Author: Talia Ogliore

Crows and ravens have great flying ability, which allows them to gain access to new places more easily. While their flying skills were key to their success, new research from biologists in Arts & Sciences also shows that big bodies and big brains played an important role in helping crows and ravens survive in the new climates they occupied.

Demand for new kinds of antibiotics is surging, as drug-resistant and emerging infections are becoming an increasingly serious global health threat. Biologist Joshua Blodgett in Arts & Sciences discovered a new candidate for drug development from bioactive compounds in a soil bacterium. The findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alexander Thompson, a postdoctoral research associate in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, updated simulations from an important climate model to more accurately reflect the role of a greener Sahara and the coniferous and deciduous forests of the mid-latitudes and the Arctic.

Laura Escobar Vega, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, won a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation for her project “Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry: Flag Varieties, Toric Geometry and Applications.”

The Office of Sustainability offers this guide to events during the month of April — including activities at the Burning Kumquat garden, free lectures and film screenings, recycling and clean-up events and more.

Biologists led by Richard Vierstra in Arts & Sciences have determined the molecular structure of the vital photoreceptor PhyB, revealing a wholly different structure than previously known. The findings, published March 30 in Nature, have many implications for agricultural and “green” bioengineering practices.

With the support of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, climate scientist Bronwen Konecky in Arts & Sciences is piloting a new program to attract and support underrepresented students in the geosciences and prepare them for further studies and careers in the field.

Biologist Susanne S. Renner in Arts & Sciences assembled and edited 15 papers that synthesize and challenge the current understanding of how plants separate into male and female functions for Philosophical Transactions B, published by The Royal Society.

Biologist Michael Landis has developed a new method to measure the extent to which regional geographic features — including barriers between regions, like mountains or water — affect local rates of speciation, extinction and dispersal for species. He considered anole lizards as a test case.

Led by physicist Alex Meshik in Arts & Sciences, Washington University scientists designed and built the device that NASA is using to extract gases from a lunar sample from the Apollo 17 mission.