Science & Technology

In her book, Lessons from Plants, Beronda Montgomery, AB ’94, explains what plants can teach us about the world and about ourselves.

Islands are hot spots of evolutionary adaptation that can also advantage species returning to the mainland, according to a study led by biologist Jonathan Losos in Arts & Sciences, published the week of Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New research from the laboratory of Jonathan Losos begins to unravel one of the major mysteries of invasion biology: why animals that tend not to hybridize in their native range abandon their inhibitions when they spread into a new land. The study is published the week of Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Neuroscientists in Arts & Sciences discovered that the daily release of hormones depends on the coordinated activity of clocks in two parts of the brain, a finding that could have implications for human diseases.

Sarah Anderson, a postdoctoral research associate in biology in Arts & Sciences, won the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a three-year fellowship valued at about $200,000.

Biologist Rachel Penczykowski in Arts & Sciences sizes up an unlikely natural phenomenon: when parasitism actually causes the number of hosts to increase, an effect known as a hydra effect. Her study of common water fleas and their fungal parasites includes laboratory components and an analysis of 13 fungal epidemics in nature.

Biomedical engineer Hong Chen at the McKelvey School of Engineering will use a $2.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to find noninvasive tools to treat the brain.

Arpita Bose in Arts & Sciences, whose research is connected to carbon sequestration and sustainable bioproduction, was selected to participate in the Anant Fellowship for Climate Action, a global program for climate change “solutionaries.”

Using computer simulations and a simple theoretical model, physicist Mikhail Tikhonov in Arts & Sciences showed how bacteria could adapt to a fluctuating environment by learning its statistical regularities — for example, which nutrients tend to be correlated — and do so faster than evolutionary trial-and-error would normally allow.

St. Louis shows the strongest correlation between biodiversity and income of the 20 major U.S. cities included in a recent study. Solny Adalsteinsson, staff scientist at Tyson Research Center and a lecturer in the environmental studies program in Arts & Sciences, is a co-author of the new research published in Global Change Biology.