Author: Talia Ogliore

New approaches to help save animals from extinction may come from experts outside of the traditional natural science disciplines. The Living Earth Collaborative invites social scientists, political scientists, engineers and other experts from the university community who would like to be involved in efforts to help with conservation projects to participate in a July 21 social event.

A team that received early support from the Living Earth Collaborative was awarded a $633,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to evaluate pollination in orchards across the city of St. Louis. They will examine how factors such as human population density, socioeconomic status, soil type and surrounding vegetation impact insect numbers and fruit yield.

Living Earth Collaborative postdoctoral fellow Matthew Austin published new research finding that climate change is affecting how violets reproduce.

Geoscientists Walid Ben Mansour and Douglas A. Wiens in Arts & Sciences received a grant from the National Science Foundation to determine the thermal and compositional structure of Antarctica using seismic, gravity and topography data and petrological modeling.

Researchers working with Jonathan Barnes, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, published new research showing how molecules with interlocking ring architectures can be functionalized and incorporated into three-dimensional polymer networks and materials.

Sachiko Amari, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is part of the international team that described results from the first sample-return mission to a carbonaceous asteroid, the JAXA Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu. The study was published June 9 in Science.

Arts & Sciences biologists from the lab of Jonathan Myers determined that tree beta diversity — a measure of site-to-site variation in the composition of species present within a given area — matters more for the ecosystem than other components of biodiversity at larger scales.

A new modeling framework proposed by physicist Mikhail Tikhonov in Arts & Sciences demonstrates how a more complex microbial ecosystem can be more coarse-grainable, making it potentially easier for scientists to understand, than one with only a few microbes interacting.

Michael Nowak, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is part of the global research team that shared the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Ethan Lowder, a December 2021 graduate who majored in the biochemistry track of biology in Arts & Sciences, won the Ralph S. Quatrano Prize; Kayla Wallace, a senior majoring in environmental biology with a minor in anthropology in Arts & Sciences, received the Spector Prize.