Science & Technology

Develop an open-source nuclear detection system. That was the charge from the U.S. Department of Defense to members of its new internship program, the X-Force Fellowship. Washington University in St. Louis sophomore Andrew Bass had been selected to serve in the pilot cohort and arrived at Cape Canaveral in Florida convinced he would fail. 

Washington University in St. Lous recently ranked among the top five green universities nationwide, according to the UI Green Metric.

Using ultrasound waves propagating through a solid surface, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were able to read text messages and make fraudulent calls on a cellphone sitting on a desk up to 30 feet away.

Stan Braude, a biologist in Arts & Sciences, published a new study in the African Journal of Ecology that considers the role of the moon in driving a particularly rare occurrence: the solo journey of a naked mole rat from one underground colony to start a new one.

In this video, Washington University in St. Louis’ Michael Vahey discusses what it takes for a virus such as the coronavirus to reach pandemic status.

Washington University in St. Louis’ East End Transformation, the iconic redesign of the eastern end of the Danforth Campus, is on the cover of February’s Architect magazine.

Nanoscale photocatalysts are small, man-made particles that harvest energy from sunlight to produce liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. A new imaging solution developed at Washington University in St. Louis reveals the significance of a particular structural feature — clusters of oxygen vacancies — in achieving high photocatalytic activity.

Deanna Barch, professor and chair of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, was chosen as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s chair-elect of its Section on Psychology. She will begin her role as chair in February 2021.

William B. McKinnon, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, led one of three new studies that together provide a far more complete picture of the composition and origin of Arrokoth. The new research published in Science points to the resolution of a longstanding scientific controversy about how such primitive planetary building blocks called planetesimals were formed.

Directly seeing the workings of our world at nano- and molecular scale has largely remained an impossible task, left to theory and working assumptions. WashU alumna Jennifer Dionne, BS ’03, has made it possible and won one of science’s most prestigious award.