Author: Gerry Everding

The intricately intertwined relationship between the global economy and politics will be the focus of a public forum titled “Politics and the Global Recession” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25 in the Knight Center. The program is being sponsored by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

St. Louis floodplains are in danger of contamination from radioactive wastes dumped years ago at a landfill in North St. Louis County, according to Robert Criss, Ph.D. professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

As Iran celebrates the 31st anniversary of its Islamic revolution, Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., professor of Persian language and literature and a native of Iran, suggests that the Feb. 11 anniversary offers yet another example of how Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skillfully manipulates the Western media into providing unwitting support for his campaign to stifle the nation’s opposition movement. Her commentary appears online at Counter Punch.

Missouri lawmakers should give serious consideration to a proposed bill requiring medical examinations for high school athletes who suffer a head injury, according to recent testimony by WUSTL sports medicine expert Mark E. Halstead, M.D.

The Eiffel Tower and other world-class icons viewable online via webcams are getting a new three-dimensional look thanks to an innovative, browser-based application recently unveiled by Austin Abrams, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis.

Given ongoing agitation by a chorus of elected officials, the stage may be set for a major overhaul, if not outright abolishment of the nation’s largest home mortgage financing operations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Radhakrishan Gopalan, who teaches finance at Olin Business School, tells Smart Money that the private market should be able meet home financing needs, in most cases.

WUSTL faculty from law and political science were quick to offer opinions to the news media about implications of a controversial Jan. 21 ruling by the The U.S. Supreme Court that will allow corporations and unions to spend freely in elections, a decision many expect to shift the balance of political power.

In his latest book, “Repairing Paradise, The Restoration of Nature in America’s National Parks,” WUSTL political science professor William R. Lowry takes us to Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Everglades national parks to examine four contentious issues that disrupted the natural side of these parks, and identifies keys to how they could be overcome. Lowry comments on the book in an extensive review published Jan. 8 in the magazine National Parks Traveler.   

Nearly 40 years after the Apollo astronauts first brought samples of the Moon to Earth for study, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis are leading an effort to return to the Moon for samples that could unlock secrets of the early Solar System. Known as MoonRise, the proposed Moon mission is one of three finalists now bidding to become NASA’s next big space science venture, a $650 million mission that would launch before 2019.

NASA’s robotic rover Spirit, bogged down in the loose soil of a Red Planet crater for months, has helped make an important scientific discovery just by spinning its wheels. “We’ve found something supremely interesting in the disturbed soil,” says WUSTL’s Raymond Arvidson, deputy principal scientist on the mission. Sulfate minerals churned up by the rover’s wheels offer evidence that this area “could have once supported life,” he explains.