Science & Technology

A class at Washington University taps directly into the astonishing motivational power of the mashup of computers, gaming and popular culture. In the class, the students develop applications, popularly known as “apps,” for the iPhone and iPad, the digital tablet that was released to consumers April 3.

Nearly all animals make sounds instinctively, but baby songbirds learn to sing in virtually the same way human infants learn to speak: by imitating a parent. Now, an international team of scientists, led by the School of Medicine, has decoded the genome of a songbird — the Australian zebra finch — to reveal intriguing clues about the genetic basis and evolution of vocal learning. 

A team of psychologists at Washington University that include graduate student Jonathan Jackson have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.

Outgoing, gregarious people who fill their lives with deep, meaningful conversations may have found at least one key to a happier life, suggests research from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Arizona.

A team led by physicist Ken Kelton, PhD, is building an electrostatic levitation chamber that will be installed at the Spallation Neutron Source at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kelton and his colleagues are particularly eager to see what the new instrument will tell them about glass transition, “the deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid-state research.”

As one of the “generic geologists” on a dig called the Dakhleh Oasis Project, Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, was asked to sample the alum from ancient mines and to determine whether it could be the source of the blue in the “blue painted pottery” found at sites dating from the New Kingdom.

Peter Wyse Jackson, PhD (left), who has been appointed to succeed Peter H. Raven, PhD, the Engelmann Professor of Botany, as president of the Missouri Botanical Garden, visited the Danforth Campus March 3 to meet biology department faculty and to deliver a seminar on international efforts to slow or halt the loss of biodiversity.

The Tyson Living Learning Center at Washington University in St. Louis has been called one of the greenest buildings in the U.S. Green technologies behind the building are the focus of a National Public Radio Science Friday news video and an NPR radio discussion broadcast live from St. Louis March 12.

Nanocages that efficiently convert light to heat are the basis for a targeted form of phototherapy that would destroy tumors without making cancer patients sick.

Washington University will host its fourth ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp June 20-July 2 for more than 45 St. Louis-area disadvantaged middle schoolers. The camp is a free, two-week academic residential camp designed to boost middle school students’ skills in math and science and their interest in related careers as well as introduce them to college life. Applications are being accepted through April 2.