Author: Diana Lutz

Ralph Quatrano, immediate past dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, has been named dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

WUSTL researchers have shed light on one of the most important events in earth history, the conquest of land by plants. No would-be colonizer could have survived without the ability to deal with dehydration, a major threat for organisms accustomed to soaking in water. Clues to how the first land plants managed to avoid drying out are provided by the drought-tolerant moss Physcomitrella patens.

Younan Xia, Ph.D., the James M. McKelvey Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been ranked as one of the top 10 chemists in the world by The Times Higher Education, a magazine based in London. 

New calculations by an international group of theorists paint a better picture of the nature of quark stars and suggest a way for astronomers to find the quark stars among the neutron stars. But WUSTL physicist Mark Alford, commenting on the journal publication in a news article posted Jan. 15 at PhysicsWorld.com, suggests that the new work may not be the last word. Alford, who uses mathematical modeling to explore the properties of quark stars, contends that the mathematical theory it uses is only truly accurate when the quarks are millions of times denser than they are in real neutron stars.

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.

Robert Kranz has devoted much of his caeer to understanding cytochrome c, a little-noted molecule but one as important to life as DNA or hemoglobin. Because bacteria and people use different systems to assemble this molecule, his work may open the door to novel antibiotics and other medicinal drugs.

A tiny sensor that exploits the same physics as the whispering gallery in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London will help make nanotechnology safer.

Heme, a crucial component of the biomachinery that squeezes energy out of food, must be transported across membranes but without exposing its central iron atom to oxidation. Work at Washington University shows how it is done.

Nearly 100 years after the discovery of cosmic rays, a new type of gamma-ray telescope is finally allowing physicists to make images of cosmic-ray nurseries.

A group at Washington University recently tackled a simple circuit in the visual processing area of a chicken’s brain that detects motion in its field of view — with surprising results.