Science & Technology

Below is a link to the Washington University news release about the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings for 2004-05: http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/3627.html To view a full listing of U.S. News magazine, book and Web-only rankings for 2004-05, please visit the U.S. News & World Report site: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

FlanaganKathryn Flanagan, Ph.D., senior scientist and head of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute, will deliver the 2008 McDonnell Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in Room 214 Wilson Hall on the Danforth Campus at Washington University in St. Louis.

British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell will describe her landmark work in discovering the first pulsars at the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. on Wed., March 19 in Graham Chapel.

Human diseases and social networks seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, along with his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, has published an algorithm (a recipe of computer instructions) to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

Lemur population has declined sharply since the 1950s. Through education and conservation, a WUSTL expert hopes the trend will be reversed.Using satellite imagery, GIS and ecological and demographic data from the field, Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied the effects of deforestation on the ringtailed lemur population in Madagascar during the last forty years. He has determined that while causes of deforestation vary in different parts of the African island nation, the total lemur population has dropped by more than half since the 1950s.

The Earth’s orbital behaviors are responsible for more than just presenting us with a leap year every four years. According to Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, parameters such as planetary gravitational attractions, the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun and the degree of tilt of our planet’s axis with respect to its path around the sun, have implications for climate change and the advent of ice ages.

Below is a link to the Washington University news release about the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings for 2004-05: http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/3627.html To view a full listing of U.S. News magazine, book and Web-only rankings for 2004-05, please visit the U.S. News & World Report site: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

Below is a link to the Washington University news release about the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings for 2004-05: http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/3627.html To view a full listing of U.S. News magazine, book and Web-only rankings for 2004-05, please visit the U.S. News & World Report site: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

The Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Structural Engineering continues its series of seminars and workshops on the topic of reducing the damage that would occur if a strong earthquake strikes the New Madrid fault area again. The first program covered subjects of hazards, codes, vulnerability and strengthening of infrastructure. The speakers were practicing engineers and […]

Researchers at WUSTL and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll, chlorophyll d. Chlorophyll d absorbs “red edge,” near infrared, long wave length light that is invisible to the naked eye. In so doing, the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina competes with virtually no other plant or bacterium in the world for sunlight.