Brain imaging can predict how intelligent you are, study finds
New research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that as much as 10 percent of individual differences in intelligence can be explained by the strength of neural pathways connecting the lateral prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain. Findings establish “global brain connectivity” as a new method for understanding human intelligence.
Landslides on other worlds
Saturn’s ice moon Iapetus has more giant landslides than any solar system body other than Mars. Measurements of the avalanches suggest that some mechanism lowered their coefficients of friction so that they flowed rather than tumbled, traveling extraordinary distances before coming to rest. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who have been studying the ice avalanches suggest a experimental test that might provide some answers.
$125 million U.S.-India Initiative for Clean Energy drives expansion of WUSTL’s solar energy program
Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis will be working on low-cost solar cells and systems that integrate solar cells with batteries as part of $125 million U.S.-India Initiative for Clean Energy announced this year. The technology is designed to help India leapfrog energy technologies, moving directly to low-emission electricity generation and bypassing as much as possible fossil-fuel electrical generation.
Scientists read monkeys’ inner thoughts
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis who were decoding the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex discovered that they could tell how a monkey was planning to approach a reaching task. By chance the two monkeys
chosen for the study had completely different cognitive styles. One was a hyperactive type, who kept jumping the gun, and
the other was a smooth operator, who waited for the entire setup to be
revealed before planning his next move. The difference is clearly
visible in their decoded brain activity, allowing the scientists, in effect, to read their minds.
Many men with prostate cancer can avoid early surgery
Gerald Andriole, MD, chief of urologic surgery at the Siteman Cancer Center
at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine
in St. Louis, is a co-author of new research showing that many men with prostate cancer do not need immediate treatment, especially if they have low PSA scores or low-risk tumors that are unlikely to grow and spread.
$2 million to study role-switching cells in heart failure
The National Institutes of Health has awarded more than
$2 million to a team of scientists from Washington University in St.
Louis and InvivoSciences, a biotechnology startup with WUSTL roots, to
construct artificial tissue models that will allow the rapid testing of
new drugs for heart failure.
Foundational concept of ecology tested by experiment
How strong are the links in food webs? An experiment at Washington University in St. Louis demonstrates that they’re strong enough for a disturbance to propagate across four trophic levels and two ecosystems. The experiment demonstrates that invasive species such as purple loosestrife could have broad effects on surrounding plant and animal communities, many of them cryptic.
Animal reservoir mystery solved
A new assay that uses mitochondrial DNA that mutates faster than nuclear DNA has allowed scientists at Washington University in St. Louis to identify one of the major animal reservoirs for the ehlichioses, STARI and other tick-borne diseases in the southeastern United States. The animal turned out to be the eastern gray squirrel.
Key part of plants’ rapid response system revealed
A cross-Atlantic collaboration between scientists at
Washington University in St. Louis, and the European Synchrotron
Radiation Facility and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, both
in Grenoble, France, has revealed the workings of a switch that
activates plant hormones, tags them for storage or marks them for
destruction.
Amazingly mathematical music
Math and music might seem a strange combination to
some. Certainly many famous performers are able to bring audiences to
their feet without once thinking about ratios or anything else overtly
mathematical. But David Wright, chairman of the mathematics department at Washington University in St. Louis, always has been gifted with an unusual, even
eerie, ability to hear both the music and the math simultaneously.
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