Science & Technology

Erik TrinkausA human jawbone (left), dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago, along with a facial skeleton (center) and a temporal bone (right).A research team co-directed by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, has dated a human jawbone from a Romanian bear hibernation cave to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago. That makes it the earliest known modern human fossil in Europe. Other human bones from the same cave — a temporal bone, a facial skeleton and a partial braincase — are still undergoing analysis, but are likely to be the same age. The jawbone was found in February 2002 in Pestera cu Oase — the “Cave with Bones” — located in the southwestern Carpathian Mountains. The other bones were found in June 2003.

Former EPA administrators Carol Browner and William Reilly will deliver the first Sesquicentennial Environmental Initiative Lecture at 3 p.m., Friday, October 3. The lecture, which focuses on politics and the environment, is free and open to the public and will be held in Graham Chapel, located just north of Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd., on the Washington University campus.

New and improved consumer goods, better planes, vehicles, and electronics, and new biomedical products that could lead to better pharmaceuticals and innovative medical devices are among the objectives of a new, interdisciplinary center housed in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. The Center for Materials Innovation, (CMI) located in the refurbished basement of Crow Hall, will enable collaborators from across campus to make basic and applied advances in materials research, eventually touching many aspects of daily life.

A new technique in development may produce quick and efficient radiation dosing.Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a technique that drastically decreases the time a radiation oncologist spends calculating radiation dosages and also provides a more carefully controlled dosage with less damage to nearby healthy tissues. They have applied a mathematical tool called wavelet analysis to radiation dose distributions simulations and have sped up the dose calculations by a factor of two or more over the standby dose calculation.

Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoGiammar discusses a batch reaction cell.As global temperatures continue to rise, many methods have been proposed to deal with the excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis just wants the problem to go away – out of the atmosphere, into the earth.

Mark Twain once mused that his mental faculties had decayed such that he could remember only things that never happened.Age-related false memories and failing recall are not inevitable, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis indicates. The researchers tested a group of senior adults averaging 75 years of age and found that one in four did not suffer memory loss and were as sharp as college students.

September Tip Sheet: Science & Technology

Washington University in St. Louis and Monsanto Co., Creve Coeur, Mo., have been issued patent 6,608,241 by the United States Patent Office. The patent is for a technique that protects crops from devastating viral diseases that currently threaten or harm many important food crops. The inventors are Roger Beachy, Ph.D., president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and professor in the department of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, and Robert T. Fraley, Ph.D., Monsanto chief technology officer and former Monsanto research scientist Stephen G. Rogers.

Next time you think “oil spill,” remember that the vegetable oils used to make Freedom fries also can create an environmental mess.

Photo by David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoErik Herzog, Ph.D., and graduate student Rachel Huckfeldt attach electrodes to a multielectrode array.Getting over jet lag may be as simple as changing the temperature —your brain temperature, that is. That’s a theory proposed by Erik Herzog, Ph.D. assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Herzog has found that the biological clocks of rats and mice respond directly to temperature changes.