Science & Technology

The Mars rover Opportunity, which was designed to operate for three months and to rove less than a mile, has now journeyed more than seven years crossing more than 21 miles. Today, it is poised at the edge of a heavily eroded impact basin, the possible location of clay minerals formed in low-acid wet conditions on the red planet.

This summer students participating in the McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environmental Partnership (MAGEEP) International Summer Experience traveled to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong metropolitan area to learn about alternative energy research and practice but also to explore the festivals, museums and food of another culture.

Mounting casualities in America’s nearly 10-year-old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might seem to serve as a catalyst for people to denounce the war and demand a way out. But a Washington University in St. Louis study into the psychology of “sunk-costs” finds that highlighting casualties before asking for opinions on these wars actually sways people toward a more pro-war attitude. This sunk-cost mindset may also expain why losers stay in the stock market.

Just one second, one heartbeat. That’s what is needed for a new, noninvasive functional imaging technology, developed by a Washington University in St. Louis scientist, to record data for locating the source in the heart of a dangerous cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia (VT). WUSTL researchers in biomedical engineering and medicine report in the Aug. 31, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine, that the technique would far more quickly find the source and type of VT, saving hours of mapping.  

A quick glance through history books and today’s news headlines seems to support the idea that humans by nature are aggressive, selfish and antagonistic. But this view simply doesn’t fit with scientific facts, write researchers featured in the new book Origins of Altruism and Cooperation, edited by WUSTL professors Robert W. Sussman, PhD, and C. Robert Cloninger, MD. The book’s authors argue that humans are naturally cooperative, altruistic and social, only reverting to violence when stressed, abused, neglected or mentally ill.

Jerome R. Cox Jr. (right), PhD, senior professor of computer science, describes the interactive display of the Laboratory Instrument Computer, known as LINC, to Brian Smith in the atrium of Brauer Hall. LINC, developed at MIT in 1962 then brought to WUSTL by Cox in 1964, transformed biomedical research by integrating computer science with medicine and allowing researchers to program data analysis on the fly.

Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now, in one of the first studies of its kind, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are beginning to unravel the process by which the brain makes these everyday prognostications.

Biologist Alan R. Templeton fell in love with the eastern collared lizard that lives in the hot, dry Ozark glades when he was 13. By the time he returned from  postgraduate work, 75 percent of the lizard populations had vanished. Over the next 30 years, he reintroduced lizards to a few glades and then sought to establish the disturbance regime that had once sustained them by advocating for the highly controversial process of landscape-scale burning. The cover article in the September issue of Ecology celebrates the success of this prolonged effort.

A clinical warning system undergoing a feasibility study at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis will include wireless sensors that take blood oxygenation and heart-rate readings from at-risk patients once or twice a minute. The data  and lab results in the electronic medical record will be continually scrutinized by a machine-learning algorithm looking for signs of clinical deterioration. If any such signs are found, the system will call a nurse on a cellphone, alerting the nurse to check on the patient.

Two recent research studies have found differences between the distribution of potassium-ion-channel variants in the mouse heart and in the human heart. In the mouse, the ion channels in the atria are different from those in the ventricles. In people there is no such chamber specificity. The difference is crucially important for the development of safe and effective cardiovascular drugs.