WUSTL engineer helping unravel mystery of traumatic brain injury
The American Academy of Neurology issued new guidelines last week for assessing school-aged athletes with head injuries on the field. The message: if in doubt, sit out. With more than 3 million sports-related concussions occurring in the U.S. each year, from school children to professional athletes, the issue is a burgeoning health crisis.
The secret lives of the wild asses of the Negev
The Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) disappeared from the Negev, the desert region in southern Israel, in the 1920s. But a remnant herd survived in the Shah of Iran’s zoo. Some of these animals were reintroduced to the
desert beginning in 1982. Recently scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Washington University in St. Louis have been inventing clever new ways to check on the status of these famously elusive animals.
Saturday Science takes a paradoxical turn
The popular Saturday Science seminar series celebrates its 20th year by tackling on paradoxes, those fascinating little conundrums that are sometimes just words colliding but other times are cracks in our understanding of the world that, when prised open, give access to a much deeper understanding. The first lecture is Saturday, April 6.
Skulls of early humans carry telltale signs of inbreeding, study suggests
Buried for 100,000 years at Xujiayao in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, the recovered skull pieces of an early human exhibit a now-rare congenital deformation that indicates inbreeding might well have been common among our ancestors, new research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis suggests.
Wang to use NSF grant for study of oxygen consumption in cells
Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of
Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has
received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to study oxygen consumption rates of individual cells
using photoacoustic microscopy, a novel imaging technology he developed
that uses light and sound to measure change.
Kelleher receives Sloan Research Fellowship
Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, has received a prestigious research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kelleher
is the Hugo F. & Ina Champ Urbauer Career Development Assistant
Professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at
Washington University in St. Louis. The two-year, $50,000
fellowship supports early-career scientists and scholars in science,
mathematics, economics and computer science. Fellows may use the funds
for equipment, technical assistance, professional travel or trainee
support.
When it rains these days, does it pour?
For his undergraduate thesis project, senior Thomas Muschninski working with professor of physics Jonathan Katz published an article in Nature Climate Change showing that the signature of an increase in storminess could be extracted from precipitation data for the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The scientists suspect the same signature lies hidden under naturally stormier weather at other locations as well.
Walking in the footsteps of 19th- and 20th-century naturalists, scientists find battered plant-pollinator network
Two biologists at Washington University in St. Louis were delighted to discover a meticulous
dataset on a plant-pollinator network recorded by Illinois naturalist
Charles Robertson between 1884 and 1916. Re-collecting part of Robertson’s network, they learned that although the network has compensated for some losses, battered by climate change and habitat loss it is now weaker and less resilient than in Robertson’s time.
Global NeuroDay is March 2
Many WUSTL students will be on hand at the St. Louis Science Center this Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. to explain the brain and their brain research to interested visitors. They are participants in NeuroDay, a free brain science expo featuring hands-on
activities and demonstrations that provide a rare opportunity to learn
about the human brain, the nervous system, neurological disorders and
cutting-edge brain research.
Ancient sea lamprey gets DNA decoded
A large team of scientists has decoded the genome of a sea lamprey – one of the few ancient, jawless species of vertebrates that has survived through the modern era.
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