Science & Technology

Washington University in St. Louis has joined an international group of researchers working to make great strides in advanced coal technologies.

Huntington’s disease is a devastating, incurable disorder that results from the death of certain neurons in the brain. Rohit Pappu, PhD, and colleagues in the engineering and medical schools are conducting studies to learn from nature’s own strategies to battle the disease.

Students and faculty in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis have filed an amicus brief on behalf of air pollution scientists in an important environmental case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case, EPA v. EME Homer City Generation LP, involves a challenge to the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which seeks to protect the health of citizens of downwind states by placing limits on air pollution that crosses state lines. Electric power companies, several states and local governments challenged the rule as overreaching.

A large wooden crate was delivered to the Compton Hall loading dock last week, direct from Paris. The crate contained a fabulous new instrument that WUSTL scientists say will transform their ability to approach problems in geology, biology, space science, engineering and materials science with new precision. Called the Cameca SIMS ims7f-geo, it is a state-of-the-art secondary ion mass spectrometer, one of only three in the world.

The Active-Learning Classroom (ALC) opened in fall 2012 on the lower level of Eads Hall as a pilot program. The classroom is a highly flexible space that facilitates collaborative group work as well as class discussions. The pilot program was such a success, it is hoped that additional active-learning classrooms will be designed throughout the Danforth Campus.

A 60-acre plot in Washington University in St. Louis’ Tyson Research Center has been named a Forest Global Earth Observatory, or ForestGEO. The oak-hickory forest in the rolling foothills of the Ozarks joins a network of 51 long-term forest study sites in 23 countries, including eight others in the United States. Together, the forests, containing roughly 8,500 species and 4.5 million individual trees, comprise the largest, systematically studied network of forest-ecology plots in the world.

For Amazon’s recently announced drone delivery system to get off the ground, the company will have to solve numerous difficult technological challenges. Chief among them will be increasing battery life, getting the drones to work without a central command and to “think” on their own, and determining what kind of navigation sensors they will use. As complicated as those tasks may be, says a WUSTL robotics expert, they will be much more easily solved than the seemingly more simple issues of regulation and insurance.

A new study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, University of California, Los Angeles, and Indiana University found that listeners can accurately determine the relative heights of speakers just by listening to them talk. The key clue may be contained in a particular type of sound produced in the lower airways of the lungs, known as a subglottal resonance.

In Science, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis report on a new technique that allowed them to extract a photosynthetic megacomplex consisting of a light antenna and two reaction centers from the membrane of a cyanobacterium. This is the first time an entire complex has been isolated and studied as a functioning whole.

Political scientist William Lowry has paid close attention to environmental issues for 25 years, marshaling what he learns each year and testing it in front of a class of critical students. He has honed his class “Environmental and Energy Issues” to the point where it is a white-water ride down a river of arguments and counterarguments that puts everything in context and lays out the facts — but skips the lecturing and fearmongering that characterize this debate. There can be no better guide to the perplexed.