Author: Talia Ogliore

Rita Parai, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, will use a National Science Foundation CAREER award to leverage new techniques to measure heavy noble gases in ocean island basalts from the Azores archipelago.

Many North American migratory birds are shrinking in size as temperatures have warmed over the past 40 years. But those with very big brains, relative to their body size, did not shrink as much as smaller-brained birds, according to biologists in Arts & Sciences. The study in Ecology Letters is the first to identify a direct link between cognition and animal response to human-made climate change.

Holden Thorp, the Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professor and editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, will speak at a free online event Feb. 8 focused on the intersection between science and politics.

A five-year nearly $2 million project led by biologist Erik Herzog in Arts & Sciences will use machine learning and other tools to improve understanding of how the brain is organized as a network of synchronized circadian cells.

Eight faculty members at Washington University are among 564 new fellows selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Leonard Green, Elizabeth S. Haswell, Sophia E. Hayes, Erik Herzog, Mark A. McDaniel, Jay W. Ponder, Crickette Sanz and Pamela K. Woodard.

A new study co-authored by biologist Jonathan Myers in Arts & Sciences provides key insights into how and why tree populations migrate in response to climate change. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new analysis led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences provides an alternative to the mantle convection hypothesis. The study is published in a special paper of the Geological Society of America.

Guido L. Weiss, the Elinor Anheuser Professor Emeritus of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Dec. 25, 2021, of Alzheimer’s disease. Weiss was a prominent mathematician, former chair of the Department of Mathematics and an active member of the university community. He was 92.

A new isotope of magnesium — magnesium-18 — was discovered by a team that includes Robert Charity, research professor of chemistry, and Lee Sobotka, professor of chemistry and of physics, both in Arts & Sciences, as reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis described for the first time the structure of a bifunctional protein, called CcsBA, that transports heme and attaches it to cytochromes. The study led by Robert Kranz, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, captured two conformational states of CcsBA, a bacterial and chloroplast protein, allowing researchers to characterize the enzyme mechanism.