Arts & Sciences

A team of psychologists at Washington University that include graduate student Jonathan Jackson have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.

Bernard F. Schutz, PhD, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture Wednesday, April 7. Schutz will give a talk titled “Gravitational Waves: Listening to the True Music of the Spheres” at 7 p.m.

James Lennox, PhD, a prominent scholar of the history and philosophy of biology, will deliver the annual John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in the Classics for the Assembly Series at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 7, in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium. This event, which is free and open to the public, originally was scheduled for April 8.

Outgoing, gregarious people who fill their lives with deep, meaningful conversations may have found at least one key to a happier life, suggests research from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Arizona.

A new chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the national collegiate Hispanic honor society and largest foreign-language honor society in the world, opened on campus with an induction ceremony March 22 in the Danforth University Center.

A team led by physicist Ken Kelton, PhD, is building an electrostatic levitation chamber that will be installed at the Spallation Neutron Source at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kelton and his colleagues are particularly eager to see what the new instrument will tell them about glass transition, “the deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid-state research.”

The Max Kade Center on Contemporary German Literature will celebrate its 25th anniversary by hosting the 20th St. Louis Symposium on German Literature, “The Ethics of Literature: Contemporary German Writers,” Friday through Sunday, March 26-28, in Room 276 of the Danforth University Center.

Celebrated poet Frank Bidart, author of Desire and Watching the Spring Festival, will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 23. Bidart will then present a reading from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 25. He is on campus as the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.

Celebrated memoirist, poet and playwright Nick Flynn, author most recently of The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (2010), will read from his work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 31, for The Writing Program Reading Series in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. The talk is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall.

Congressional expert Steven S. Smith says Congress has plenty of parliamentary tactics for stalling and pushing through legislation. The fate of the health care reform bill could be determined by a process of reconciliation, filibusters, deeming or something Smith calls a “vote-a-rama”.