Edward and Joshua Geltman: A Photographic Journey

A photo exhibit at the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center this summer just goes to show that some things run in a family. The father-son photography duo of Edward and Josh Geltman will be on display beginning at 5:30 p.m. July 24 in the hearth area of the FLTC. The show runs until September 20.

Small market baseball teams may do better signing a pitcher over a hitter

While the St. Louis Cardinals decide whether to re-sign baseball’s best hitter, Albert Pujols, following the 2010 season, they might want to consider a new study by a business professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Mike Lewis, assistant professor of marketing at the Olin Business School, claims that small market teams can get as many as four times more incremental wins by signing a high-level pitcher over an all-star hitter.

Mice with skin condition help scientists understand tumor growth

Cancerous tumors sometimes form at the site of chronic wounds or injury, but the reason why is not entirely clear. Now researchers at theSchool of Medicine have engineered mice with a persistent wound-like skin condition, and the mice are helping them understand the tumor-promoting effects of long-standing wounds and injuries.

Pinpointing origin of gamma rays from a supermassive black hole

An international collaboration of 390 scientists reports the discovery of an outburst of very-high-energy gamma radiation from the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87), accompanied by a strong rise of the radio flux measured from the direct vicinity of its supermassive black hole. The combined results give first experimental evidence that particles are accelerated to extremely high energies in the immediate vicinity of a supermassive black hole and then emit the observed gamma rays. The gamma rays have energies a trillion times higher than the energy of visible light. Washington University in St. Louis physicists helped coordinate this cooperative project, the results of which appear in the July 2 Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

Washington University Orthopedics participating in NFL spine treatment program

RiewThe National Football League has announced a new spine treatment program for retired players, and orthopedics specialists at the School of Medicine have been chosen to participate. K. Daniel Riew, the Mildred B. Simon Distinguished Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and chief of the cervical spine service for Washington University Orthopedics, is one of five U.S. spine specialists selected to participate in the new NFL program.

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum announces 2009-10 schedule

In an unstable world chance events can seem to threaten our claims to self-determination. Yet in the early 20th century avant-garde artists embraced chance as a primary compositional principle. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Chance Aesthetics, a major loan exhibition examining the use of chance in modern art. The exhibition is the first of four major shows slated for the 2009-10 academic year.

Four out of 106 heart replacement valves from pig hearts failed

Pig heart valves used to replace defective aortic valves in human patients failed much earlier and more often than expected, says a report from cardiac surgeons at the School of Medicine. This is the first report to demonstrate this potential problem, the researchers say.

Iran’s Joan of Arc?

Julie SingerThe shooting death last Saturday of Neda Agha-Soltan has emerged, thanks to video widely circulated on the Internet, as a potent symbol of Iran’s antigovernment movement. In the news media and in private postings across the Web, Agha-Soltan has been memorialized as a victim, a martyr and — perhaps most hauntingly to Western ears — as “Iran’s Joan of Arc.” Yet while fitting in some ways, that comparison says less about either Agha-Soltan or the 15th-century French saint than it does about our own need to make sense of the present through comparison with the past, says Julie Singer, Ph.D., assistant professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.