Author: Diana Lutz

To meet design and cost changes, industry and government are considering clockless computing.Computing royalty, including Ivan Sutherland, the father of computer graphics, and Wesley A. Clark, the designer of the world’s first personal computer, will gather at a computing symposium Friday, March 26th, 2004, from 1:00-5:30 p.m. at Washington University in St. Louis’s Whitaker Hall Auditorium. As part of the University’s 150th anniversary of its founding, participants will honor time by contemplating how computing can evade time as the industry prepares to go clockless.

Anthrax is nasty stuff. An environmental engineer at WUSTL uses smart catalysts in his device that can detect the presence of airborne anthrax and disable it.An environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis with his doctoral student has patented a device for trapping and deactivating microbial particles. The work is promising in the war on terrorism for deactivating airborne bioagents and bioweapons such as the smallpox virus, anthrax and ricin, and also in routine indoor air ventilation applications such as in buildings and aircraft cabins.

March Science & Technology Tip Sheet

The first time you don a new pair of bifocals, what you perceive visually and what your hand does may be very different.Marvin Gaye wailed in the ’60s hit “Heard it through the Grapevine,” that we’re supposed to believe just half of what we see. But a new collaborative study involving a biomedical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis and neurobiologists at the University of Pittsburgh shows that sometimes you can’t believe anything that you see. More importantly, the researchers have identified areas of the brain where what we’re actually doing (reality) and what we think we’re doing (illusion, or perception) are processed.

A graduate student in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has combed the dinosaur fossil record from T. Rex to songbirds and has compiled the first quantitative analysis of the quality and congruence of that record.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoBruce Fegley, Jr. and Laura Schaefer, with a chunk of galena, or lead sulfide.Lead sulfide — also known by its mineral name, galena — is a naturally occurring mineral found in Missouri, other parts of the world, and now. . .other parts of the solar system. Because recent thermodynamic calculations by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis provide plausible evidence that “heavy metal snow,” which blankets the surface of upper altitude Venusian rocks, is composed of both lead and bismuth sulfides.

John E. McCarthy, Ph.D., professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences, is a native of Ireland who has a facile way with stories. He tells them with an engaging Irish accent, and continually provides fascinating insights into science and life that make you see mathematics and the larger world in a way you’d never anticipate. […]

Martin Silverstein, professor in the Department of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences, was killed in a pedestrian accident in the 7900 block of Delmar in University City last night. Silverstein has been with the University since 1977.

Image courtesy of NASAAn artist’s rendition of a sea on MarsWhile NASA engineers and scientists determine how to roll the Spirit robotic rover onto the Martian surface, Raymond Arvidson, Ph.D., McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and a host of Washington University personnel are doing their part for a successful mission.

A new book by botanists at Washington University in St. Louis enlightens both consumers of natural products and herbs and traditional physicians. Medical Botany, Plants Affecting Human Health, is the second edition of a 1977 book, Medical Botany, published by Walter Lewis, Ph.D., professor emeritus of biology, and Memory Elvin-Lewis, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and ethnobotany in biomedicine in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.