Arts & Sciences

Former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, of Maine, will have an informal conversation with Washington University in St. Louis students and faculty at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. The event is sponsored by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

The journal Icarus published a study this month that compared lunar crater counts by eight professionals with crowdsourced counts by volunteers. The professional crater counts varied by as much as a factor of two. Two of the professionals, both planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, explain why they weren’t surprised.

Washington University in St. Louis is re-establishing its sociology department after a nearly 25-year hiatus, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, has announced.

Plants fine-tune the response of their cells to the potent plant hormone auxin by means of large families of proteins that either step on the gas or put on the brake in auxin’s presence. Scientists at Washington University have learned that one of these proteins, a transcription factor, has an interaction region that, like a button magnet, has a positive and negative face. Because of this domain, the protein can bind two other proteins or even chains of proteins arranged back-to-front.

World-renowned archaeologist John M. Camp will give this year’s John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in the Classics for the Assembly Series. His lecture, “Greece between Antiquity and Modernity: View of Two Early 19th Century Travelers” will be held at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium on Washington University in St. Louis’ Danforth Campus. It is free and open to the public.

Murray Weidenbaum, PhD, the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences and honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, died Thursday, March 20, 2014, in St. Louis. He was 87.

Cindy Kahn in the Performing Arts Department recommends the St. Louis Actors’ Studio presentation of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” at the Missouri History Museum through March 23.

More than two-dozen WUSTL students have been invited to attend Clinton Global Initiative University in Arizona this weekend. One team’s project would help loved ones connect after disasters. And graduate student DeAndrea Nichols was chosen to help open the meeting. WUSTL hosted last year’s event.

​More than a dozen dancers will debut nine original works by WUSTL student choreographers April 4-6 as part of “Young Choreographers Showcase.” The biennial concert takes place in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio.

What’s a long-awaited threat, born of outer space and a danger to life as we know it? Why, it’s “The Intergalactic Nemesis,” of course. Part old-time radio play and part multimedia graphic novel, this unique science fiction serial returns to St. Louis with the first two parts of a planned “Nemesis” trilogy.