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WashU Expert: More at stake than cake in SCOTUS decision

While this week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision siding 7-2 with bakery owner Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission was “far from explosive,” it still sends important signals on how such cases will be handled in the future, said a legal scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

Medicine & Health

Are fast-pitch softball pitchers overdoing it?

Youth baseball leagues often have fairly strict limits on how many innings pitchers can pitch or how many pitches a player can throw. But for girls playing fast-pitch softball, such guidelines are rare. School of Medicine sports medicine specialists have found that many pitchers aren’t getting enough time to recover and are experiencing shoulder fatigue, pain, weakness and injury.

Science & Technology

The future of energy

So what does the future have in store for us in regard to energy resources, consumption and technology? Aaron Bobick, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, breaks down the issue in his blog, “The Observational Engineer.”

Science & Technology

New clues on the origins of agriculture

Using a new approach, researchers from Colorado State University and Washington University have uncovered evidence that underscores one long-debated theory about the origins of agriculture.

Humanities & Society

WashU Expert: Clear principles needed for meaningful digital free expression

Our daily lives revolve around the internet, whether it’s personal contact, news or the sharing of political views. As such, there remains significant work to do so the internet can deal with the real challenges it faces, rather than ones it fails to consider, an internet privacy expert at Washington University in St. Louis said.

Cannabis is an exit drug for opioid addicts

What’s it going to take for us to recognize the value of cannabis in combating the opioid epidemic? Medical professionals and scientists do not need additional convincing. But others certainly do. As a nation, we must acknowledge cannabis as the exit drug to the opioid epidemic.

Physical Sciences

Flavor of the moment

In a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, Bhupal Dev, assistant professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how future accelerators could crash together charged particles in a new way to shed light on their behavior.

Medicine & Health

Smoking rates decline when mentally ill get help to quit

Recognition of a disconnect between what patients with serious mental illness want and what health providers think they want appears to be a crucial step in reducing smoking rates among such patients, School of Medicine researchers found.

Business & Entrepreneurship

Time is not on your side

The central finding of an Olin Business School study published May 15 in the Journal of Consumer Research was that people faced with scheduled appointments in an upcoming hour or more: (a) perceive they have less time than in reality; (b) perform fewer tasks as a result; and (c) are less likely to attempt extended-time tasks that can be feasibly accomplished or more lucrative.

Science & Technology

Fortune — and nature — favors the bold

Natural selection acts on behavioral traits, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos, who helped lead a replicated field experiment with anole lizards on eight small islands in the Caribbean, as reported in the June 1 issue of Science