Science & Technology

Patricia Weisensee, an assistant professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, won a $351,971 National Science Foundation grant to support a new study of condensation in fluid refrigerants.

The Neuroscience Research Building under construction on the Medical Campus will contain energy-efficient, low-energy research freezers in laboratories; electric charging stations in the parking garage; and numerous other sustainability-focused elements. The building is on track to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification.

Major advances in battery technologies will bring us a big step closer this year to large-scale renewable energy goals, international energy independence and a big reduction in greenhouse gases, according to Arts & Sciences’ Michael Wysession.

Chenyang Lu, at the McKelvey School of Engineering, has received the Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award from the IEEE Technical Community on Real-Time Systems. Lu is internationally renowned for work in cyber-physical and real-time systems.

A team of researchers led by Young-Shin Jun at the McKelvey School of Engineering analyzed how light breaks down polystyrene, the plastic from which packing peanuts and disposable utensils are made. They found that small plastic particles interact with neighboring substances more easily than previously thought, including with things like heavy metals and organic contaminants.

Models based on an average cell are useful, but they may not accurately describe how individual cells really work. Molecular biologists use actual single-cell data to update the framework for understanding the relationship between cell growth, DNA replication and division in a bacterial system.

Far from orderly “brick-by-brick” assembly, the internal structures of cells are grown in stochastic bursts, according to physicist Shankar Mukherji in Arts & Sciences, author of a Jan. 6 study in Physical Review Letters.

A team of researchers, led by Rohit Pappu at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, focused on defining the features of condensate boundaries. They found that within condensates — molecular communities that make up the building blocks of life — the molecules’ organization resembles the hub-and-spoke structure of airports.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. The study from the laboratory of Jeffrey Catalano in Arts & Sciences was published Dec. 22 in Nature Geoscience.