Newsroom Stories

The New Republic Jeff Smith: A rising political star until the FBI started asking about his past 1/13/2011 Missouri State Senator Jeff Smith, a thirty-something academic turned politician, was the brightest young star in the Missouri Democratic Party until a campaign violation upended his career and sent him to jail. As a Washington University political […]

A Washington University in St. Louis team is participating in the modENCODE project, a massive ongoing effort to map all the elements in model organisms that affect whether genes are silenced or expressed. The work supports the more complex ENCODE project, which is tasked to map the same elements in the human genome. While the genome is the same in every cell, each cell type expresses a different set of genes. In people, moreover, roughly 95 percent of the genome is silenced. Together the projects will “put flesh on the bones” of the Human Genome Project, says team leader Sarah C.R. Elgin.

Bloomberg Businessweek Obama in Arizona means moment to alter an image of ‘detachment’ 01/12/2011 In Arizona today, President Barack Obama will confront a moment of national pain that presents him with a chance to establish a new bond with the American people. Obama “has to walk a careful line in which he’s not accusing, but […]

“The Past is Alive … The Work is Not Yet Done” is the theme of Washington University in St. Louis’ 24th annual celebration honoring Martin Luther King Jr. at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 17, in Graham Chapel on the Danforth Campus. Events will aslo take place at the School of Medicine, the Brown School and the School of Law.

CQ Today Politicians plan strategies aimed at changing filibuster rules in Congress 1/05/2011 In an attempt to avoid a knock-down partisan battle over proposals to overcome Senate filibusters with a simple majority vote, Democrats proposed changes Wednesday that would take more-modest steps to reduce the minority’s power to slow or block Senate action. “They are […]

Life expectancy was probably the same for early modern and late archaic humans and did not factor in the extinction of Neanderthals, suggests a new study by Erik Trinkaus, PhD, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Bloomberg News Neanderthal life expectancy is similar to that of early modern human 1/10/2011 The life expectancy for early modern humans was probably the same as that of Neanderthals, suggesting that humans didn’t have the survival advantage of living longer, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by […]

Sports updates for the week of Jan. 10, 2011.

Using a sophisticated version of the stroboscopic photography a pioneering photographer used in 1877 to prove that a horse takes all four hooves off the ground when it gallops, Michael L. Gross, PhD, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences and of medicine and immunology in the School of Medicine, catches proteins in the act of folding.

F. Edmund Hunter Jr., professor emeritus of developmental biology, died Sunday, Jan. 2, 2011, of natural causes in St. Louis. He was 94.