Science & Technology

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.

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.

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.