MySci Resource Center opens Feb. 18 (VIDEO)

Washington University in St. Louis’ Institute for School Partnership (ISP) and its signature science education program, MySci, take a major step forward Monday, Feb. 18, when they open the MySci Resource Center at 6601 Vernon Ave. Refurbished with the help of a $2.2 million grant from the Monsanto Fund, the MySci Resource Center becomes the nerve center of the ISP, WUSTL’s signature effort to strategically improve teaching and learning within the K-12 education community in the St. Louis region. ​

A WUSTL undergraduate may have written that Wikipedia article you’re reading

This fall Joan Strassmann, PhD, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences taught a course in behavior ecology that was also an official Wikipedia course that required students both to edit an existing Wikipedia entry and then either add 25 references and 2500 words to a second entries or to create new ones. “No work by students as good as Washington University’s students should ever end up in a professor’s drawer,” said Strassmann. “It was their responsibility as smart people who were getting a great education to help others.”

Super-TIGER lying low for the Southern Hemisphere winter

Late Friday, Feb. 2, an overcast day in St. Louis, the twitter feed for the Super-TIGER cosmic ray experiment burst into life, as the Super-TIGER team received word that NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which provides operations support for scientific ballooning in Antarctica, had decided to terminate the flight of the balloon carrying their detector aloft in the polar vortex.

New professorship emphasizes commitment to STEM education and honors a pioneering WUSTL educator

Regina (Gina) F. Frey, PhD, associate professor of STEM education in the department of chemistry in Arts & Sciences and executive director of the Teaching Center, will be installed as the initial Florence E. Moog Professor of STEM Education on January 31, 2013.The professorship honors two of WUSTL’s women scientists, one past and one present, while also recognizing its deep commitment to excel in teaching the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Hydrogeologist questions reservoir releases and blasting rock to deepen the Mississippi for barge traffic

Coverage of the recent shipping crisis on the Mississippi River assumes that the appropriate response to a problem like low water levels is to find an engineering solution. Washington University in St. Louis hydrogeologist Robert E. Criss disagrees. He feels the river has been over-engineered and that many of the engineering “solutions” are not economic if all of their costs, including those to the taxpayer and to the environment, are taken into account.

Super-TIGER shatters scientific balloon record in Antarctica

Over the holiday weekend, the WUSTL-led cosmic ray experiment Super-TIGER set a record for the longest flight ever made by a heavy-liftscientific balloon. Now aloft for 45 days, shattering the previous record of 42 days, it has recorded more than 50 million “events,” or hits by cosmic rays arriving from space. The scientists are ecstatic to have such a great balloon because the longer the it stays up, the more data they will collect and the more they will learn about the mysterious mechanism that accelerates these particles and sends them streaming across space.

Global plant diversity still hinges on local battles against invasives, study suggests

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis long suspected that dueling findings about the impact of invasive species on biodiversity reflect the different sizes of study sites. Now field work confims that the impact of invasive species is different at small scales than at large ones. The scientists hope an understanding of this “scale dependence” will help settle arguments that have broken out in the scientific community and discourage recent popular science articles downplaying the damage invasives cause.

Embedding with startups to study entrepreneurship

Washington University’s business, engineering, and law schools are collaborating on a new course in 2013 that will embed students in the center of the thriving entrepreneur community in downtown St. Louis. Students will trade their campus classroom for working space at T-REx, a new St. Louis tech incubator that offers startup companies affordable offices in the historic Railway Exchange Building.
Older Stories