Science & Technology

In the Jan. 14 issue of Science, Washington University in St. Louis biologist Sarah C.R. Elgin, PhD, and 12 other biomedical research scientists recommend seven steps that universities can take to support the teacher-scientist, ranging in difficulty from educating faculty about research on learning or creating teaching discussion groups to creating (monetary) awards and named professorships for outstanding teachers and requiring excellence in teaching for promotion.

Who knew? The chance discovery that spikes in seismometer noise recorded in Africa corresponded with soccer matches has led to the discovery that there’s a lot more buried in the noise, including a signal from the famous storms of the Southern Atlantic Ocean, the bane of ships of sail.

A Washington University in St. Louis team is participating in the modENCODE project, a massive ongoing effort to map all the elements in model organisms that affect whether genes are silenced or expressed. The work supports the more complex ENCODE project, which is tasked to map the same elements in the human genome. While the genome is the same in every cell, each cell type expresses a different set of genes. In people, moreover, roughly 95 percent of the genome is silenced. Together the projects will “put flesh on the bones” of the Human Genome Project, says team leader Sarah C.R. Elgin.

Using a sophisticated version of the stroboscopic photography a pioneering photographer used in 1877 to prove that a horse takes all four hooves off the ground when it gallops, Michael L. Gross, PhD, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences and of medicine and immunology in the School of Medicine, catches proteins in the act of folding.

Three Washington University faculty — two from the School of Medicine and one from Arts & Sciences — have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.

Life expectancy was probably the same for early modern and late archaic humans and did not factor in the extinction of Neanderthals, suggests a new study by Erik Trinkaus, PhD, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Mechanical engineering students maneuver BattleBots during a Battle Royale held Tuesday, Dec. 14. The battle was the final assignment in a freshman mechanical engineering class taught by Pat Harkins, a technical lab technician in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Last year’s attempt to kill the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico by pouring heavy mud down the well bore may have been defeated by an instability that led to turbulent mixing of the oil and the mud. Jonathan Katz, PhD, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, had suggested a simple solution to the problem: cornstarch. Experiments described in an article published recently in Physical Review Letters suggest his solution might have worked.

A WUSTL professor’s excavation of a “gold mine of archeology” in China has been ranked as one of the top 100 science stories of 2010 by Discover magazine.

The cyanobacteria are famous for releasing the oxygen that made the Earth a hospitable planet, but some strains also have a hidden talent for producing hydrogen gas, a potential biofuel. With the help of a few metabolic tricks, a lab at Washington University has coaxed one such strain to produce champion levels of the gas.