Science & Technology

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced that a team of engineers at WUSTL will receive $2 million to design a battery management system for lithium-ion batteries that will guarantee their longevity, safety and performance. These technologies could revolutionize the way Americans store and use energy in electric vehicles, the electrical grid and beyond.

Zuum, a free iPad app, estimates a user’s disease risk and offers a customized plan for living a healthier life.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.