Newsroom Stories

NASA’s senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is examining rocks at the edge of Endeavour Crater for signs that they may have been either transported by a flood or eroded in place by wind.

Washington University’s Office of Sustainability is partnering with the Danforth Campus Facilities Planning and Management to roll out a new thermostat setpoint policy, designed to take the chill out of campus office temperatures during the summer.

At the recent Washington University in St. Louis Board of Trustees meeting, some faculty members were appointed with tenure or promoted with tenure, effective July 1.

Recent university alumna Emma Riley is a proud graduate of Clayton High School, but her perceptions of her hometown changed after she started studying Clayton’s history. Her documentary, “Displaced & Erased,” explores how city leaders zoned Clayton’s once-thriving black neighborhood out of existence to expand the central business district.

Washington University’s McDonnell Genome Institute has received $10 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to sequence the DNA of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, in an effort to identify the genetic roots of COPD and other lung disorders.

It’s easy to make up a story to explain an evolved trait; proving that’s what happened is much harder. Here scientists test ideas about cooperative breeding in birds and find a solution that resolves earlier disagreements.

Heather Woofter, co-director of the St. Louis-based firm Axi:Ome llc, has been promoted to director of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, both part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Frequent measurement of a quantum system’s state can either speed or delay its collapse, effects called the quantum Zeno and quantum anti-Zeno effect. But so too can “quasimeasurements” that only poke the system and garner no information about its state.

A new study from the School of Medicine has found that a molecular decoy can target and reduce UTI-causing bacteria in the gut. With a smaller pool of disease-causing bacteria, the researchers say the risk of having a UTI goes down.

In a study of predominantly African-American women — who have a much higher rate of delivering babies early compared with other racial groups — researchers at the School of Medicine showed that a decrease in the diversity of vaginal microbes of pregnant women between the first and second trimesters is associated with preterm birth.