Science & Technology

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.

Is there a faster way to determine a frequency? It turns out there is, in a new discovery published this week in Physical Review Letters by a collaboration between a Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rochester.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded a team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis a five-year, $1.6 million grant to develop a combined treatment option using drug treatment and physical therapy to better restore range of motion following injury.

Two engineers at Washington University in St. Louis are combining their expertise in studying brain networks to determine whether there are rules that determine how sensory stimuli, including touch, smell, sound, sight or taste, get mapped on the brain onto behavioral response.

Michael Wysession, a professor of earth and planetary sciences, explores the intersection of earth science and the classic novel Frankenstein.