Arts & Sciences

Yearly expeditions to explore the lava tubes on the famed archipelago will culminate in an international symposium to be held there next year. In the meantime we may all be able to participate as well, if only vicariously. WUSTL’s Aaron Addison, who has traveled to the Galàpagos repeatedly to map the tubes, apppears in a new IMAX film called Galàpagos 3D. Not yet released in the United States, it stars David Attenborough as well as the archipelago’s fantastic geology and biology.

We all know the story of the Roman gladiator, right? Not the whole story, says Harvard classicist and advisor to the 2000 blockbuster film, “Gladiator.” Kathleen Coleman will explain this fascinating and complex culture for the annual Biggs Lecture in the Classics: “Christians in the Roman Arena,” April 9.

A strange stone found in the Moroccan desert was the talk of the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The stone has highly unusual chemistry, suspiciously like that found by the Messenger space probe, which is currently surveying the surface of Mercury. If it was from Mercury, it would be the first meteorite from that body ever found. The prospects was thrilling but doubts crept in. WUSTL’s Randy Korotev, a lunar meteroite expert, explains the arguments for and against Mercurian origin.

Thomas J. Bernatowicz,  professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 105, Steinberg Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis. He will discuss what cosmic dust carried to Earth by meteorites has revealed about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae. The St. Louis community is cordially invited to the lecture, which is sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Why is it so hard for some people to resist the least little temptation, while others seem to possess incredible patience, passing up immediate gratification for a greater long-term good? The answer, suggests a new study from Washington University in St. Louis, is that patient people focus on future rewards in a way that makes the waiting process seem much more pleasurable.

Author and political scientist Cathy Cohen studies American politics and particularly how they affect African-Americans, women and the LGBTQ community – never ignoring the intersections between these identity categories. She will be on campus April 9 to give a lecture titled “Race, Sex and Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama.”

A team of four WUSTL students, including sophmores, Grace Kuo and Amy Patterson, shown to left accepting a trophy, won the College Nationals in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 30. Click here for a video of a rolling ball bearing setting off a chain reaction in “Rube Goldberg’s office” that eventually drop a hammer on a nail–the assigned task.

“The anthropological concept of culture is extremely important and often misunderstood because many of the things that are assumed to be biologically determined, like criminality or homosexuality or IQ, are really behaviorally and societally defined,” says WUSTL physical anthropologist Robert W. Sussman, and it forms the basis for his Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture, “The Importance of the Concept of Culture to Science and Society,” the next Assembly Series program held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 9.

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, many faculty members were appointed with tenure, promoted with tenure or granted tenure. Read more to see who they are.

When Carl Neureuther, a 1940 graduate of Washington University, set up an endowment in 1987 to support library collections, he was also ensuring support for something more: a lifelong love of reading. The results are in for this year’s Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition sponsored by Washington University Libraries.