Arts & Sciences

Freshwater fish are an important part of the diet of many peoples around the world, but it has been unclear when fish became an essential part of the year-round diet for early humans. A new study by an international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, shows it may have happened in China as far back as 40,000 years ago.

President Barack Obama met this week with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev. While the two sides did not see eye-to-eye on all topics, they did mutually agree to dispose of 34 tons each of weapons-grade plutonium, an initiative started in the 1990s and never completed. It’s a step in the right direction, says an expert on Russian identity at Washington University in St. Louis.

An international collaboration of 390 scientists reports the discovery of an outburst of very-high-energy gamma radiation from the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87), accompanied by a strong rise of the radio flux measured from the direct vicinity of its supermassive black hole. The combined results give first experimental evidence that particles are accelerated to extremely high energies in the immediate vicinity of a supermassive black hole and then emit the observed gamma rays. The gamma rays have energies a trillion times higher than the energy of visible light. Washington University in St. Louis physicists helped coordinate this cooperative project, the results of which appear in the July 2 Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

Julie SingerThe shooting death last Saturday of Neda Agha-Soltan has emerged, thanks to video widely circulated on the Internet, as a potent symbol of Iran’s antigovernment movement. In the news media and in private postings across the Web, Agha-Soltan has been memorialized as a victim, a martyr and — perhaps most hauntingly to Western ears — as “Iran’s Joan of Arc.” Yet while fitting in some ways, that comparison says less about either Agha-Soltan or the 15th-century French saint than it does about our own need to make sense of the present through comparison with the past, says Julie Singer, Ph.D., assistant professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.

Robert Canfield As the Iranian government continues to crack down on citizens protesting against the recent disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an expert on Iran at Washington University in St. Louis says the Iranian administration wants the legitimacy of having won an election without actually having allowed a true election to take place.

Windows on IranAn Iranian-American scholar at Washington University in St. Louis has been posting daily updates on election-related turmoil in Iran as part of her long-running electronic newsletter on cultural, political and social issues in Iran. Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences, posts news, filled with cell phone videos and firsthand anecdotes from friends and academic contacts within Iran, at Windows on Iran Web site. She is available for media interviews on the day-to-day news reports she’s receiving from contacts within Iran and for broader discussions of the cultural context of these events, including the role of women and the unique ways that this protest is being shaped by the use of cell phones, instant messaging and other online social media.

WUSTL Photo ServicesWUSTL’s ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science CampWashington University in St. Louis will host its third ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp June 14-26. The Danforth Campus will welcome 48 middle schoolers from traditionally underrepresented populations who are academically qualified, recommended by their teachers and genuinely interested in math and science. The free residential camp gives students a first-hand experience with experiments, role models and innovative programs to encourage their continued participation in math and science courses in school. A special “ExxonMobil Media Day” will be held from 9:30-11:30 a.m. June 17 at the Mallinckrodt Center, lower level. Campers will work side by side with scientists to complete an engineering challenge.

Washington University is dismayed and shocked to learn that an attack was made today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The university has a long-standing commitment to human rights and religious studies, including the Holocaust and Jewish studies, as well as being a sponsor of Holocaust lectures by experts from around the world.

The Gateway Festival Orchestra will begin its 46th season of free Sunday evening performances at 7:30 p.m. July 12 in Brookings Quadrangle with a program celebrating American music.

The Linda Presgrave Quintet will launch Washington University’s summer Jazz at Holmes series Thursday, June 11.