Science & Technology

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.

In mid-summer two lucky Washington University in St. Louis graduate students got to travel to Lake Constance in Germany to listen in the morning to Nobel laureates lecture on the topics of their choice and quiz them in afternoon about life in science and what it is really like.

Genetic investigators, include Fiona Marshall, PhD, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, say that the partnership between people and the ancestors of today’s donkeys was sealed not by monarchs trying to establish kingdoms, but by mobile, pastoral people who had to recruit animals to help them survive the harsh Saharan landscape in northern Africa more than 5,000 years ago.

Two scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are able to image subcutaneous melanoma tumors with startling clarity. Their imaging technique relies on sound rather than light because sound is less strongly scattered by tissues. In addition, the tumors are preloaded with a nanoparticle contrast agent that latches onto proteins that stud the surface of the cancerous cells.

Pass the chips and hand over the remote. In a study involving the first-ever daily energy expenditure measurements in apes, a researcher from Washington University in St. Louis and his team have determined that orangutans living in a large indoor/outdoor habitat used less energy, relative to body mass, than nearly any eutherian mammal ever measured, including sedentary humans.

John C. Georgian, who taught mechanical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis for 60 years, died Tuesday, July 6, 2010, in St. Louis after a brief illness. He was 97.

A comprehensive study by an intellectual property law expert published in the journal Science may guide global climate change and other scientific policy-makers in developing rules for research data release.