News highlights for October 22, 2010

News highlights for October 22, 2010

CisionPoint news monitoring provides this small sampling of the university’s daily news coverage. Click headline to read full text via Cision or link directly to the online article where available. For questions or comments about this service, or to add or delete a name from the mailing list, please contact Gerry Everding.

Reuters Health

Hormones helpful for younger women?
10/21/2010
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may pose little risk to younger women, and could even help some aspects of their health – but any benefit appears to disappear as women age, according to a new study. Given the mix of evidence about HRT, it’s too soon to say that hormones are good for younger women, cautioned Dr. Graham A. Colditz at Washington University School of Medicine. Instead, this and other studies suggest that any benefit, if it exists, disappears as women age. “The older they get, the longer they take (hormones), the less benefit they seem to get from taking them,” said Colditz.
Link to Article

Tribune Magazine (UK)
How is the empire?
10/21/2010
The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them and Why They Always Fall (Oxford University Press), a new book by Timothy H. Parsons, professor of African History at Washington University in St Louis, is reviewed. Parsons uses the example of failed empires to chastise George W Bush for trying to do in Iraq what he believes cannot be done successfully anywhere. He goes to some trouble to argue that the recent invasion, wrong though he believes it to be, was not precisely empire. “Parsons has done serious work and written an intelligent and original book, worth respect and argument,” the review concludes.
Link to Article

Science Careers
Career Profiles: Making a Difference in the Classroom and on the Stage
10/21/2010
Science teacher Jeffrey Polish, a 39-year-old with a PhD in molecular cell biology from Washington University in St. Louis, left the lab bench to teach high school biology after finishing graduate school in 2004. Since 2008, he has also been living out a dream, to tell personal stories to an audience, as founder and director of The Monti, a successful, live storytelling event for and by adults.
Link to Article

KTVI-FOX2Now.com (St. Louis)
St. Louis astronaut is back home
10/21/2010
A St. Louis astronaut is back home delivering a series of lectures at his alma matter. NASA astronaut Robert Behnken, a Washington University alumnus has spent more than 700 hours in space. He’s been on two shuttle missions and made six spacewalks. NASA Astronaut Robert Behnken is speaking at 7 p.m. Thursday night in the Laboratory Sciences Building at Wash-U. He discusses his priorities for future NASA space exploration in an interview posted online at KTVI.
Link to Article

KMOX Radio / CBS News (St. Louis)
Ameren’s Labadie Power Plant in environmentalists sights again
10/21/2010
You’ve heard a lot about the Labadie Power Plant on KMOX recently because of ongoing debate over a proposed coal ash landfill. But now, some people are worried about what’s going into the air. An environmental group is concerned that Missouri state regulators have left some key federal requirements out of the renewal draft for Ameren’s Labadie operating permit. Maxine Lipeles with the Environmental Law Clinic at Washington University represents the Sierra Club. They contend Ameren did some major projects that increased smokestack emissions at the facility, without adding pollution controls or applying for the right permits.
Link to Article

St. Louis Riverfront Times
Wash U Program Aims to Prevent Pregnancy in Foster Girls
10/21/2010
Nearly half of all girls in Missouri’s foster care system are pregnant or give birth before age 19. A new program at Washington University aims to provide these girls and young women with tools to prevent unwanted pregnancies and be better stewards of their own sexual health. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative kicks off with five years of funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Link to Article

Saint Louis Beacon
The Muslims in your neighborhood: Immigrant Muslims bring with them varied cultures and customs
10/21/2010

In the St. Louis metro area, like around the rest of the country, the Muslim population has grown steadily over the past 25 years, representing both native-born Americans and immigrants. While they share common Muslim beliefs, these residents are a diverse group coming from many countries, ethnicities and cultural influences. Ahmet Karamustafa, a professor of history and religious studies at Washington University, offers his perspective on issues and challenges facing the city’s increasingly diverse Muslim population, which he estimates at about 50,000 to 60,000 people.

Link to Article

News in higher education

The Boston Globe
Mass. doctors earn drug firms’ dollars
10/19/2010
The Harvard brand, unrivaled in education, is also prized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful tool in promoting drugs. A new ProPublica analysis of publicly reported industry payments to physicians shows that drug firms’ speaking fees are flowing to many Harvard doctors. Because of rising concern that certain speaking fees can compromise the independence of doctors, Harvard and its affiliated hospitals are clamping down on such payments.
Link to Article

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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Inside Higher Ed
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