Arts & Sciences

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present its third biennial “Young Choreographers Showcase“ March 28-30 in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The concert will feature more than a dozen dancers in seven original works — ranging from ballet to modern, solos to large group works — by student choreographers in the PAD’s Dance Program

Poet Mary Jo Bang, professor of English and director of The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

Whether or not Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination for president, the question of how much being a woman helped or hurt her campaign will linger for a long time. A WUSTL professor discusses the unique challenges Clinton faces and why people seem to react so strongly to her. Video available.

David MarchantShaina Goodman’s *Holding.*The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present its third biennial Young Choreographers Showcase March 28 to 30 in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The concert will feature more than a dozen dancers in seven original works — ranging from ballet to modern, solos to large group works — by student choreographers in the PAD’s Dance Program

The third African Film Festival will be held March 27-30. The series consists of four feature films and four short films from eight different African nations, touching on themes of love, gender, family and the effects of globalization. It also will include a new youth program March 26-27.

Human diseases and social networks seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, along with his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, has published an algorithm (a recipe of computer instructions) to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

Ancient donkey skeletons at Abydos, Egypt.An international group of researchers, led by Fiona Marshall, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought.

Washington University will host its third African Film Festival March 27-30. The series will consist of four feature films and four short films from eight different African nations. This year’s themes include love, gender, family, and the effects of globalization. It will also include a new youth program March 26-27.

Learning something once — like the fact that berg means mountain in German — and studying it over and over again may do little to help you remember it in the future. The key to future recall, suggests a new WUSTL study, is how often over time you actively practice retrieving that information from memory.

A team of scientists led by Washington University has begun to unlock the genetic secrets of corn, a crop vital to U.S. agriculture. The researchers have completed a working draft of the corn genome, which should accelerate efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet society’s growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel.