Science & Technology

David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoBottled water or tap? A WUSTL environmental engineer specializing in aquatic chemistry sees no difference between the two in terms of health.Paying extra for bottled water? You may be wasting your money, says an expert in aquatic chemistry. Daniel Giammar, Ph.D., a faculty member in the Environmental Engineering Science Program at Washington University in St. Louis, says that tap water is just as safe to drink as bottled water. He also says that the pricey bottled water you value so highly might well be nothing more than repackaged tap water. “The tap water we drink meets very strict standards that are designed to protect our health,” Giammar says. “These are developed over many years of study and they all include fairly large factors of safety. Any differences between tap and bottled water, in terms of health, are negligible.”

Joe Angeles / WUSTL PhotoA new book co-authored by a memory researcher at Washington University in St. Louis is one-stop shopping for all the questions we have about memory and how serious our lapses might be as we grow older. Mark A. McDaniel, Ph.D., professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL, says his book, Memory Fitness: A Guide for Successful Aging, relies on many rigorous academic studies but is written for the lay person. “Our mission is to give the general public a good idea of what they can reasonably expect from their memory capabilities as they age,” says McDaniel about the book he co-authored with Gilles O. Einstein, Ph.D., professor and chair of the psychology department at Furman University. “It also outlines some reasonable expectations about things people can do to perhaps increase their memory performances.”

Washington University has a number of internationally recognized experts and researchers on terrorism and homeland security who can address issues including intelligence, critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, target identification, and many other areas of concern related to the latest news on threats to the U.S. Faculty associated with the University’s Center for Security Technologies may be of […]

It’s a bug-eat-bug world found in this seemingly innocuous, surprisingly revealing, ecosystem.If you think your place is a dump, try living in a tree hole: a dark flooded crevice with years of accumulated decomposing leaves and bugs, infested with bacteria, other microbes, and crawling with insect larvae. A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has studied the ecosystem of the tree hole and the impact that three factors — predation, resources and disturbance — have on species diversity.

Courtesy NASA/JPL/CornellArtist’s rendition of the rover on Mars.Washington University faculty, staff and students are making critical contributions to the success of NASA’s ongoing rover mission to Mars. Visit here for links to the latest news on the 2004 Mars Rover Mission, as well as background on other Mars-related research at Washington University.

Io, satellite of Jupiter, is the most volcanically active and hottest body in the solar system.The hottest spot in the solar system is neither Mercury, Venus, nor St. Louis in the summer. Io, one of the four satellites that the Italian astronomer Galileo discovered orbiting Jupiter almost 400 years ago, takes that prize. The Voyager spacecraft discovered volcanic activity on Io over 20 years ago and subsequent observations show that Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Galileo spacecraft, named in honor of the astronomer Galileo, found volcanic hot spots with temperatures as high as 2,910 Fahrenheit (1,610 Celsius). Now computer models of volcanic eruptions on Io performed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis show that the lavas are so hot that they are vaporizing sodium, potassium, silicon and iron and probably other gases as well into its atmosphere.

The Ponderosa gang. The “Big Bonanza” was part of the Comstock Lode, now newly mapped.Remember the burning Ponderosa map at the beginning of the long-running TV show “Bonanza”? It’s up in flames before you can read all the place names. Now a geologist at Washington University in St. Louis has replaced that map with one of the famous ore site known as the Comstock Lode, a part of which is the “Big Bonanza.” While it’s doubtful that Hoss, Adam and Little Joe – not to mention the sages, Pa and Hop Sing – could make heads nor tails of it, the map is a valuable contribution to geology because it gives an interpretation of the flow of hot waters interacting with rock some 14 million years ago that created the ore district.

That’s using your brain. For the first time in humans, a team headed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has placed an electronic grid atop patients’ brains to gather motor signals that enable patients to play a computer game using only the signals from their brains.

Are humans inherently good? The prevailing view in popular and scientific literature is that humans and animals are genetically driven to compete for survival, thus making all social interaction inherently selfish. According to this line of reasoning, known as sociobiology, even seemingly unselfish acts of altruism merely represent a species’ strategy to survive and preserve its genes. But Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that this is a narrow and simplistic view of evolutionary theory that fails to explain many aspects of sociality among mammals in general and primates in particular. In “The Origins and Nature of Sociality,” a new book Sussman co-edited, he and other researchers challenge the proponents of sociobiology. “The ‘selfish gene’ hypothesis is inadequate,” Sussman says.

Are altruism and morality artificial outgrowths of culture, created by humans to maintain social order? Or is there, instead, a biological foundation to ethical behavior? In other words, are we inherently good? The prevailing view in popular and scientific literature is that humans and animals are genetically driven to compete for survival, thus making all […]