Science & Technology

A cross-disciplinary team of chemists and physicists in Arts & Sciences is building a better computer chip to improve detection and surveillance for the illegal transport of nuclear materials at U.S. borders. The work is part of a new, five-year, $10 million collaboration in low-energy nuclear science led by Texas A&M University.

Rita Parai, assistant professor of geochemistry in Arts & Sciences, constrains the history of volatile transport from the atmosphere into the deep Earth in a new publication in the journal Nature.

Petra Levin, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, was recently awarded a $2 million grant to identify and characterize the molecular circuits that coordinate or limit the growth and reproduction of bacteria.

William Yeoh, of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, is designing algorithms to run the smart homes of the future – and he’s making sure they won’t bother us too much.

By looking into the brains of locusts, researchers in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis have determined how one smell can affect another, and how a locust can recognize a smell even though its brain activity looks different depending on the context.

Amit Pathak, a mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in mechanobiology, plans to take a closer look at various aspects of cell group behavior — and their implications for diseases such as cancer — with a prestigious five-year, $1.9 million grant for early-stage investigators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have published a first-of-its-kind look at the physical characteristics of lizards that seem to make the difference between life and death in a hurricane, as reported July 25 in the journal Nature.

A team of international researchers led by engineers at Washington University has developed a way to use a light field to trigger a mechanical movement that will generate an acoustic wave.

We may not be able to change recent events in our lives, but how well we remember them plays a key role in how our brains model what’s happening in the present and predict what’s likely to occur in the future, finds new research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Under warming conditions, Arctic wolf spiders’ tastes in prey might be changing, according to new research by biologist Amanda Koltz in Arts & Sciences — initiating a new cascade of food web interactions that could potentially alleviate some impacts of global warming.