Newsroom Stories

Who knew? The chance discovery that spikes in seismometer noise recorded in Africa corresponded with soccer matches has led to the discovery that there’s a lot more buried in the noise, including a signal from the famous storms of the Southern Atlantic Ocean, the bane of ships of sail.

Scientists, including Gerald W. Dorn, MD, have identified the first DNA sequence variant common in the population that is not only associated with an increased risk of heart failure, but appears to play a role in causing it.

WUSTL sports updates for the week of Jan. 17, 2011.

In remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers at Washington University’s Brown School will host the fifth annual “Financial Freedom Seminar: Recovering From the Recession, Reaching for the Future,” from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 22, in Brown and Goldfarb halls. The seminar, free and open to the public, is designed for St. Louis community youth and adults interested in building wealth, repairing and maintaining good credit, purchasing a home or starting and expanding a business. 

Ramesh K. Agarwal, PhD, the William Palm Professor of Engineering, has been selected to receive two awards from SAE International: the Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson Aerospace Vehicle Design and Development Award, which recognizes Agarwal’s contributions to aerospace engineering; and the Franklin W. Kolk Air Transportation Progress Award, which recognizes Agarwal’s contributions to air transportation through […]

USA Today
 Obama’s call for civility seen as right tone
 01/14/2011 President Obama’s warmly received plea for tolerance and temperance in the wake of last weekend’s massacre in Tucson has created an opportunity for him to change the tone of political debate in Washington and possibly advance his overall agenda. “What he has to make […]

The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will launch its spring Danforth University Center Chamber Music Series with a concert titled “Music from Spain and the Middle East” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 19. The performance will include works by Joaquin Turina, Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados and Pablo de Saraste, as well as traditional Kurdish and Persian folk music. Soprano Stella Markou will perform with pianist Martin Kennedy April 7.

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 […]

Peter M.J. Burgers, PhD, has been named the Marvin A. Brennecke Professor of Biological Chemistry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

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.