Science & Technology

Who better to explain the meaning of the shamrock than an ethnobotanist born and raised in Ireland? Peter Wyse Jackson, the George Englemann Professor of Botany at Washington University in St. Louis, indulges our curiosity.

As scientists look for replacements for our dwindling stock of antibiotics, the evolution of resistance is never far from their minds. Washington University in St. Louis biologist R. Fredrik Inglis explored the ability of bacteria to become resistant to a toxin called a bacteriocin by growing them for many generations in the presence of the toxin.

New research sheds light on how the rhythms of daily life are encoded in the brain. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered that different groups of neurons, those charged with keeping time, become active at different times of day despite being on the same molecular clock.

While philosophers and voters can debate the pros and cons of situational ethics, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that most people stay true to their intrinsic moral colors — good or bad — when dealing with day-to-day choices, regardless of extenuating circumstances or well-intended reform efforts.

Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Hubert Humphrey and some guy named “Thomas Moore” are among the names that many Americans mistakenly identify as belonging to a past president of the United States, finds a news study by memory researchers at Washington University in St. Louis.

Anthropologists from Washington University in St. Louis are among an international research team that found Australopithecus sediba did not have the jaw and tooth structure necessary to exist on a steady diet of hard foods. The findings are contrary to a 2012 study that gained international attention.

Pulsars are dead stars that emit intense beams of radio waves that sweep through space with the regularity of a clock. That’s strange enough but what’s even stranger, they sometimes speed up — in a universe where the norm is for everything to slow down. What could possibly give them the extra energy? S Kumar Mallavarapu, […]

Why was the New Year’s flood in Missouri so bad? Most news reports blamed it on the heavy rain, but Robert Criss, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis says analysis of the flood data shows much of the damage was due to recent modifications to the river.

Given that antibiotics are losing effectiveness faster than we are finding replacements for them, chemist Timothy Wencewicz in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis suggests a new approach. Drugs that hobble the production of virulence factors — small molecules that help bacteria to establish an infection in a host — would put much less selective pressure on bacteria and delay resistance.

We take for granted that when we turn on a faucet in our homes o​r busines​ses that clean, fresh, drinkable water will be available in a seemingly endless supply. But in the last several years, clean water has become almost a luxury in parts of the U.S. due to drought and changes in climate, while […]