Author: Diana Lutz

Randy Korotev regularly receives samples from meteorite enthusiasts that are not the real thing; mistakenly identified meteorites are dubbed “meteorwrongs.”

Courtesy PhotoPathfinder Program students use an emission spectrometer at the Rio Tinto site in southern Spain.The work conducted along the Rio Tinto in Spain was part of the program’s Capstone Experience, a research-intensive field study conducted during the senior year.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world’s largest general scientific organization; the multidisciplinary program is Feb. 16-20.

Randy Korotev with a sample meteorite found in Siberia.The mysterious orb you find in your backyard that wasn’t there just the day before has to be a meteorite, right? Wrong. Overwhelmingly the chances are it’s a meteorwrong, says Randy Korotev, Ph.D., research associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that 998 out of 1,000 meteorites are from asteroids, one out of 1,000 is from the Moon, and one out of 1,000 is from Mars. Of the hundreds of meteorites that have been found in the United States, none has been a lunar meteorite, and only one has been a Mars meteorite.

A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes — strongly — the ‘Out of Africa’ replacement theory. That theory holds that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and wiped out existing populations of humans. Templeton has shown that the African populations interbred with the Eurasian populations — thus making love, not war.

Good pollinators wantedMother Nature could use a few more good pollinators, especially in species-rich biodiversity hotspots, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS online, Jan. 16, 2006). Jana Vamosi, Ph.D, postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary and Tiffany Knight, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and their collaborators have performed an exhaustive global analysis of more than 1,000 pollination studies which included 166 different plant species and found that, in areas where there is a great deal of plant diversity, plants suffer lower pollination and reproductive success. For some plant species, this reduction in fruit and seed production could push them towards extinction.

It’s common for NASA to name features on planets and stars in constellations for characters in Greek mythology, or in honor of esteemed NASA colleagues.

University scientists have devised a technique on humans that for the first time shows just what the brain does when the skull accelerates.

Josh Smith in the Libyan desert.They’re back! Joshua Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and D. Tab Rasmussen, Ph.D., professor of anthropology, both in Arts & Sciences, are stateside, teaching at Washington University after returning from what is thought to be the first-ever collaborative paleontological expedition between American and Libyan scientists. Smith and Rasmussen were in Libya for just three weeks in August of 2005. They were in the field for only 10 days, and they and their colleagues visited 13 new places that have produced Cretaceous-aged vertebrate fossils. They found fossils of sharks, bony fish, crocodiles and turtles.

Mechanical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis and their collaborators have devised a technique on humans that for the first time shows just what the brain does when the skull accelerates. What they’ve done is use a technique originally developed to measure cardiac deformation to image deformation in human subjects during repeated mild head decelerations.