Science & Technology

A WUSTL team, consisting of sophomore Anthony Grebe, junior Patrick Lopatto and freshman Jongwhan Park, placed 10th out of 430 teams in the prestigious Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition. WUSTL students also earned the first perfect score in the Missouri Collegiate Mathematics Competition.

At St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a section of the dome called the Whispering Gallery makes a whisper audible from the other side of the dome as a result of the way sound waves travel around the curved surface. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used the same phenomenon to build an optical device that may lead to new and more powerful computers that run faster and cooler.

Before his Assembly Series talk, Adam Steltzner, a NASA engineer in charge of the Mars Curiosity rover landing, met with WUSTL students and discussed their entry for NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition.

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Bill McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, lists as his top research interests the icy satellites of the outer solar system and the physics of impact cratering. But he isn’t picky. If anything unusual and exciting is going on anywhere in the solar system, he wants to know about it.

IDEA Labs will host its second annual Demo Day April 18. Medical and engineering students from the Medical and Danforth campuses will demonstrate prototypes for inventions they created to solve a variety of health-care problems.

The journal Icarus published a study this month that compared lunar crater counts by eight professionals with crowdsourced counts by volunteers. The professional crater counts varied by as much as a factor of two. Two of the professionals, both planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, explain why they weren’t surprised.

Washington University in St. Louis is re-establishing its sociology department after a nearly 25-year hiatus, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, has announced.

Plants fine-tune the response of their cells to the potent plant hormone auxin by means of large families of proteins that either step on the gas or put on the brake in auxin’s presence. Scientists at Washington University have learned that one of these proteins, a transcription factor, has an interaction region that, like a button magnet, has a positive and negative face. Because of this domain, the protein can bind two other proteins or even chains of proteins arranged back-to-front.

Yehuda Ben-Shahar and his team at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that some mRNAs have a side job unrelated to making the protein they encode. They act as regulatory molecules as well, preventing other genes from making protein by marking their mRNA molecules for destruction.