Author: Diana Lutz

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis who were decoding the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex discovered that they could tell how a monkey was planning to approach a reaching task. By chance the two monkeys chosen for the study had completely different cognitive styles. One was a hyperactive type, who kept jumping the gun, and the other was a smooth operator, who waited for the entire setup to be revealed before planning his next move. The difference is clearly visible in their decoded brain activity, allowing the scientists, in effect, to read their minds.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded more than $2 million to a team of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis and InvivoSciences, a biotechnology startup with WUSTL roots, to construct artificial tissue models that will allow the rapid testing of new drugs for heart failure.

Cleon R. Yohe Jr., PhD, emeritus professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Tuesday, June 26, of cancer. He was 70.

A new assay that uses mitochondrial DNA that mutates faster than nuclear DNA has allowed scientists at Washington University in St. Louis to identify one of the major animal reservoirs for the ehlichioses, STARI and other tick-borne diseases in the southeastern United States. The animal turned out to be the eastern gray squirrel.

How strong are the links in food webs? An experiment at Washington University in St. Louis demonstrates that they’re strong enough for a disturbance  to propagate across four trophic levels and two ecosystems. The experiment demonstrates that invasive species such as purple loosestrife could have broad effects on surrounding plant and animal communities, many of them cryptic.

A cross-Atlantic collaboration between scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, both in Grenoble, France, has revealed the workings of a switch that activates plant hormones, tags them for storage or marks them for destruction.

Math and music might seem a strange combination to some. Certainly many famous performers are able to bring audiences to their feet without once thinking about ratios or anything else overtly mathematical. But David Wright, chairman of the mathematics department at Washington University in St. Louis, always has been gifted with an unusual, even eerie, ability to hear both the music and the math simultaneously.

The American Academy of Microbiology has named two Washington University in St. Louis faculty members as fellows: Robert Blankenship, PhD, and John Heuser, MD.

Sixteen St. Louis youth will be in Forest Park on June 13 tracking box turtles, fitted with telemetry devices — all to help with a project aimed at studying box turtle movements and their health. The 12- and 13-year-olds are participating in a pilot study designed by scientists from the Saint Louis Zoo and Washington University in St. Louis to document box turtle movements and their health status in urban and rural areas in and around St. Louis.

The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) honored Barbara Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, with the 2011-12 AIBS Distinguished Scientist Award June 1.