Arts & Sciences

The importance of human milk in evolution and modern health; biology and race in Ferguson; and the latest research on Cahokia Mounds will be among the presentation topics as three major human biology and anthropology professional groups converge in St. Louis for their annual scientific meetings March 24-28.

​Ireland lost 1 million souls to hunger and disease during the potato famine and another million to immigration. But that’s not all, says Peter Wyse Jackson, PhD, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and the George Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University in St. Louis. Ireland also lost its connection to the many plant species that sustained its people throughout the centuries. The ethnobotanist says the study of plants is more important than ever.

There are five regular polytopes (Platonic solids) in three-dimensional space and six in four-dimensional space. Only their projections can be built in our dimension-deficient world and that requires an act of imagination. Ivan Horozov, PhD, the Chauvenet Lecturer in Mathematics, is building the two most complex figures in this office in his spare time.

Can theater movement-training techniques help real-life computer scientists improve human/robot interactions? Beginning March 26, director Annamaria Pileggi will put that theory to the test with “Sky Sky Sky,” a world premiere drama featuring three human actors and one PR2 robot. Performances take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.

Scholars of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and other sciences of the mind will discuss how insight from their disciplines can help us better understand and eliminate the effects of racial bias in policing during a free forum March 27 at Washington University.

David Sedley, PhD, an internationally acclaimed Greek philosopher, will deliver the annual John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in the Classics for the Assembly Series at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom in Anheuser-Busch Hall on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The lecture, “What Is Plato’s Theory of Forms?” is free and open to the public.

Isotopic analysis of animal teeth from a 2,000-year-old herding settlement near Lake Victoria in southern Kenya show the area was once home to large grassland corridors — routes that could have been used to dodge tsetse flies and bring domesticated livestock to southern Africa.

​​​​​Every austral summer, a group of volunteers heads off to a remote region of Antarctica to set up a field camp on the ice. For the next month, they search the ice and nearby glacial moraines for dark rocks that might be extraterrestrial in origin. Research scientist Christine Floss describes this year’s trip, which included a record-setting day. ​

In the quantum world, the future predicts the past. Playing a guessing game with a superconducting circuit called a qubit, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis has discovered a way to  narrow the odds of correctly guessing the state of a two-state system. By combining information about the qubit’s evolution after a target time with information about its evolution up to that time, the lab was able to narrow the odds from 50-50 to 90-10.

The ziggurat drum. The nail violin. The gong array with artillery shells. The chariot of choir. If Mad Max and Dr. Seuss started a band, it might look something like Scrap Arts Music, which comes to Edison March 20 and 21. The Vancouver-based percussion ensemble builds wild, one-of-a-kind instruments from gleaming industrial salvage.