Science & Technology

This fall, the Department of Computer Science & Engineering  in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis is holding a five-part lecture series on cyber-physical systems, a topic increasingly recognized as key to the future competitiveness of U.S. industry. The first talk will be Friday, Sept. 24.

University College, the continuing education and professional studies division in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will host a symposium titled “The Sustainability Challenge: Local to Global” at 7 p.m. Oct. 26 in Steinberg Auditorium. The symposium will feature experts from Washington University and the greater St. Louis region as they discuss questions and challenges facing the environment, community development and organizational life.

Students with good ideas for saving energy have until Sept.r 19 to shoot a three-minute video promoting their idea and to post the video on a contest site. The prize for winning is $5000 and travel assistance to St. Louis for the Global Energy Future Symposium in early October.

Christopher Field, PhD, one of the leaders of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis as an I-CARES Distinguished Speaker at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 21, in Graham Chapel. Field and a team of scientists have calculated how fast temperature zones are likely to move across the planet in the future and whether plants and animals will be able to migrate fast enough to stay ahead of the heat.

In a scientific study of secondhand smoke exposure in St. Louis bars and restaurants, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that ventilation systems and “voluntary” smoke-free policies do not protect employees and customers from exposure to nicotine in the air.

The warming that following the last Ice Age was interrupted by a cold snap that killed off megafauna such as the giant ground sloth and the wooly mammoth. Could this crisis have been caused by an asteroid impact or a comet breaking up in the atmosphere? Unfortunately the geological evidence for such a dramatic event has not stood up to scrutiny. In PNAS a group of scientists challenges the catastrophists last, best hope: shock-synthesized nanodiamonds. 

A computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis is part of a collaborative team that is one of four project teams chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue ways to build a more robust, secure and reliable Internet. Patrick Crowley, PhD, associate professor of computer science & engineering and researchers from nine other institutions received one of NSF’s “Future Internet Architecture” program awards to create a new Internet architecture.

Renowned scientists from across the country will share their knowledge on biomedical research at the BioMed 21 Symposium Monday, Sept. 27, at Washington University School of Medicine.

Researchers in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis conduct a study on the battle between an invasive plant and a native plant on the coast of California and how it is effecting wildlife in the area.

Recent work with geochemical proxies for oxygen levels suggests that oxygen levels continued to fluctuate long after the Great Oxygenation Event 2.7 billion years ago, and that the oceans were many different flavors of anoxic right up until the Edicaran period, 600 million years ago. What happened in the intervening 2 billion years will be contested until scientists have more data, says a geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis.