Science & Technology

Math circles, which bring together professional mathematicians and young students, have been a part of mathematical culture in Russia since the 1930s and in Bulgaria for nearly a century. Washington University’s math circle, founded in 2002, gives kids a chance to meet a mathematician and to absorb his or her adventuresome and imaginative approach to solving problems.

New work shows that bacteria (and probably other cells as well) don’t  double in mass before dividing. Instead they add a constant volume (or mass) no matter what their initial size. A small cell adds the same volume as a large cell. By following this rule a cell population quickly converges on a common size.

Lihong Wang, PhD, continues to build on his groundbreaking technology that allows light deep inside living tissue during imaging and therapy. In the Jan. 5 issue of Nature Communications, Wang, the Gene K. Beare Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, reveals for the first time a new technique that focuses diffuse light inside a dynamic scattering medium containing living tissue.

​Washington University researchers worked in the local community and across the globe in 2014 to better understand our bodies, our minds and our cultures.

This year, Washington University researchers advanced our understanding of schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, and developed devices to help surgeons see cancer cell and scientists to capture new vistas through the world’s fastest 2-D camera.

Calm winds allowed the ANITA III experiment to be launched into the polar vortex above Antarctica on Dec. 17. The instrument consists of 48 radio receivers that are listening for  pings that will be generated when ultra-high-energy cosmic rays generate radio-frequency bursts that reflect off the ice and up to the instrument at a float altitude of 120,000 feet, four times higher than commerical airliners cruise.

​A team of biomedical engineers in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis has made an important discovery about how a channel in the heart responds to membrane voltage, which causes the channel to open and also determines the properties of electrical signals that control the heart, contrary to what had previously been believed.​​​

An astrophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis is among the team hunting for an elusive particle called a WIMP, that may be the fundamental particle of dark matter. To catch this notoriously wily particle they have built a detector consisting of a large vat of xenon in a deep chamber of a played-out gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

​A team of biomedical engineers in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Lihong Wang​, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has developed the world’s fastest receive-only 2-D camera, a device that can capture events up to 100 billion frames per second.​

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation’s collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released Nov. 27 by the journal Science.