Holiday break ideal time for students to network

Career Center advisers are encouraging students to make the most of the upcoming holiday break. The extended time off is a great chance to network and put plans into action, they say. Students are urged to self-evaluate, review their interests and options and update their resumes with recent experiences and new skills. 

High levels of tau protein linked to poor recovery after brain injury

High levels of tau protein in fluid bathing the brain are linked to poor recovery after head trauma, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Fondazione IRCCS Ca Granda-Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico in Milan, Italy. The results were reported online Nov. 23 in the journal Brain.

Portions of Millbrook Garage, Throop Drive to close for construction Dec. 22

A section of Throop Drive that runs in front of the Knight Center and Eliot Hall will close for construction beginning Thursday, Dec. 22. That stretch of Throop Drive will reopen Tuesday, Jan. 17. Also closing Dec. 22 are three levels Millbrook Garage’s southwest section that face the Knight Center and Eliot Hall. The three levels are slated for demolition and will not reopen. Both closings are in preparation for the construction of two new buildings for Olin Business School.

Impact of Assets and the Poor grows 20 years after its release

Michael Sherraden’s book, Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy, broke new ground on social policy in 1991. Twenty years later, its impact still is being felt around the world. In Assets and the Poor, Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, writes that asset accumulation is structured and subsidized for many non-poor households, primarily via retirement accounts and home ownership. He argues that these opportunities should be available to all and proposes establishing individual savings accounts for the poor — also known as Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). Since Sherraden first proposed IDAs, they have been adopted in federal legislation and in more than 40 states.

Key genetic error found in family of blood cancers

Scientists have uncovered a critical genetic mutation in some patients with myelodysplastic syndromes — a group of blood cancers that can progress to a fatal form of leukemia. The research team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis also found evidence that patients with the mutation are more likely to develop acute leukemia.

Neureuther book-collection competition seeks WUSTL student entrants

Neureuther winner
The annual Neureuther book collection essay contest sponsored by Washington University Libraries offers four cash prizes to students who submit short essays about their personal book collections. Any full-time WUSTL undergraduate and graduate student who has a passion for collecting books can compete in the Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition, which offers first- and second-place prizes of $1,000 and $500.

$1.38 million to pick ‘large’ pieces of supernova grit out of meteorite

Ernst K. Zinner, research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a three-year, $1,380,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study presolar grains in a sample of the Murchison meteorite, a primitive meteorite that fell to Earth near the town of Murchison, Australia, in 1969. Presolar grains are literally tiny bits of stars — stardust — that were born and died billions of years ago, before the formation of the solar system. Some carry within them clues to the process of nucleosynthesis by which new elements are forged in the bellies of supernovae.