McKinley Avenue to close July 21-Sept. 23

From July 21 through Sept. 23, McKinley Avenue between Taylor Avenue and the Olin Circle will be closed to pedestrians, vehicles and shuttle bus traffic. The closure will allow for installation of an underground tunnel to connect the School of Medicine’s Environmental Health and Safety building, currently under construction, with the Scott McKinley Research Building, also under construction.

Dispatches from the Horn of Africa

Jeffrey A. Lowell, MD, of the School of Medicine is also a commander in the U.S. Navy. He currently is deployed to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Africa. He’s checked in to tell us about his experience there — and about the gratitude of service members who recently received care packages from some generous Washington University employees.

Youth regularly receive pro-marijuana tweets

Hundreds of thousands of American youth are following marijuana-related Twitter accounts and getting pro-pot messages several times each day, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. They said the tweets are cause for concern because young people are thought to be especially responsive to social media influences and because patterns of drug use tend to be established in a person’s late teens and early 20s.

Nichols elected to Royal Society

Colin Nichols, PhD, the Carl F. Cori Endowed Professor and director of the Center for the Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases, has been elected to the Royal Society, an honorary English organization equivalent to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

Slaying bacteria with their own weapons

A novel antibiotic delivery system would exploit small molecules called siderophores that bacteria secrete to scavenge for iron in their environments. Each bacterium has its own system of siderophores, which it pumps across its cell membrane before releasing the iron the siderophores hold. If an antibiotic were linked to one of these scavenger molecules, it would be converted into a tiny Trojan horse that would smuggle antibiotics inside a bacterium’s cell membrane.
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