Science & Technology

This spring, theory-heavy Washington University in St. Louis geology students went on a field trip to southeastern Spain with field-trained students from Trinity College, Dublin. What they learned from each other transcended earth — and time.

Most of the galactic cosmic rays reaching Earth come from nearby clusters of massive stars, according to new observations from NASA’s ACE spacecraft. The distance between the cosmic rays’ point of origin and Earth is limited by the survival of a radioactive isotope of iron, Fe-60, which has a half life of 2.6 million years. These tiny clocks indicate there was a source within spitting distance of Earth within the past few million years.

The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum can farm symbiotic bacteria for food by carrying them from generation to generation. New research shows that these bacteria can also protect the amoeba from environmental toxins.

The six Washington University students who went to the Conference of the Parties (COP21) climate negotiations in Paris are well prepared, resilient, tough-minded and in this fight for the duration.

A team of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have helped discover a new chemical method to immobilize uranium in contaminated groundwater, which could lead to more precise and successful water remediation efforts at former nuclear sites.

We take so many things for granted. Why do trees grow only so tall and no taller? Why do some potatoes have those mysterious brown holes in them? And why do plants grow right-side up instead of upside-down? Eric Hamilton, PhD ’16, explores the question.

For more than 80 years, scientists have thought that cancer cells fuel their explosive growth by soaking up glucose from the blood, using its energy and atoms to crank out duplicate sets of cellular components. But is this really true? Work in a metabolomics laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis suggests not.

An engineering team at Washington University in St. Louis developed a cellular kill switch, a sensor that rewards hard working cells and eliminates their lazy counterparts. The high-tech engineering fix could help improve production of biofuels and pharmaceuticals.

Fireflies use oscillation to communicate on the same wavelength. An engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a new waveform that can control chemical oscillation in the lab. This finding could lead to better understanding of oscillation as it pertains to heart pacemakers, the brain’s neural patterns and even jet lag.

Our experience of the world differs radically from one person to another. Some people are plant blind and others recognize plants at a glance. Some are not aware of the background music at the grocery store and others know which piece it is and who is playing it. And most of us walk blindly through the campus quadrangles seeing only one another, but a few of us see the other creatures as well, such as the songbirds that are resting for a day or two before resuming their migrations.