Science & Technology

As an economist, academician and researcher steeped in such data and assessments, one Washington University in St. Louis expert wants to press the pause button on the worst-case-scenario numbers related to the National Climate Assessment that was released the day after Thanksgiving.

Eleven faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis are among 416 new fellows selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.

When it comes to personal versus private email use, it’s all a matter of controlling access.

Audrey Odom John, MD, PhD, is on a mission to fight the spread of infectious diseases like malaria through better, faster, more nimble diagnostic tools.

Researchers in the School of Engineering & Applied Science have discovered a new, natural law that sheds light on the fundamental relationship between coated black carbon and light absorption.

Washington University researchers have mapped the regions of the brain in mormyrid fish in extremely high detail. In a study published in the Nov. 15 issue of Current Biology, they report that the part of the brain called the cerebellum is bigger in members of this fish family compared to related fish — and this may be associated with their use of weak electric discharges to locate prey and to communicate with one another.

Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench. The work has important implications for the global water cycle, according to Douglas A. Wiens in Arts & Sciences.

Washington University’s newly launched Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law has signed on as one of the early signatories of French President Emanuel Macron’s “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” announced Nov. 12 as part of the peace forum commemorating 100 years since the ending of World War I.

Ovarian cancer claims the lives of more than 14,000 women in the U.S. each year, ranking fifth among cancer deaths in women. A multidisciplinary team at Washington University has found an innovative way to use sound and light to diagnose ovarian tumors, which may lead to a promising new diagnostic imaging technique to improve current standard of care.

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.