Science & Technology

The Office of Sustainability offers this guide to events during the month of April — including activities at the Burning Kumquat garden, free lectures and film screenings, recycling and clean-up events and more.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded funding to Tammy English and Renee Thompson in Arts & Sciences for research to better understand emotion and aging.

Biologists led by Richard Vierstra in Arts & Sciences have determined the molecular structure of the vital photoreceptor PhyB, revealing a wholly different structure than previously known. The findings, published March 30 in Nature, have many implications for agricultural and “green” bioengineering practices.

Architecture inspired by biology is not a new concept. But typically, “architecture has imitated the imagery of biology and nature without awareness of the underlying mechanisms,” argue Ram Dixit and Sung Ho Kim in “Cellular Transformations: Between Architecture and Biology.”

With the support of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, climate scientist Bronwen Konecky in Arts & Sciences is piloting a new program to attract and support underrepresented students in the geosciences and prepare them for further studies and careers in the field.

Biologist Susanne S. Renner in Arts & Sciences assembled and edited 15 papers that synthesize and challenge the current understanding of how plants separate into male and female functions for Philosophical Transactions B, published by The Royal Society.

Shantanu Chakrabartty at the McKelvey School of Engineering proposes a new kind of encryption to protect data in the age of quantum computers.

Biologist Michael Landis has developed a new method to measure the extent to which regional geographic features — including barriers between regions, like mountains or water — affect local rates of speciation, extinction and dispersal for species. He considered anole lizards as a test case.

Interdisciplinary Washington University research finds patients may be OK with artificial intelligence playing a role in medical diagnostics.

A research team led by Chao Zhou at the McKelvey School of Engineering has used a safe, noninvasive imaging technique to observe the development of a human heart organoid over 30 days.