Science & Technology

Plants are less efficient at capturing the energy in sunlight than solar cells, mostly because they have to drag along evolutionary baggage. But scientists are already thinking of creative ways to fix the inefficiencies.

Her nose habitually buried in a Nancy Drew mystery, little Kathy Miller spent much of her girlhood trying to crack the case. Today, Kathryn G. Miller, PhD, professor and chair of biology in Arts & Sciences, still is playing detective. With Sherlock Holmes-like intensity, Miller studies cells the way a special agent scrutinizes a crime scene.

Washington University in St. Louis is hosting the Midwest Several Complex Variables (SCV) May 11-14 in honor of Steven Krantz, PhD, professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL and John Erik Fornaess, PhD, professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.The conference is expected to bring to campus more than 80 mathematicians from around the country and the world.

Local high school students will launch hand gliders designed over the course of the spring semester in the final flight of the Boeing Engineering Challenge at Washington University in St. Louis. Some 120 students will compete from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Friday, May 6, in the university’s Athletic Complex Field House.

Rice originated in China, a team of genome researchers has concluded in a study tracing back thousands of years of evolutionary history through large-scale gene re-sequencing. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research suggested domesticated rice may have two points of origin — India as well as China.

The Mormyridae, a family of African fishes that communicate by means of weak electic discharges, has more than 200 species. Given its diversity a Washington University in St. Louis biologist wondered whether changes in electric communication might have influenced rates of speciation. His work showed that the fishes evolved a complex signal-processing brain before a burst of speciation, that signal variation was higher among fishes with that brain, and that these fishes could distinguish among subtly different discharges, whereas others could not.Together it adds up to a strong case for brain evolution triggering increased diversification.  

The standard experimental setup for measuring the cellular uptake of nanoparticles is to place cells in a well on a culture plate and cover them with culture medium containing nanoparticles. The assumption underlying these experiments is that the particles remain well-dispersed. But when a Washington University scientist turned cell cultures upside down, he discovered that this assumption doesn’t always hold. Some experiments preparing for the clinical use of nanoparticles may therefore need to be redone.

In the weeks following the earthquake, two geologists at Washington University in St. Louis — Doug Wiens, PhD, professor and chair of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Michael Wysession, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences — were frequently interviewed by journalists seeking to understand a catastrophe that seemed at times beyond understanding. What did the two scientists think about the quake? What was expected and what surprised them?

Twelve students at Washington University in St. Louis who had participated in an unusual biology course as freshmen, recently shared the honors as authors on a peer-reviewed research paper that appeared in the journal PLoS One. They had found two bacteriophages, viruses that prey exclusively on bacteria, in the soil of  Clayton, Mo.and University City, Mo., both suburbs of St. Louis. As the finders, they had the naming rights; the new phages are called Angelica and Uncle Howie.

That FOX Broadcasting Company has a conservative slant and MSNBC skews liberal may reflect widespread opinion, but a Washington University in St. Louis study suggests that news networks’ biases can be measured. Published in March 2011 in the journal Behavioral Research Methods, the findings are important in their validation of a new research tool developed by Washington University psychologists, according to lead author Nicholas Holtzman, a graduate student in psychology in Arts & Sciences at the university.