WUSTL to provide free Metro passes

Photo by David KilperEmployees, students and other members of the University community will be provided much greater access to the St. Louis region.A new program will provide students and other members of the University community much greater access to the St. Louis metropolitan region on public transit.

Campus Watch

The following incidents were reported to University Police Feb. 23-28. Readers with information that could assist in investigating these incidents are urged to call 935-5555. This information is provided as a public service to promote safety awareness and is available on the University Police Web site at police.wustl.edu. Feb. 23 11:42 a.m. — A University […]

Interfaculty initiative

Photo by Mary ButkusThe class “American Indian Societies, Cultures and Values” is part of the Interfaculty Initiative on American Indian Affairs & features faculty from numerous areas.

Commitment to cultural diversity reaffirmed

In this memo to the Washington University community, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton reaffirms the University’s commitment to equal opportunity and cultural diversity.

Poor neighborhood conditions triple risk for disabilities

The gray shading shows the areas surveyed for the study.A comparison of residential areas in the St. Louis region reveales that late middle-aged and older African-Americans who live in rundown neighborhoods with poor air and street quality are three times more likely to develop difficulties walking, standing, or lifting than those in cleaner, better-maintained areas.

Two other Mars missions heating up

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (above) is poised to go into orbit around Mars in March, then spend about six months aerobraking to place the spacecraft in a low circular orbit by this fall.Two Mars orbiter missions — one from NASA, the other from the European Space Agency (ESA) — will open new vistas in the exploration of Mars through the use of sophisticated ground-penetrating radars, providing international researchers with the first direct clues about the Red Planet’s subsurface structure. Roger Phillips, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, is participating in both the Mars Express (ESA) and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) missions by lending his expertise in radar. Phillips says that the combination of the radars on the two missions will provide important and unique data sets that will directly map the structure of the upper portions of the interior of Mars. More…

Researchers find ways heat-loving microbes release energy

Jan Amend sampling shallow marine vent fluids in 2005 at Ambitle Island, Papua, New Guinea.Curiosity about the microbial world drove Jan Amend, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to Vulcano Island, Italy, a shallow hydrothermal Shangri-la near Sicily. There, Amend and his collaborators managed to examine the environment in depth, design a gene probe, and discover new life-which could have some big implications for the origin and presence of life on Earth. More…