Law professor conducts workshop on constitutional reform for Burmese leaders

A multiweek visit to the United States by Burmese lawmakers kicked off with a two-day intensive workshop on constitutional reform conducted by David S. Law, professor of law and of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The curriculum included mechanisms and strategies for amending a constitution; options for structuring a federal system of government; the decentralization of control over natural resources; protection of minority rights; the role of the judiciary in promoting democracy and enforcing constitutional guarantees; and strategies for promoting the rule of law. Law was selected to conduct the workshop for his interdisciplinary background and expertise on global constitutionalism, constitutional drafting, design of government institutions, and Asian constitutionalism in particular.​

Cat domestication traced to Chinese farmers 5,300 years ago

Five-thousand years before it was immortalized in a British nursery rhyme, the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt was doing just fine living alongside farmers in the ancient Chinese village of Quanhucun, a forthcoming study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed.

Staying ahead of Huntington’s disease

Huntington’s disease is a devastating, incurable disorder that results from the death of certain neurons in the brain. Rohit Pappu, PhD, and colleagues in the engineering and medical schools are conducting studies to learn from nature’s own strategies to battle the disease.

‘Among idiots, Indians, minors, and females’

A few years ago, when David Browman, PhD, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, read his graduate student’s thesis on the early figures in Americanist archaeology, he immediately asked, “Where are all the women?”