Science & Technology

Sixteen St. Louis youth will be in Forest Park on June 13 tracking box turtles, fitted with telemetry devices — all to help with a project aimed at studying box turtle movements and their health. The 12- and 13-year-olds are participating in a pilot study designed by scientists from the Saint Louis Zoo and Washington University in St. Louis to document box turtle movements and their health status in urban and rural areas in and around St. Louis.

The American Academy of Microbiology has named two Washington University in St. Louis faculty members as fellows: Robert Blankenship, PhD, and John Heuser, MD.

The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) honored Barbara Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, with the 2011-12 AIBS Distinguished Scientist Award June 1.

Crow Observatory was open June 5, 2012, for a viewing of the twice-per-century transit of Venus across the Sun. The 154-year-old Yeatman telescope projected an image of the Sun about two feet in diameter that several people could simultaneously and safely view.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have found a gene that seems to unleash the courtship ritual in male fruit flies. Males missing this gene are capable of courtship; they just have trouble getting started. Usually male fruit flies are “highly sexed,” to the point that they will court and mount “perfumed dummies,” decapitated females coated in waxy pheromones.

A new model for understanding how nerve cells in the brain control movement may help unlock the secrets of the motor cortex, a critical region that has long resisted scientists’ efforts to understand it, researchers report June 3 in Nature.

Parkway South High School senior Will Mertz explains the design of his team’s custom-built hand glider to Chris Kroeger, associate dean for students in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, during the Boeing Engineering Challenge May 4 in the Athletic Complex Field House. Mertz was among some 80 area high school students in 24 teams competing in the Boeing Challenge to determine which team’s glider had the farthest flight, straightest path, longest hang time or highest quality of flight.

WUSTL’s entry in Formula SAE, a student competition to design and drive a Formula-style race car organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers, was unveiled May 7. The car did well in competition at the Michigan International Speedway — until the last event,  where it lost its steering after the first lap of an endurance test.

Sophia Hayes, associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, leaning toward an economics major when she stumbled into a quantum mechanics class and then a chemistry class with a collaborative research focus. Research projects were the hook, and “I crammed the chemistry major into my last two years,” Hayes says.

Eleven Washington University in St. Louis-affiliated entrepreneurs are among the winners of $750,000 in inaugural grants from Arch Grants, the global business plan competition providing $50,000 grants to startups and taking no equity in return. The 11 WUSTL-affiliated winners comprise five alumni, four faculty members and two students.