Science & Technology

In an article published in the advance online edition of Genes, Brain and Behavior on April 6, 2012, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues demonstrate that the division of labor among honeybees is correlated with the presence in their brains of tiny snippets of noncoding RNA, called micro-RNAs, or miRNAs, that suppress the expression of genes.

Mara MacMahon has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 Harrison D. Stalker Award from the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. The award is given annually to a graduating biology major whose undergraduate career has been marked by outstanding scientific scholarship as well as contributions to the university in the areas of artistic expression or community service.

The Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital is seeking patients for a clinical study to determine the best treatment for patients with early-stage lung cancer who also have breathing problems. The study focuses on patients with the most common type of lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer.

Washington University biomedical engineer Lihong Wang, PhD, will explain his photoacoustic tomography technology April 3 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago.

Clifford Will, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in Room 100, Whitaker Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis. Will plans to discuss “Black Holes, Waves of Gravity and Other Warped Ideas of Dr. Einstein.”

The Academy of Science of St. Louis will honor 10 faculty members from Washington University in St. Louis for their contributions and leadership in science and medicine. The Outstanding St. Louis Scientists Awards will be presented Thursday, April 19, at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel. The awards are designed to focus attention on St. Louis individuals and institutions known around the world for scientific contributions to research, industry and quality of life.

Tej Azad, a junior in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was among 162 students from across the country named a Newman Civic Fellow for 2012 by Campus Compact. The Newman Civic Fellows Awards recognize inspiring college student leaders who have demonstrated an investment in finding solutions for challenges facing communities throughout the country and the world.

Four applications of the new imaging technique photoacoustic tomography are moving into clinical trials. One is to visualize the sentinel lymph nodes that are important in breast cancer staging; a second to monitor early response to chemotherapy; a third to image melanomas; and the fourth to image the gastrointestinal tract. Biomedical engineer Lihong Wang believes photoacoustic tomography might also allow early diagnosis of cancer because the technique can reveal the hypermetabolism that is cancer’s hallmark.

Seismologists have just returned from a cruise in the Western Pacific to lay the instruments for a seismic survey that will follow the water chemically bound to or trapped in the down-diving Pacific Plate at the Mariana trench, the deep trench to which Avatar director James Cameron is poised to plunge.

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. The goal of Agrawal’s project, titled “Provably Good Concurrency Platforms for Streaming Applications,” is to design platforms that will allow programmers to easily write correct and efficient high-throughput parallel programs.