating raw or undercooked pork or carnivorous wild game animals, such as bear and walrus.

Daniel Moran, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurobiology in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, is developing brain-computer interfaces based on grids of electrodes that lie beneath the skull but outside the dura mater, the protective membrane that covers the brain. His next project is to slip a thin 32-electrode grid he designed with a colleague under a macaque’s skill and to train the monkey to control — strictly by thinking about it — a computational model of a macaque arm.

Proposals ranging from sharing electricity savings with lab users to allowing students to bid on how much electricity they can save are among the ideas that students suggested in the Olin Sustainability Case Competition. The winner gets $5,000 cash and a meeting to present her proposal to the chancellor and other top administrators.

Pioneering game developer Ernest Adams, who had a hand in developing the Madden NFL Football line and Dungeon Keeper, will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis for an Assembly Series presentation at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

The annual George Washington Week, sponsored by the sophomore honorary Lock & Chain, kicks off on President’s Day, Monday, Feb. 21. The week will have many opportunities to celebrate Washington University’s namesake, including presentations, horse and buggy rides, dancing and volunteer opportunities.

Li-Wei Chang, PhD, research instructor in pathology and immunology, has received a two-year, $180,000 career transition award from the National Library of Science for research titled “Novel Bioinformatics Tools for Gene Regulatory Network Inference.” … Matthew Erlin, PhD, associate professor of German in Arts & Sciences, has received a one-year, $50,400 Fellowship for University Teachers […]

Inside Higher Ed Yanked from the margins 02/18/2011 A new blue-ribbon commission has been assembled in a bid to put the humanities and social sciences on an equal footing on the public agenda with science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Gerald Early, professor of modern letters at Washington University in St. Louis, is among 41 cultural […]

Eden Brukman (left), vice president of the International Living Building Institute, presents Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton with an award recognizing Washington University in St. Louis’ Living Learning Center as a Living Building. The Living Learning Center, located at the Tyson Research Center in west St. Louis County, was one of only two buildings to meet the institute’s Living Building Challenge in 2010.

Photonics Online Guide star lets scientists see deep into human tissue 02/7/2011 Ultrasound guide star and time-reversal mirror can focus light deep under the skin, a game-changing improvement in biomedical imaging technology. Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has invented a guide star […]