Arts & Sciences

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2004Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s recently announced plan to nationalize the telecommunications and electricity industries in his country sent shockwaves through the boardrooms of multinational corporations with large holdings in Latin America. While some see Chavez as the leading edge of a “socialist revolution,” research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests this latest nationalization push is nothing more than politics as usual, part of a predictable pattern of political tensions that often arise when corporations make large foreign investments.

David Kilper/WUSTL Photo ServicesNoga Landau as AgnesConservative versus liberal, political versus personal, father versus daughter. Such are the forces at play in civil disobedience, a world premiere drama by Carter Lewis, playwright-in-residence in Washington University’s Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences. Commissioned by the PAD, the play centers on the relationship between Fred, a conservative justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and his daughter Marlee, a social activist and Manhattan bookstore owner.

KWUR (90.3 FM), Washington University’s student-run radio station, will launch KWUR WEEK, a series of on-campus events, with a free concert by four of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra’s newest—and youngest—players. The program will include string quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn and Johannes Brahms.

A.G. Edwards Inc., the St. Louis-based national investment firm, will establish the A.G. Edwards Visiting Professorship in Entrepreneurship.

The acclaimed fiction writer is the author of five short story collections, most recently “Twilight of the Super Heroes: Stories” (2006).

Eric ChouTesting the wake-sleep cycleA biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and his collaborators have identified the factor in mammalian brain cells that keeps cells in synchrony so that functions like the wake-sleep cycle, hormone secretion and loco motor behaviors are coordinated daily.

NASALet’s visit Europa!William B. McKinnon, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, says the space science community suffers from an embarrassment of riches when pondering which of Jupiter’s moons should be studied next, because they all differ in the way that they can reveal more about planets and how they behave. But he thinks it is Europa that clearly commands the most attention.

Eric ChouA slice through the earth, showing the attenuation anomalies within the mantle.A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping — diminishing — deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. The research, which analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms, provides the first evidence for water existing in the Earth’s deep mantle.

In 1973, while a doctoral student at Indiana University, Henry I. Schvey befriended the eminent Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Now chair of Washington University’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, Schvey has written “Kokoschka: A Love Story,” an original drama about the artist’s torrid affair with Alma Mahler (1879-1964), the beautiful widow of composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).

Harvard physicist Lisa Randall explains how our visible world of four dimensions could be embedded in a higher-dimensional universe at the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7 in Graham Chapel.