Arts & Sciences

Debra Hillabrand as Lizzie Borden.”Lizzie Borden took an ax/ And gave her mother 40 whacks. / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father 41.” So goes the well-known nursery rhyme. This month, the Washington University Opera, led by director Jolly Stewart, will explore the characters and conflicts that may (or may not) have caused Borden to snap with a new production of Jack Beeson’s acclaimed operatic adaptation, Lizzie Borden.

This month, the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present a new production of this prototypical “situation comedy” in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre. Performances begin at 8 p.m. Feb. 22-23 and at 2 p.m. Feb. 24. Performances continue the following weekend at 8 p.m., Feb. 29-March and at 2 p.m. March 2..

Washington University will host free screenings of two recent Japanese films Friday, Feb. 15, and Saturday, Feb. 16, in Brown Hall, Room 100. “Hanging Garden” (2005), beginning at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 15, explores the quirky soul of a dysfunctional clan struggling to survive amidst the pressures of the modern age. It is directed by Toshiaki […]

In America, helium is running out of gas. The element that lifts things like balloons, spirits and voice ranges is being depleted so rapidly in the world’s largest reserve, outside of Amarillo, Texas, that supplies are expected to be depleted there within the next eight years.

The Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Structural Engineering has begun a series of seminars and workshops on the topic of reducing the damage that would occur if a strong earthquake strikes the New Madrid fault area again.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll, chlorophyll d. Chlorophyll d absorbs “red edge,” near infrared, long wave length light that is invisible to the naked eye. In so doing, the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina, competes with virtually no other plant or bacterium in the world for sunlight.

Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., professor of Persian language and literature and chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages & Literatures in Arts & Sciences, will give the Assembly Series lecture at 11 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 13, in Graham Chapel.

Preventing Alzheimer’s disease is a goal of Raphael Kopan, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and pharmacology at the Washington University School of Medicine. The moss plant Physcomitrella patens, studied in the laboratory of Ralph S. Quatrano, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor and chair of the biology department on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus, might inch Kopan toward that goal.

Image courtesy of NASAThe Earth’s orbital behaviors are responsible for more than just presenting us with a leap year every four years. According to Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, parameters such as planetary gravitational attractions, the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun and the degree of tilt of our planet’s axis with respect to its path around the sun, have implications for climate change and the advent of ice ages.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoRobert Blankenship, professor of biology and chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, holds the cyanobacteria *Acaryochloris marina*, a rare bacterium that uses chlorophyll d for photosynthesis.Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll, chlorophyll d. Chlorophyll d absorbs “red edge,” near infrared, long wave length light that is invisible to the naked eye. In so doing, the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina, competes with virtually no other plant or bacterium in the world for sunlight.