Science & Technology

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.

A team of scientists a team, including William B. McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, propose an explanation for the bizarre ridge belting Saturn’s outermost moon Iapetus. At one time Iapetus itself may have had a satellite, created by a giant impact with another body. The satellite’s orbit would have decayed because of tidal interactions with Iapetus, and at some point it would have been ripped apart, forming a ring of debris around Iapetus that would eventually slam into the moon near its equator,

Washington University is starting a Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education (NUE) program. The NUE program, which will take applicants in the fall of 2011, has two components. The first is a new minor in nanotechnology open to any undergraduate pursuing a major in engineering, biology, physics or chemistry. The second is a summer fellowship open to undergraduates to develop nanotechnology teaching modules for K-12 students.

Try to imagine an environmentally friendly science lab that reduces, reuses and recycles. That’s the challenge posed by the second annual Olin Sustainability Case Competition at Washington University in St. Louis. Students who devise the best plan for green labs will be seeing green — a $5,000 first prize — when the winners are announced in February.

Competing against 130 teams from across the world, a team of six undergraduates from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis took silver in the foundational advance category of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition this year. The  WUSTL team built a genetic sequence that once inserted in a yeast cell would signal whether the cell was growing with or without the sugar galactose by fluorescing either yellow or cyan.

The Advanced Coal and Energy Research Facility, an experimental combustion facility on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, was dedicated in October 2010. At the time, the combuster was cold and the bioreactors empty. Now that the facility is up and running, Richard Axelbaum, PhD, professor of energy, environmental & chemical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and director of the new facility, gives a video tour of the new laboratory.  

Novel metal catalysts might be able to turn greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide into liquid fuels without producing more carbon waste in the process.