Science & Technology

HoltenA chemist at Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues has taken an elegant chemical approach to turn a nonfluorescent organometallic complex into a strong emitter by hampering its internal rotations at the molecular level. Dewey Holten, Ph.D., Washington University professor of chemistry, Jonathan Lindsey, Ph.D., of North Carolina State University and David Bocian, Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, have made a molecule photoluminescent by hindering its intramolecular rotation.

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Administrators from leading American universities come together to discuss environmental initiatives at their respective campuses.

For the first time, researchers have identified organic material in interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), gathered from the Earth’s stratosphere, that was made before the birth of our Solar System.

Image courtesy of the Cellar Store, San Bernardino, CA.A new book is persuading ecologists to think “outside the helmet”.An ecologist at Washington University in St. Louis has co-authored a new book that is forcing the pith helmet set to “think outside the helmet.” Jonathan M. Chase, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts& Sciences at Washington University and Mathew A. Leibold, Ph.D.,associate professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, take on one of the tenets of ecology, niche theory, which holds that species evolve and thrive because of their particular environment and what activities they do to shape that environment, providing them their niche, if you will.

BlankCarrine Blank, Ph.D. , assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has found that the currently accepted dates for the appearance of oxygen-producing bacteria and sulfur-producing bacteria on the early earth are not correct. She believes that these bacteria appeared on earth much later than is now believed.

Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of EngineersBarge traffic makes its way through a lock on the Upper Mississippi.”Our Rivers: A Sustainable Resource?” is the focus of a public education forum that four Washington University faculty will lead as part of a community-wide symposium being held in conjunction with the 5th annual St. Louis Earth Day Celebration, April 22-23. The sustainable rivers program will be held April 22 from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will feature Washington University faculty Charles Buescher, professor of environmental engineering, Robert Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and William Lowry, Ph.D., professor of political science in Arts & Sciences. The colloquium will provide a background history of the rivers in our region and their various uses in transportation, agriculture, power production, recreation and public water supply.

Poet and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann will use examples from chemistry, poetry, painting and ceramics to make a case for an underlying unity of science and the arts.

Scientists have known for years that abnormal activity involving a brain chemical called dopamine is somehow connected to the movements and vocalizations, or tics, associated with Tourette syndrome. Now neuroscience researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found brain activity in these patients is abnormal during memory tasks as well.

BrentA large team of researchers, including a computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, has effectively completed the genome sequence of the common laboratory brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, This makes the third mammal to be sequenced, following the human and mouse.