Science & Technology

New research from an engineer at Washington University in St. Louis stitches together the best bits of several different bacteria–including a virulent pathogen–to synthesize a new biofuel product.

A team of researchers, including a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow from Washington University, found that oxygen levels appear to increase at about the same time as a three-fold increase in biodiversity during the Ordovician Period, between 445 and 485 million years ago, according to a study published Nov. 20 in Nature Geoscience.

Three Washington University in St. Louis scientists studied the great granddaddy of all photosynthetic organisms — a strain of cyanobacteria — to develop the first experimental map of that organism’s water world.

In reaction to multiple countries — including Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Italy — announcing at the United Nations climate talks that they’re unifying to phase out coal-generated power by 2030, an environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis warned that a “mix of energy sources” is vital for the near future.

First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

A team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis is developing a new way to look inside the brains of the littlest patients — a technique that will provide precise measurements without requiring children to stay perfectly still or the use of ionizing radiation.

An engineer at Washington University in St. Louis plans to push the envelope of microscopic imaging, to better visualize the molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease.  

When you are out in the woods and hear a cracking sound, your brain needs to process quickly whether the sound is coming from, say, a bear or a chipmunk. In new research published in PLoS Biology, a biomedical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has a new interpretation for an old observation, debunking an established theory in the process.

Xuan “Silvia” Zhang and Christopher Gill, both faculty in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, received a four-year, $936,504 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how to orchestrate modular power in a modular manner at the mesoscale, an area that has not yet been studied.

In the body, cells move around to form organs during development; to heal wounds; and when they metastasize from cancerous tumors. A mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis found that cells remember the properties they had in their first environment for several days after they move to another in a process called mechanical memory.