Building engineers of the future
Every Tuesday afternoon, an undergraduate from WUSTL’s School of Engineering & Applied Science heads back to middle school. Nick
Okafor leads the after-school Young Engineers Club at Brittany Woods
Middle School in University City. N’Desha Scott, a sophomore majoring in
biomedical engineering, started the club last fall as a way to reach
out to middle school students from groups traditionally underrepresented
in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.
Tales from the field: maintaining seismic stations at the South Pole
This winter (the Southern Hemisphere summer), postdoctoral research associate Aubreya Adams, PhD, spent a few months at the South Pole Station maintaining seismic equipment. This photoessay, based on her Facebook page, provides a glimpse of what it is like at the South Pole and what seismologists get up to when they go into the field to maintain seismic stations.
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).
Archaic Native Americans built massive Louisiana mound in less than 90 days, research confirms
A massive earthen mound constructed about 3,200 years ago by Native Americans in northeastern Louisiana was built in less than 90 days, and perhaps as quickly as 30 days, according to new research in the journal Geoarchaeology. The site was recently nominated for a place on the UNESCO list of Word Heritage sites.
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.
Genes provide clues to gender disparity in human hearts
Healthy men and women show little difference in their
hearts, except for small electrocardiographic disparities. But new
genetic differences found by Washington University in St. Louis
researchers in hearts with disease could ultimately lead to personalized
treatment of various heart ailments.
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.
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