This fall Joan Strassmann, PhD, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences taught a course in behavior ecology that was also an official Wikipedia course that required students both to edit an existing Wikipedia entry and then either add 25
references and 2500 words to a second entries or to create new ones. “No work by students as good as Washington University’s students should ever end up
in a professor’s drawer,” said Strassmann. “It was their responsibility
as smart people who were getting a great education to help others.”
Late Friday, Feb. 2, an overcast day in St. Louis, the
twitter feed for the Super-TIGER cosmic ray experiment burst into life,
as the Super-TIGER team received word that NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon
Facility, which provides operations support for scientific ballooning in
Antarctica, had decided to terminate the flight of the balloon carrying
their detector aloft in the polar vortex.
WUSTL students living in on-campus housing on the
South 40, the north side of the Danforth Campus and in fraternities are
shutting off lights, sharing refrigerators and setting their laptops on
power save mode to try to win the annual Green Cup. The Green Cup recognizes the team in
each area of campus that garners the most points during the four-week
competition, Feb 1-28.
Timothy McBride, PhD, professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on healthcare policy and health economics, has been named chairman of the MO HealthNET Oversight Committee for the state of Missouri.
The call for poster abstracts for Washington University School of Medicine’s third annual Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) Symposium is open through Feb. 15. Registration also is open, through April 1. The symposium will be April 16 and 17 at the Eric P. Newman Education Center. Its theme this year is “Comparative Effectiveness Research: From Study […]
People who grew up in states where it was legal to drink alcohol before the age of 21 are more likely to be binge drinkers later in life. Washington University researchers found that people who lived in states with lower minimum drinking ages weren’t more likely to consume more alcohol overall, but when they did drink, they were more likely to drink heavily.
For a majority of the pollsters and established pundits, the outcome of the 2012 presidential election was a shock. For statistician/author/blogger Nate Silver, it was anything but. In his Assembly Series presentation on Feb. 11, he will describe one of his secrets: discerning the “signal” from the “noise.”
Two new studies from the School of Medicine suggest ways to improve surgical treatment for a debilitating condition caused by compressed nerves in the neck and shoulder. The condition, neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome, causes pain, numbness or tingling in the shoulder, arm or hand and is perhaps best known for affecting baseball pitchers and other athletes.
Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (“Winter Journey”) opens on a melancholy note. Memories of warmth and spring vie with cold anticipation of the road to come. It’s an apt metaphor for Schubert himself, who would die at age 31, shortly after completing the cycle. On Sunday, Feb. 10, musicians from WUSTL and the St. Louis Symphony will present an evening of late works by this most romantic of Romantic composers.
Dining Services debuted a new environmentally friendly to-go program that includes both a compostable to-go box and a redesigned reusable box. Dining Services also recently began offering take-home heat-and-eat meals for four, aimed at busy campus faculty and staff.
