Science & Technology

Quick detection of the COVID-19 virus — in the air and in one’s breath — offers hope in the nearly four-year struggle against the disease and its variants. A collaboration of WashU scientists is leading the way.

Two Washington University faculty members and their research teams build the “WashU Mini-City” — a novel and low-cost physical environment — to study autonomous vehicles and, ultimately, to improve their reliability and safety.

With a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Srikanth Singamaneni at the McKelvey School of Engineering will develop a method that combines a bright fluorescent nanoparticle with expansion microscopy to image secreted proteins with high sensitivity, precision and accuracy.

The “Share Our Stuff” program collects items during student move-out each year to divert them from landfills. Events are held regularly to get the items to new homes. The program is hosting a fashion sale from noon-4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 13, at its North Campus warehouse, 700 Rosedale Ave.

Petra Levin, a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, was installed as a George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in a Sept. 19 ceremony held in Holmes Lounge. Her installation address was titled “The Environment Matters.”

Feng Jiao, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, will lead work designed to address food insecurity in low- and middle-income countries.

Song Hu at the McKelvey School of Engineering plans to develop deep-brain fiber-optic techniques to investigate the cause of memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease.

New research from Washington University in St. Louis and the Georgia Institute of Technology directly measures the long-term survival of lizards in the wild, providing a more complete explanation of how evolution plays out among species that live side-by-side.

Ulugbek Kamilov and Jiaming Liu in the McKelvey School of Engineering developed a sophisticated deep learning model that can create high-quality CT images from severely limited data and quantify the uncertainty in the reconstructed images.

A team of researchers including Kater Murch, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, has found a shortcut to establishing a baffling phenomenon of quantum physics.