Author: Talia Ogliore

Does this recent extreme cold snap spell bad news for mosquitoes and ticks this summer? Not necessarily. Researchers at Tyson Research Center, the environmental field station for Washington University in St. Louis, offer insight into how both insects are surviving the Polar Vortex that has gripped most of the Midwest and eastern United States.

Purple rice is a whole grain with high levels of antioxidants — and high levels of genetic diversity, thanks to traditional farming practices, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Carl Bender, the Konneker Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has received a Humboldt Research Award. The award is given to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Federico Ardila, professor of mathematics at San Francisco State University, will deliver the Loeb Undergraduate Lecture in Mathematics, “Using geometry to move robots quickly,” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17, in Brown Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University in St. Louis announced that its SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument, which studies the origin of cosmic rays, successfully launched today from Williams Field at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

Brett Wick, professor of mathematics, and three other mathematicians from the U.S., France and Australia, received a Discovery Project award for their collaborative international project “Harmonic analysis: function spaces and partial differential equations.”

Jeffrey G. Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has been appointed the next executive editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the official journal of Geochemical Society and the Meteoritical Society. His term will begin Jan. 1. 

Brian E. Blank, associate professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, died of heart failure Sunday, Dec. 9, 2018, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. He was 65.

Ten students are among representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in Poland for COP24, the U.N. conference on climate change. This year’s meeting will focus on how to achieve climate goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

John E. McCarthy, chair and professor of mathematics and statistics at Washington University, was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. The society recognized McCarthy for his contributions to operator theory and functions of several complex variables.