Science & Technology

Photo by Don DavisRotating black hole: one of nature’s most perfect objectsA physicist at Washington University in St. Louis has found a new twist on a 40-year-old discovery — “the Carter constant” — about the motion of particles in the external field of a rotating black hole. Clifford M. Will, Ph.D., the James S. McDonnell Professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has shown that even in Newton’s gravity, arrangements of masses exist whose gravitational field also admits a Carter-like constant of motion. The finding has implications for gravitational-wave astronomy, he says.

Computer science faculty at Washington University in St. Louis are exposing their undergraduate students to learning in ways that prepare them for interaction in the real work place. It’s not about “staying between the lines,” but more about getting out of your seat, moving around and interacting with your classmates. It’s called active learning, a learning-laboratory- based tutorial teaching concept.

SussmanPrimates are social animals. But why did they become social and what are the causes for the differences in social structure among various primate species? Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, addressed those questions and more in his talk “A Comparative Overview of Primate Social Organization” during the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 15 in Chicago.

GoodenoughThe hot topics of global warming and environmental sustainability are concerns that fit neatly within the precepts of religious naturalism, according to Ursula Goodenough, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to being a renowned cell biologist, Goodenough is a religious naturalist and the author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, a bestselling book on religious naturalism that was published in 1998. Religious naturalism neither requires belief in God nor excludes such faith. Rather, the movement is based on what Goodenough describes as “an exploration of the religious potential of nature.”

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to “get lost” in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

National Science FoundationBuilding on plant virus research started more than 20 years ago, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and his colleague at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis have discovered a technology that reduces infection by the virus that causes Rice Tungro Disease, a serious limiting factor for rice production in Asia.

SchaefferJonathan Schaeffer talks about playing checkers with a computer and the interplay between people and technology in his Assembly Series talk at 11 a.m. on Wed., Feb. 18 in Steinberg Hall Auditorium.

A crater on the moon has been named after the late Larry Haskin, Ph.D., who spent much of his career as a researcher in the WUSTL Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences.

HaskinA crater on the moon has been named after the late Larry Haskin, Ph.D., who spent much of his career as a WUSTL researcher in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoFor the first time, WUSTL scientists have used gold nanocages to map sentinel lymph nodes in a rat noninvasively using photoacoustic tomography.