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.

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.

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. 

WUSTL geoarcheologist Jennifer Smith, Ph.D., is featured a History channel documentary that solves a series of geological mysteries about the Sahara's past. The show, part of the "How the Earth Was Made" series, explains why there are marine fossils embedded in the blocks of stone from which the pyramids are made and drawings of people swimming are scratched into the walls of desert caves.