Newsroom Stories

Right now there’s no rapid way to diagnose sepsis, a fast-moving blood infection that is a leading cause of death in hospital intensive care units. Doctors who suspect sepsis typically rush to prescribe powerful antibiotics, but this can lead to the inappropriate treatment of patients with uncontrollable inflammation without an underlying infection. New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that doctors one day could quickly distinguish sepsis from widespread non-infectious inflammation based on genetic profiles of patients’ blood.

The surge of baby boomers now entering their 60s means more drivers on the road who may be impaired by dementia or other cognitive impairments linked to aging. Researchers at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and elsewhere have developed a three-hour workshop that trains health care providers to identify potentially unsafe drivers with dementia and to encourage appropriate retirement from driving.

David Murray demonstrates defibrillation techniques to a group of students in the Clinical Simulation Center.The Institute of Medicine estimates that medical errors are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States, and poor communication can be a major source of those errors. Now the Clinical Simulation Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis hopes to improve patient safety by using clinical simulators to find the source of miscommunications during medical treatments.

VIDEO AVAILABLE: Stardust, the NASA spacecraft mission, was given that name in hopes that the seven-year journey to capture comet samples would bring back to Earth, well, stardust. In an article coming out in the Dec. 15, 2006, issue of the journal Science, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are the first to report that a sample they received from the mission actually does contain stardust — particles that are older than the sun.

Hundreds of technology-transfer offices have popped up on university campuses over the past 20 years to enable universities to facilitate the commercialization of innovations and discoveries pioneered by their professors. Licensing patents for the inventions is a commercial opportunity for universities, which hope to make money selling the intellectual property and to see faculty research make a tangible impact in the marketplace. While all the inventions might be equally genius, they aren’t all valued equally. The question for technology-transfer offices is: What will sell? A professor at the Olin School of Business found that the ease of selling intellectual property doesn’t necessarily depend on whether the innovation has received patent protection. More…

When good fortune smiles on a company, the stock market responds by valuing the firm more favorably. It’s well known that good news for one firm means other companies in the same industry will be affected as well. But a business professor at Washington University in St. Louis says we can also anticipate a predictable connection between news announcements of a company and its suppliers or customers.

Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoKenneth Olsen, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, examines a cultivated rice plant in the Goldfarb Greenhouse.Red rice sounds like a New Orleans dish or a San Francisco treat. But it’s a weed, the biggest nuisance to American rice growers, who are the fourth largest exporters of rice in the world. And rice farmers hate the pest, which, if harvested along with domesticated rice, reduces marketability and contaminates seed stocks. Complicating matters is the fact that red rice and cultivated rice are exactly the same species, so an herbicide cannot be developed that seeks out only red rice. It would kill cultivated rice, too. But now a plant evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at $1.12 million for two years to perform genetic studies on red rice to understand molecular differences between the two that someday could provide the basis for a plan to eradicate the weed. More…

“I smell a rat!” Researchers have found that the sense of smelling in mice is affected by a biological clock devoted entirely to olfaction — smelling stuff, like sleeping and waking, is on a daily cycle.Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered a large biological clock in the smelling center of mice brains and have revealed that the sense of smell for mice is stronger at night, peaking in evening hours and waning during day light hours. A team led by Erik Herzog, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, discovered the clock in the olfactory bulb, the brain center that aids the mouse in detecting odors. More…

Photo courtesy NASAStrange Brew: Astronomers are debating whether the matter in these stars is composed of free quarks or crystals of sub-nuclear particles, rather than neutrons.According to the “Strange Matter Hypothesis”, which gained popularity in the paranormal 1980’s, nuclear matter, too, can be strange. The hypothesis suggests that small conglomerations of quarks, the infinitesimally tiny particles that attract by a strong nuclear force to form neutrons and protons in atoms, are the true ground state of matter. The theory has captivated particle physicists worldwide, including one of Washington University’s own. Mark Alford, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, and collaborators from MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, have used mathematical modeling to discover some properties of theoretical “strange stars,” composed entirely of quark matter. More…

Explaining “why the French don’t like headscarves” in public schools.March will mark the third anniversary of a law passed by the French government banning from public schools all clothing that indicates a student’s religious affiliation. Though written in a religion-neutral way, most people in France, and around the world, knew the law was aimed at keeping Muslim girls from wearing headscarves to class. But why? John R. Bowen, Ph.D., a sociocultural anthropologist in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was in France at the time and has written an enlightening book, recently published by Princeton University Press, titled “Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space.” More…