WUSTL wins 2013 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals
A team of four WUSTL students, including sophmores, Grace Kuo and Amy Patterson, shown to left accepting a trophy, won the College Nationals in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 30. Click here for a video of a rolling ball bearing setting off a chain reaction in “Rube Goldberg’s office” that eventually drop a hammer on a nail–the assigned task.
Sussman to outline critical role of culture in understanding society
“The anthropological concept of culture is extremely important and often misunderstood because many of the things that are assumed to be biologically determined, like criminality or homosexuality or IQ, are really behaviorally and societally defined,” says WUSTL physical anthropologist Robert W. Sussman, and it forms the basis for his Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture, “The Importance of the Concept of Culture
to Science and Society,” the next Assembly Series program held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 9.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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