Arts & Sciences

Graduate and professional students presented their research during the 19th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium, held Feb. 22 in Whitaker Hall. Suthatip Jullamon, a law student, explains her research comparing class-action law in Thailand with the U.S.

Emma sits at a corner table. Jerry arrives with wine and bitters. It’s the end of the affair and the start of the play. In “Betrayal,” Harold Pinter traces a years-long adulterous relationship in reverse chronological order — a clever structural device that begs a profound question. Knowing the height of the fall, would you still jump?

Acclaimed violinist Cecilia Belcher and pianist Patti Wolf will launch KWUR Week 2014 with a free performance of works by Mozart, Fauré and Ravel March 18. The four-concert series, which continues through March 23, will range from rock and funk to classical percussion.

Named for WUSTL founder William Greenleaf Eliot, the Eliot Trio consists of three prominent St. Louis musicians: pianist Seth Carlin, violinist David Halen and cellist Bjorn Ranheim. On March 26, the group will perform piano trios by Bohuslav Martinů, Ludwig van Beethoven and Antonín Dvořák in Holmes Lounge.

Growing up in rural Alaska, Chukwuma is caught between American friends and traditional Nigerian parents. So begins “Alaskaland,” one of eight films to be screened March 28-30 as part of Washington University’s annual African Film Festival. Other highlights will include “Tey,” an impressionistic celebration of life and death, and “Aya of Yop City,” adapted from the graphic novels of Marguerite Abouet.

At the far edge of the solar system lies the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of icy comets representing the furthest reaches of the sun’s gravitational influence. On Sunday, March 23, seven members of the St. Louis Symphony will perform “Oort Cloud,” an original composition by principal timpanist Shannon Wood, in WUSTL’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Republican presidential candidate and ambassador to China, visited WUSTL recently and discussed challenges facing America. Read more to check out his Feb. 25 speech for the Assembly Series.

People often feel draggy the day after they have to set their clocks forward in the spring but often shrug off that feeling as trivial. In fact, says Erik Herzog, PhD, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies biological clocks, jamming our biological clocks into reverse, as daylight savings time does, has serious consequences.

Water. It is the source of life, the indispensible molecule, the elemental force that carves rivers, topples mountains, nurtures crops and extinguishes flame. In “Scattered,” Motionhouse Dance Theatre combines daring movement, mid-air acrobatics and state-of-the-art projection technology to capture the might, majesty and savagery of water.

Washington University in St Louis chemist Timothy Wencewicz says we’ll stay ahead of antibiotic resistance only if we find drugs with new scaffolds, or core chemical structures. One promising candidate, an antibiotic made by a bacterium than infects plants, caught his attention because it contains an “enchanted ring,” the beta-lactam ring that is found in penicillin. In this drug candidate, however, it acts against a different target than the penicillins.