Arts & Sciences

Alexander Calandra, Ph.D., professor emeritus of physical science in physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, died Wednesday, March 8, 2006. Calandra, who joined WUSTL in 1947 and retired in 1979, was nationally known for his work in science education. He was 95.

Boris Nemtsov will address liberal politics and market reforms in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States during a talk in Graham Chapel.

The series will consist of four feature films and four short films from seven different African nations; all screenings are free and begin at 7 p.m. in Brown Hall.

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.

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.

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

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…

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…