Arts & Sciences

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.

On Monday, March 10, Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, McDonnell International Scholars Academy director James V. Wertsch and 10 students from 10 different countries will ring the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell at 9:30 a.m. EST. The students are all members of WUSTL’s McDonnell Academy.

Distinguished poet Carl Phillips, professor of English and of African and African American Studies, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, will deliver the first of three talks on poetry at 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, in Umrath Lounge on the Danforth Campus, as part of the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities (IPH) in Arts & Sciences and WUSTL’s Assembly Series. Based on the theme of “The Art of Restlessness: On Poetry and Making,” Phillips’ talks are free and open to the public. The March 25th program will focus on “Poetry and Resistance.”

Mike Venso/Laumeier Sculpture ParkAschheim’s “Earworm (Node),” contains LEDs, plastic, speakers, music and copper.Artist Deborah Aschheim, known for her focus on interactive multi-sensory responses to neuroscience, memory and cognition, joins Washington University faculty from art, medicine, psychology and neuroscience for a free public panel discussion examining the relationship between Aschheim’s art and brain science at 6 p.m. March 20 in Room 110, January Hall. The “Deborah Aschheim: Reconsider,” exhibition, on display at Laumeier Sculpture Park, explores why we remember what we see and hear and why we forget, while offering a solution to curb the “forgetting curve.”

Emotional concerns are a serious consideration with the diagnosis of dementia.When it comes to a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, what you don’t know may not kill you, but knowing the truth as soon as possible appears to be the better approach — one that may improve the emotional well-being of both patients and their caregivers, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.