Arts & Sciences

When the Senate convenes Jan. 25, it is expected to weigh a resolution to reform the filibuster rule and eliminate secret holds — protocols that many have blamed for encouraging congressional gridlock. Although the proposal is put forth by the Democratic majority in the Senate, it contains a series of relatively modest changes that should hold some appeal to the Senate’s Republiican minority, suggests congressional expert Steven S. Smith, PhD.

Who knew? The chance discovery that spikes in seismometer noise recorded in Africa corresponded with soccer matches has led to the discovery that there’s a lot more buried in the noise, including a signal from the famous storms of the Southern Atlantic Ocean, the bane of ships of sail.

The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will launch its spring Danforth University Center Chamber Music Series with a concert titled “Music from Spain and the Middle East” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 19. The performance will include works by Joaquin Turina, Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados and Pablo de Saraste, as well as traditional Kurdish and Persian folk music. Soprano Stella Markou will perform with pianist Martin Kennedy April 7.

A Washington University in St. Louis team is participating in the modENCODE project, a massive ongoing effort to map all the elements in model organisms that affect whether genes are silenced or expressed. The work supports the more complex ENCODE project, which is tasked to map the same elements in the human genome. While the genome is the same in every cell, each cell type expresses a different set of genes. In people, moreover, roughly 95 percent of the genome is silenced. Together the projects will “put flesh on the bones” of the Human Genome Project, says team leader Sarah C.R. Elgin.

Using a sophisticated version of the stroboscopic photography a pioneering photographer used in 1877 to prove that a horse takes all four hooves off the ground when it gallops, Michael L. Gross, PhD, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences and of medicine and immunology in the School of Medicine, catches proteins in the act of folding.

Three Washington University faculty — two from the School of Medicine and one from Arts & Sciences — have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.

Life expectancy was probably the same for early modern and late archaic humans and did not factor in the extinction of Neanderthals, suggests a new study by Erik Trinkaus, PhD, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Changing words in Mark Twain’s classic book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is fine as long as the original version still is easily available for readers, says Gerald L. Early, PhD. “We change texts all the time,” Early says. “For instance, we make children’s versions of the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare.”

In 1890, the American painter John La Farge embarked on a yearlong journey through the islands of the South Pacific. Just months later, Paul Gauguin began his own Polynesian odyssey. Though the two artists never met, their paths nearly crossed in Tahiti, with Gauguin arriving a mere four days after La Farge departed. So it is perhaps fitting that, last fall, a group of five graduate and undergraduate students from the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences set out on their own mission of travel, visiting a pair of East Coast exhibition that focused on works by the two artists. 

The following are among the new faculty members at Washington University: Minjung Kyung, PhD; Yuko Miki, PhD; Sowande’ Mustakeem, PhD; and Alvaro Pelayo, PhD.