Arts & Sciences

Photo by David KilperBiblical scholar Pamela Barmash leads Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies

The Washington University Concert Choir and the Washington University Symphony Orchestra will present the 2007 Chancellor’s Concert at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 29, in Washington University’s E. Desmond Lee Auditorium. The program will highlight Carl Orff’s popular cantata Carmina Burana (“Songs of Beuren”), which combines 20th century music with medieval texts.

Richard Freund, Ph.D., director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, will discuss “Temple Treasures in the Dead Sea Caves: New Insights from Archaeology” at 11 a.m. April 20 in Room 301 of the Lab Sciences Building.

The Center for the Humanities and the Program in Film and Media Studies, both in Arts & Sciences, will host the Third Annual Children’s Film Symposium April 20-21 featuring three screenings and two lectures.

The Eliot Trio will perform piano trios by Franz Joseph Haydn, Camille Saint-Saëns and Johannes Brahms at 2:30 p.m. April 22 in the auditorium of Whitaker Hall.

The Pulitzer Prize for history was awarded Monday to Hank Klibanoff, a Washington University alumnus. Klibanoff, who graduated from Washington University in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in English in Arts & Sciences, and Gene Roberts won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.”

Shirley Dyke (left) and Pengcheng Wang adjust wireless sensors onto a model laboratory building in Dyke’s laboratory. An earthquake engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has successfully performed the first test of wireless sensors in the simulated structural control of a model laboratory building. Shirley J. Dyke, Ph.D., the Edward C. Dicke Professor of Civil Engineering and director of the Washington University Structural Control and Earthquake Engineering Laboratory, combined the wireless sensors with special controls called magnetorheological dampers to limit damage from a simulated earthquake load. More…

Discussions of memory lapses often focus on a failure to recall past events, but equally important to our daily lives is a form of memory that helps us remember to do something in the future — drop a child at daycare, go to the dentist or pick up bread on the way home. “Memory is fallible, even for tasks that are very important,” suggests WUSTL psychologist Mark A. McDaniel, Ph.D., co-author of a new book exploring how the brain processes memories critical to planning and other forward-looking activities. “As soon as intention leaves awareness, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be retrieved again.” More…

Tabatha Heet, a junior earth and planetary sciences major and Pathfinder student, shows Ray Arvidson, earth and planetary sciences department chair, a potential landing site for the Phoenix mission to Mars.Earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are paving the way for a smooth landing on Mars for the Phoenix Mission scheduled to launch in August this year by making sure the set-down literally is not a rocky one. A team led by Raymond E. Arvidson, Ph.D., James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, has been analyzing images taken from a NASA instrument to make sure that the Phoenix spacecraft lands in a spot on the Red planet’s northern plains that is relatively rock-free. Video included.

NO BYLINEGerald Early’s “Unpopular Answer to a Popular Question.”As Major League Baseball prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary on April 15 of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the “color barrier,” there’s been a groundswell of dire warnings about the diminishing ranks of African-Americans on big-league rosters. Some say young urban blacks are isolated from the game by racism, poverty and little access to facilities, but Gerald Early, Ph.D., a noted essayist and black culture expert at Washington University in St. Louis, has a much simpler explanation: “Black Americans don’t play baseball because they don’t want to.” More…