Arts & Sciences

The warming that following the last Ice Age was interrupted by a cold snap that killed off megafauna such as the giant ground sloth and the wooly mammoth. Could this crisis have been caused by an asteroid impact or a comet breaking up in the atmosphere? Unfortunately the geological evidence for such a dramatic event has not stood up to scrutiny. In PNAS a group of scientists challenges the catastrophists last, best hope: shock-synthesized nanodiamonds. 

In its 15th year, the “Work, Families and Public Policy” series, a schedule of Monday brown-bag seminars presented on campus biweekly through Dec. 6 will give faculty and graduate students of St. Louis-area universities an array of opportunities to lunch and learn. The series features one-hour seminars on research interests including labor, households, health care, law and social welfare by faculty from local and national universities.

Born and raised in Chicago, Carol Camp Yeakey, PhD, knew from an early age that cities would play a commanding role in her life.

Marshall Klimasewiski (far right), director of the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, leads a lively discussion in Eliot Hall Aug. 30 of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Freshman Reading Program book for this year.

From mordant humor and exuberant defiance to love and war and existential anguish, the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will scale the heights and plumb the depths of our shared mortal coil with its 2010-11 season.

Multimedia solos and structured improvisations will share the stage with Flamenco and classical Indian works in Dance Close Up, the biennial concert of new and original choreography by faculty in the Dance Program in Washington University’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

University College, the adult, evening and continuing education division at Washington University in St. Louis, will participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program beginning this fall, allowing eligible U.S. veterans to attend University College with no out-of-pocket expenses for tuition or fees.

Researchers in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis conduct a study on the battle between an invasive plant and a native plant on the coast of California and how it is effecting wildlife in the area.

Recent work with geochemical proxies for oxygen levels suggests that oxygen levels continued to fluctuate long after the Great Oxygenation Event 2.7 billion years ago, and that the oceans were many different flavors of anoxic right up until the Edicaran period, 600 million years ago. What happened in the intervening 2 billion years will be contested until scientists have more data, says a geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis.

In mid-summer two lucky Washington University in St. Louis graduate students got to travel to Lake Constance in Germany to listen in the morning to Nobel laureates lecture on the topics of their choice and quiz them in afternoon about life in science and what it is really like.