Arts & Sciences

First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

The Washington University Choirs will mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation with a free concert featuring music from the Reformation era alongside songs drawn from more recent protest movements, such as the fights for women’s suffrage and African-American civil rights.

Jennifer M. Hudson, program manager for the Washington University Prison Education Project, discusses the project, its animating philosophy and the importance of the liberal arts.

Can art be separated from its cultural context? In “Kiss,” Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderon explores the power, empathy and sometimes difficult responsibilities of live theater. The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present Calderon’s funny yet searing drama Nov. 16-19.

“Never Been a Time,” a documentary film by Denise Ward-Brown, associate professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, will be screened Nov. 5 as part of the 26th annual St. Louis International Film Festival.

As a lead co-author of the K-12 Next Generation Science Standards being adopted by more than three-quarters of U.S. schools, Michael Wysession, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, is presenting an innovative “Elevate Science” instructional program published in October through Pearson Education.

A memorial service for Gregory Paul Smith Jr., who was entering his junior year at Washington University in St. Louis, will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. Smith died July 27, 2017, while studying abroad in London. He was 20.

Is there a faster way to determine a frequency? It turns out there is, in a new discovery published this week in Physical Review Letters by a collaboration between a Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rochester.

School of Medicine researchers have identified a pathway in the brain that seems to connect exposure to adverse experiences during early childhood with depression and problems with physical health in teens and preteens.

Garland E. Allen, professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive the History of Science Society’s 2017 Sarton Medal for lifetime scholarly achievement Nov. 10 at the society’s annual meeting in Toronto.