Author: Talia Ogliore

A review published in the Nov. 9 issue of Science explores the complexity of evolution’s predictability in extraordinary detail. Jonathan Losos of Arts & Sciences takes on a classic question posed by Stephen Jay Gould in an effort to fully interrogate ideas about contingency’s role in evolution.

David Charbonneau, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, will deliver the annual Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, in Whitaker Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The talk, titled “How to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet,” is free and open to the public.

David L. Kirk, former professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, died Nov. 1, 2018, in St. Louis after a long illness. He was 84. Kirk spent a lifetime teaching and researching developmental biology and, in retirement, worked to improve the way evolution is taught in K-12 schools.

During an 8-mile journey from the Columbia Bottom conservation area over the Chain of Rocks in a canoe, Bob Criss in Arts & Sciences talks about Lewis and Clark, navigation and the relevance of rivers today.

Storms help form an important chemical that is highly significant in the search for life on Mars. A team led by Alian Wang of Arts & Sciences created a simulation in the lab that sheds new light on what’s being kicked up by those massive Martian dust devils.

At the river’s edge, where water and soil meet, microbes churn out methane and other greenhouse gasses. Jeffrey G. Catalano, of Arts & Sciences, wades into local Missouri wetlands to determine the role of heavy metals in this process.

A favorite Halloween symbol leaves behind clues to what a tropical landscape looked like thousands of years ago. With support from the Living Earth Collaborative, postdoctoral scholar Rachel Reid of Arts & Sciences digs in.

Gary Patti, the Michael and Tana Powell Professor of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded $4.8 million in two separate National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants focused on improving the accessibility of metabolomics — the study of the biochemical reactions that underlie metabolism.

A National Science Foundation-funded workshop recently brought more than 75 statistics researchers to the Danforth Campus. Organized by Todd Kuffner of Arts & Sciences, this is the third year the event has been hosted at the university, and the first since math changed its name this summer to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

2016 Nobel laureate Fraser Stoddart will deliver the Weissman Lecture Oct. 4 at Washington University in St. Louis. The lecture journeys into mechanical innovations realized during the early and mid-20th century and a new type of bonding in molecules consisting of mechanical linkages. It is free and open to the public.