Science & Technology

Educators from across St. Louis will build and test robots using LEGOs as they explore teaching science, technology, engineering and math in grades K-12. They will share strategies for using the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, which can turn the building toys into programmable robots, during an all-day conference Friday, June 17, at Washington University’s Whitaker Hall. 

Kevin Moeller, PhD, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is working to find ways to use clean energy in clean chemistry. “We can make the oxidation reactions used in the synthesis of organic molecules cleaner by hitching photovoltaics to electrochemistry,” Moeller says. It’s not a new idea, but one Moeller and his colleagues hope catches on.

The Young Scientist Program (YSP) will mark its 20th anniversary with a day-long symposium at 8:30 a.m. Monday, June 6, at Washington University School of Medicine.

The Optical Society (OSA) has awarded the C.E.K. Mees Medal to Lihong V. Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. The medal was given for Wang’s seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.

Washington University in St. Louis hydrogeologist Robert Criss, PhD, wasn’t particularly surprised by the spring floods on the Mississippi this year. Floods are becoming more frequent and more severe, he says. “We are increasingly constraining the river by building wing dikes and higher levees and then upping the ante by building in the river’s natural flood plains” Criss says. “There are far better ways to deal with this problem than have municipalities compete with one another to build the highest levee and fight over who has the right to be protected in times of distress.”

Plants are less efficient at capturing the energy in sunlight than solar cells, mostly because they have to drag along evolutionary baggage. But scientists are already thinking of creative ways to fix the inefficiencies.

Her nose habitually buried in a Nancy Drew mystery, little Kathy Miller spent much of her girlhood trying to crack the case. Today, Kathryn G. Miller, PhD, professor and chair of biology in Arts & Sciences, still is playing detective. With Sherlock Holmes-like intensity, Miller studies cells the way a special agent scrutinizes a crime scene.

Washington University in St. Louis is hosting the Midwest Several Complex Variables (SCV) May 11-14 in honor of Steven Krantz, PhD, professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL and John Erik Fornaess, PhD, professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.The conference is expected to bring to campus more than 80 mathematicians from around the country and the world.

Local high school students will launch hand gliders designed over the course of the spring semester in the final flight of the Boeing Engineering Challenge at Washington University in St. Louis. Some 120 students will compete from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Friday, May 6, in the university’s Athletic Complex Field House.

Rice originated in China, a team of genome researchers has concluded in a study tracing back thousands of years of evolutionary history through large-scale gene re-sequencing. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research suggested domesticated rice may have two points of origin — India as well as China.