Arts & Sciences

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, examines a Neandertal skull.New scientific evidence challenges a common perception that Neandertals — a close evolutionary relative to modern humans that lived 230,000 to 30,000 years ago — possessed exceptionally long faces. Instead, a report authored by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that modern humans are really the “odd man out” when it comes to facial lengths, which drop off dramatically compared with their ancestral predecessors.

Photo by Patrick ShoreAnatahan eruption yields spectacular images, seismic data trove.Washington University geophysicists were fortunate to observe the May 10 eruption of a long dormant volcano on the uninhabited island Anatahan, part of the U.S.-administered Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas in the western Pacific. A seismograph they deployed there only a few days before the unexpected eruption has captured a trove of important seismic data — a detailed chronology of pre- and post-eruption rumblings. While the team’s primary focus is exploring the tectonic forces in the region, the chance capture of detailed volcanic eruption data may offer new avenues of research, perhaps providing tools to help access volcanic and seismic hazards to the people of the Marianas.

Workshops will be held weekdays from 9:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. The teachers — John Dalton in fiction, Ruth Ellen Kocher in poetry and Rockwell Gray in creative nonfiction — will provide both instruction in the genre and constructive criticism of participants’ work.

Concerts are at 7:30 p.m. every Sunday night in July in Brookings Quadrangle.

Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recognized the achievements of five of its alumni at a ceremony and reception May 16 in the Arts & Sciences Laboratory Science Building on campus.

Carl M. Bender, Ph.D., and Thomas A. Woolsey, M.D., professors at Washington University in St. Louis, have been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bender and Woolsey are among 184 U.S. and Canadian Guggenheim fellows selected this year from more than 3,200 applicants for awards totaling $6,750,000. Guggenheim fellows, which include artists, scholars and scientists, are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

TempletonThe notion of race in humans is completely a social concept without any biological basis, according to a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. There are not enough genetic differences between groups of people to say that there are sub-lineages (races) of humans, said Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. On the other hand, there are different races in many other species, including chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives. Templeton was part of a recent St. Louis panel discussion that previewed the first episode of the National Public Television’s “Race: The Power of an Allusion” series running nationally on May 4, 11, and 18 (check local stations for times).

Economic research on the micro foundations of markets and price formation will be among topics discussed May 23-25.

Students and recent graduates from Arts & Sciences have made an impressive showing, including four Mellon fellowship recipients.

Viewers will be treated to a lunar eclipse May 15th.A total lunar eclipse of the moon will be visible from across North America late Thursday, but whether the moon turns red depends on the presence of tiny particles in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, says Richard Heuermann, Outreach Program Coordinator in the University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.