Science & Technology

Washington University in St. Louis administrators are urging Congress and the White House to reach a compromise to avoid wide-ranging, across-the-board federal spending cuts that would take effect March 1.

An undergraduate student at WUSTL helped create and launch a mobile app that helps students track the campus circulator shuttle. It’s called the “WUSTL Circulator,” and on its first day, it had up to four times as many downloads as typical new university apps.

Scientific efforts to explain feeblemindedness, delinquency and racial inferiorities date to the Spanish Inquisition. And while the horrors of Nazi Germany exposed fatal flaws in science’s quest to build the master race, the ethical dilemmas posed by the science of eugenics are far from behind us, warns an anthropologist from Washington University in St. Louis.

Every Tuesday afternoon, an undergraduate from WUSTL’s  School of Engineering & Applied Science heads back to middle school. Nick Okafor leads the after-school Young Engineers Club at Brittany Woods Middle School in University City. N’Desha Scott, a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, started the club last fall as a way to reach out to middle school students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

This winter (the Southern Hemisphere summer), postdoctoral research associate Aubreya Adams, PhD, spent a few months at the South Pole Station maintaining seismic equipment. This photoessay, based on her Facebook page, provides a glimpse of what it is like at the South Pole and what seismologists get up to when they go into the field to maintain seismic stations.

Washington University in St. Louis’ Institute for School Partnership (ISP) and its signature science education program, MySci, take a major step forward Monday, Feb. 18, when they open the MySci Resource Center at 6601 Vernon Ave. Refurbished with the help of a $2.2 million grant from the Monsanto Fund, the MySci Resource Center becomes the nerve center of the ISP, WUSTL’s signature effort to strategically improve teaching and learning within the K-12 education community in the St. Louis region. ​

This fall Joan Strassmann, PhD, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences taught a course in behavior ecology that was also an official Wikipedia course that required students both to edit an existing Wikipedia entry and then either add 25 references and 2500 words to a second entries or to create new ones. “No work by students as good as Washington University’s students should ever end up in a professor’s drawer,” said Strassmann. “It was their responsibility as smart people who were getting a great education to help others.”

Late Friday, Feb. 2, an overcast day in St. Louis, the twitter feed for the Super-TIGER cosmic ray experiment burst into life, as the Super-TIGER team received word that NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which provides operations support for scientific ballooning in Antarctica, had decided to terminate the flight of the balloon carrying their detector aloft in the polar vortex.

Regina (Gina) F. Frey, PhD, associate professor of STEM education in the department of chemistry in Arts & Sciences and executive director of the Teaching Center, will be installed as the initial Florence E. Moog Professor of STEM Education on January 31, 2013.The professorship honors two of WUSTL’s women scientists, one past and one present, while also recognizing its deep commitment to excel in teaching the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

A massive earthen mound constructed about 3,200 years ago by Native Americans in northeastern Louisiana was built in less than 90 days, and perhaps as quickly as 30 days, according to new research in the journal Geoarchaeology. The site was recently nominated for a place on the UNESCO list of Word Heritage sites.