Arts & Sciences

Microbes set up their own markets, comparing bids for commodities, hoarding to obtain a better price, and generally behaving in ways more commonly associated with Wall Street than the microscopic world. This has led an international team of scientists, including two from Washington University in St. Louis, to ask which, if any, market features are specific to cognitive agents.

Unpaid internships are the norm in many industries. The Career Center’s summer stipends help students pay their bills while working an unpaid internship. The Career Center also awards grants to students who must travel to a job interview or would like to attend a Career Center Road Show.

The food was terrible. Kool-Aid, Manwich, Jiffy Pop, Twinkies, Spam (when the word referred to something edible). But Pat Hazell loved it all. In “The Wonder Bread Years,” Hazell — one of the original writers for “Seinfeld” — turns a fond yet pitiless eye to the brick-a-brack of American childhood. The acclaimed one-man show comes to the Edison Ovations Series Jan. 24 and 25.

Some brain regions in adults retain a childlike ability to establish new connections, potentially contributing to our ability to learn new skills and form new memories as we age, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences in Seattle.

Washington University boasts one of the nation’s most successful TRIO Programs, a federal initiative to support low-income and first-generation students. The program has helped Arts & Sciences senior Greg Opara, the son of Nigerian immigrants, buy books, travel home for breaks and, most recently, fly to interviews at top medical schools.

Your nose is not the only organ in your body that can sense cigarette smoke wafting through the air. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that your lungs have odor receptors as well. The odor receptors in your lungs are in the membranes of flask-shaped neuroendocrine cells that dump neurotransmitters and neuropeptides when the receptors are stimulated, perhaps triggering you to cough to rid your body of the offending substance.

A multiweek visit to the United States by Burmese lawmakers kicked off with a two-day intensive workshop on constitutional reform conducted by David S. Law, professor of law and of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The curriculum included mechanisms and strategies for amending a constitution; options for structuring a federal system of government; the decentralization of control over natural resources; protection of minority rights; the role of the judiciary in promoting democracy and enforcing constitutional guarantees; and strategies for promoting the rule of law. Law was selected to conduct the workshop for his interdisciplinary background and expertise on global constitutionalism, constitutional drafting, design of government institutions, and Asian constitutionalism in particular.​

Five-thousand years before it was immortalized in a British nursery rhyme, the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt was doing just fine living alongside farmers in the ancient Chinese village of Quanhucun, a forthcoming study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed.

A few years ago, when David Browman, PhD, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, read his graduate student’s thesis on the early figures in Americanist archaeology, he immediately asked, “Where are all the women?”

Four WUSTL faculty members were recognized for their accomplishments during the Faculty Achievement Awards ceremony Dec. 7 in Simon Hall. (From left) David M. Holtzman, MD, and Randall J. Bateman, MD, received the Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award from Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. James V. Wertsch, PhD, and Richard H. Gelberman, MD, received the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award and the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award, respectively.