Arts & Sciences

Courtesy photo*African Middleweights*Washington University will host the African Film Festival’s renowned Traveling Film Series March 23-26. The series consists of four feature films and four shorts from seven different African nations, addressing themes on colonialism, urbanization and youth subcultures erupting from the ironies of contemporary life.

His March 9 lecture is part of the Faculty Fellows Lecture and Workshop Series, presented by The Center for the Humanities Arts & Sciences.

The program in Holmes Lounge will feature Second Suite for the King’s Supper, Pan and Syrinx, The Sleep of Ulysses and Suite for The Imaginary Invalid.

A member of WUSTL’s cosmic ray research group, he was involved in some of the world’s most successful studies of the composition of galactic cosmic rays.

Nobody completely understands superconductors. So fathom how James S. Schilling, Ph.D., led a team that makes the phenomenon work better. Schilling, a professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, collaborated with recent doctoral graduate Takahiro Tomita and scientists at Argonne (Ill.) National Laboratory to determine whether one region in superconductors, called grain boundaries (GB), are oxygen deficient. Such oxygen deficiency impairs superconductor performance. The group developed a technique that estimates how much oxygen is present in a critical region of superconductors called grain boundaries. More…

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (above) is poised to go into orbit around Mars in March, then spend about six months aerobraking to place the spacecraft in a low circular orbit by this fall.Two Mars orbiter missions — one from NASA, the other from the European Space Agency (ESA) — will open new vistas in the exploration of Mars through the use of sophisticated ground-penetrating radars, providing international researchers with the first direct clues about the Red Planet’s subsurface structure. Roger Phillips, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, is participating in both the Mars Express (ESA) and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) missions by lending his expertise in radar. Phillips says that the combination of the radars on the two missions will provide important and unique data sets that will directly map the structure of the upper portions of the interior of Mars. More…

Jan Amend sampling shallow marine vent fluids in 2005 at Ambitle Island, Papua, New Guinea.Curiosity about the microbial world drove Jan Amend, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to Vulcano Island, Italy, a shallow hydrothermal Shangri-la near Sicily. There, Amend and his collaborators managed to examine the environment in depth, design a gene probe, and discover new life-which could have some big implications for the origin and presence of life on Earth. More…

On the heels of a highly acclaimed book on the NFL comes another football tome from Michael MacCambridge. In an era of stat freaks, over-analysis and just plain numbers-crunching, the literary world — and sports world — needed a book like the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of the Game (ESPN Books, 2005). MacCambridge, adjunct professor of journalism in University College in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, took three years worth of exhaustive research by several football experts and edited it into an easy-to-read format. More…

America’s conflicted cultural obsession with the gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain” might seem old-fashioned in Japan where stories of love and romance between beautiful young men have been entertaining women for more than a decade, suggests Rebecca Copeland, Ph.D., a Japanese studies professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to movies, male-male romance is a popular theme in a variety of other Japanese pop culture media, including book-length graphic novels and comics, known as manga, and an array of animated cartoons and television action series, known as anime. All of which have developed cult followings on the Internet and among fans of late-night cable television programming, including large numbers of American teens. More…

Repeated testing vs. repeated studyingRemember the dreaded pop quiz? Despite their reputation as a cruel tool of teachers intent on striking fear into the hearts of unprepared students, quizzes — given early and often — may be a student’s best friend when it comes to understanding and retaining information for the long haul, suggests new psychology research from Washington University in St. Louis. More…