Author: Diana Lutz

In addition to being an alum and having a 40-year career here, he established two professorships and a lecture.

By just thinking it and not actually using a joystick or other controller, patients are able to move a cursor up and down in a simple, one-dimensional computer game.

That’s using your brain. For the first time in humans, a team headed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has placed an electronic grid atop patients’ brains to gather motor signals that enable patients to play a computer game using only the signals from their brains.

Io, satellite of Jupiter, is the most volcanically active and hottest body in the solar system.The hottest spot in the solar system is neither Mercury, Venus, nor St. Louis in the summer. Io, one of the four satellites that the Italian astronomer Galileo discovered orbiting Jupiter almost 400 years ago, takes that prize. The Voyager spacecraft discovered volcanic activity on Io over 20 years ago and subsequent observations show that Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Galileo spacecraft, named in honor of the astronomer Galileo, found volcanic hot spots with temperatures as high as 2,910 Fahrenheit (1,610 Celsius). Now computer models of volcanic eruptions on Io performed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis show that the lavas are so hot that they are vaporizing sodium, potassium, silicon and iron and probably other gases as well into its atmosphere.

The Ponderosa gang. The “Big Bonanza” was part of the Comstock Lode, now newly mapped.Remember the burning Ponderosa map at the beginning of the long-running TV show “Bonanza”? It’s up in flames before you can read all the place names. Now a geologist at Washington University in St. Louis has replaced that map with one of the famous ore site known as the Comstock Lode, a part of which is the “Big Bonanza.” While it’s doubtful that Hoss, Adam and Little Joe – not to mention the sages, Pa and Hop Sing – could make heads nor tails of it, the map is a valuable contribution to geology because it gives an interpretation of the flow of hot waters interacting with rock some 14 million years ago that created the ore district.

Computer scientist Michael Brent has developed innovative sequencing techniques that will aid in the sequencing of mammals.A computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a novel technique to extract more DNA from a single sequence reaction than is normally possible, reducing both cost and time of the sequencing process. Michael R. Brent, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science, has applied software developed in his Washington University laboratory that sorts through the maze of genetic information and finds predicted sequences.

WooleyUsing a technique pioneered by Washington University in St. Louis chemist Karen Wooley, Ph.D., scientists have developed a novel way to make discrete carbon nanoparticles for electrical components used in industry and research.

WUSTL scientists say the present-day Missouri River is narrower and more prone to flooding because of extensive damming of the river.The oldest data available on the Missouri River – from the logs of Lewis and Clark – show that water flow on the river today is far more variable than it was 200 years ago. The data also show that the river is some 220 yards narrower at St. Charles, Mo., today at 500 yards across than in 1804 when it spread out some 720 yards.

Photo courtesy University of IowaCould there be a link between the obesity epidemic and eugenic thinking? A historian of science at Washington University in St. Louis poses the question.As obesity rates continue to grow in the United States, threatening the health of millions of Americans, a historian of science warns that social problems such as this cannot be solved through science, especially genetics, alone. In this new “gene age” in which large amounts of research funds are used for studies on the genetics of such complex social traits as alcoholism, criminality or obesity, for example, Garland E. Allen, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, says the climate is ripe for a “re-packaged” eugenics in American society. Allen points out that 100 years ago, eugenics, a movement that claimed many social, personality and mental traits were hereditary, was emerging as a major social movement in Europe and the United States. His concern: it might well still be with us today.

In the March 5 issue of Science, Ann Nguyen of Washington University in St. Louis and her advisor, Ernst K. Zinner, Ph.D., research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences, describe nine specks of silicate stardust — presolar silicate grains — from one of the most primitive meteorites known. This is the first reported finding of silicate stardust from a meteorite.