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Medicine

For adult scoliosis, surgery, other treatments are viable options

A School of Medicine study of adults with lumbar scoliosis and found that the most important factor in determining whether to do surgery is the extent of a patient’s disability due to his or her spinal deformity, as well as how much that disability interferes with day-to-day life.
Engineering

When a defect might be beneficial

Solar cells and LEDs
Rohan Mishra, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science in the McKelvey School of Engineering, led a widespread team of researchers — including at Washington University, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and at the University of Missouri-Columbia — that studied the structure and properties of the commonly occurring planar defects at the atomic scale, which spans only a few tenths of a nanometer.
Anthropology & Archaeology

Pottery reveals America’s first social media networks

Artists conception of the Etowah site (9BR1), a Mississippian culture archaeological site located on the banks of the Etowah River in Bartow County, Georgia. Built and occupied in three phases, from 1000–1550 CE. All rights held by the artist, Herb Roe © 2016. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
Long before Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and even MySpace, early Mississippian Mound cultures in America’s southern Appalachian Mountains shared artistic trends and technologies across regional networks that functioned in similar ways as modern social media, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Three faculty members named microbiology fellows

Dantas, Kranz and Levin
The American Academy of Microbiology has named three Washington University in St. Louis faculty members as fellows: Gautam Dantas, of the School of Medicine, and Robert Kranz and Petra Levin, professors of biology in Arts & Sciences.
Campus & Community

University launches grants for low-income students

students walking on campus
Washington University in St. Louis will introduce two pilot grants to help low-income first-year students buy college necessities. They include a $500 grant to cover or offset the cost of a computer and a $1,500 startup grant to cover necessities such as books, winter clothing and housing supplies. The grants are for first-year students entering in fall 2019 from families with less than $75,000 in family income or who are receiving a federal Pell Grant.