Arts & Sciences

Nearly five years after his death, colleagues of Washington University in St. Louis anthropologist David “Tab” Rasmussen are recognizing his contributions by listing him as first author on a primate evolution paper published March 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Praised for his “silvery tone” (Washington Post) and “gleeful command” (New York Times), Gil Shaham is among today’s foremost violinists. At 7 p.m. April 7, Shaham will join pianist Akira Eguchi for an evening of classical and contemporary duets as part of Washington University’s Great Artists Series.

In celebration of Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, Washington University students and faculty look at the statistics, physics, business and cultural significance of America’s pastime.

Pregnant women who use cannabis may slightly increase the risk their unborn child will develop psychosis later in life, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

The New York Yankees have hired Washington University senior Rohan Gupta as a baseball operations associate. He will crunch big data, “Moneyball”-style, to give his team a competitive edge. It’s a dream job for a student who is passionate about sports and statistics.

Led by Arpita Bose, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, a Washington University team showed how an electricity-eating microbe takes up electrons from conductive substances like metal oxides or rust to reduce carbon dioxide. The work is described in the journal Nature Communications.

Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies and of African and African-American studies, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will be inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars during a ceremony April 4 at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Personal experience told Lisa Gorham, captain of the Washington University in St. Louis cross-country, track and indoor track teams, that team sports and adolescent mental health are linked. But what would the data say? Gorham has just published her findings in a leading journal — a rare accomplishment for an undergraduate researcher.

Adult depression has long been associated with shrinkage of the hippocampus, a brain region that plays an important role in memory and response to stress. Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has linked participation in team sports to larger hippocampal volumes in children and less depression in boys ages 9 to 11.

Long before corn was king, the women of Cahokia’s mysterious Mississippian mound-building culture were using their knowledge of domesticated and wild food crops to feed the thousands of Native Americans who flocked to what was then North America’s largest city, suggests a new book by a paleoethnobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Feeding Cahokia” sets the record straight on America’s first farmers while offering a roadmap for rediscovering the highly nutritious native foods they once cultivated, including a North American cousin of quinoa.