Arts & Sciences

Daniel Stier / GQ, September 2006El Hombre vs. The BabeBaseball purists, especially those of Yankee allegiance, might argue that St. Louis Cardinals homerun-hitting superstar Albert Pujols is simply not in the same league as legendary New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth. Science may never settle that argument, but researchers at Washington University in St. Louis can offer some sense of how Pujols stacks up to the Babe in terms of skills necessary to hit the long ball. Pujols visited WUSTL to take part in a series of lab tests similar to those conducted on Ruth in 1921.

MacDonaldHugh Macdonald, the Avis H. Blewett Professor of Music in Arts & Sciences, has prepared a performing edition of Fiesque (1866-68), a previously unperformed opera by French composer Eduardo Lalo (1823-1892). The piece will receive its world première July 27 at Le Festival de Radio France et Montpellier. His newly prepared score will be published later this year by Bärenreiter Editions.

Peter CookPaul MuldoonPaul Muldoon, “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War” according to The Times Literary Supplement, will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 14.

David Kilper/WUSTL Photo ServicesMary MazelloTango, rhumba and Indian bharata natyam will share the stage with contemporary multi-media works and live improvisation in Dance Closeup, the biennial concert of original choreography by faculty in the Dance Program in Washington University’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences. Launched in 1995, Dance Closeup regularly serves as the unofficial kickoff to St. Louis’ professional dance season. This year’s installment will feature ten works choreographed and performed by faculty and guest dancers.

The book examines the Rinzai Zen convent, founded in 1285 by nun Kakusan Shido.

Stephanie Novak devised the “Archosaurian Morphospecies Concept” and presented its details at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting.

Constant blood flow shields the brain from cold, limiting the effects of any attempt to cool the brain.Attempts to cool the brain to reduce injury from stroke and other head trauma may face a significant obstacle: current cooling devices can’t penetrate very deeply into the brain. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that blood flow in the brain creates a “cold shielding” effect and have developed a method for calculating brain temperature that may be used to improve brain cooling techniques.

David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoLars Angenent with an earlier model of his microbial fuel cell. An advance in the design has increased the power output by a factor of 10. Hopes are that the fuel cell can be scaled up even more and function as a viable energy form.In the midst of the worldwide energy crisis, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have been continuing their work on a microbial fuel cell that generates electricity from wastewater. Advances in the design of this fuel cell in the last year have increased the power output by a factor of 10 and future designs, already in the minds of the researchers, hope to multiply that power output by 10 times again. If that goal can be achieved, the fuel cell could be scaled up for use in food and agricultural industries to generate electrical power – all with the wastewater that today goes right down the drain.

Richards has observed the inheritance of epigenetic factors in plants.Eric Richards, Ph.D., professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, writing in the May issue of Nature Reviews Genetics, analyzes recent and past research in epigenetics and the history of evolution and proposes that epigenetics should be considered a form of soft inheritance, citing examples in both the plant and mammalian kingdoms.

In the Thoroughman laboratory, volunteers play games on a computer screeen using a robotic arm so that Thoroughman and his colleagues can study how people learn motor skills.Central to being human is the ability to adapt: We learn from our mistakes. Previous theories of learning have assumed that the size of learning naturally scales with the size of the mistake. But now biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that people can use alternative strategies: Learning does not necessarily scale proportionally with error.