Can bacteria solve the plastic waste crisis?

plastic water bottles
Tae Seok Moon, an environmental engineer at the McKelvey School of Engineering, plans to address the global plastic waste problem with a bacterium that would upcycle the plastic into a value-added chemical. His work got a boost from a three-year $861,571 U.S. Department of Energy grant.

Tao named chief of pediatric radiology

Ting Tao
Ting Y. Tao, MD, PhD, assistant professor of radiology at the School of Medicine, has been named chief of the pediatric radiology section in the university’s Department of Radiology. Tao also has assumed the role of radiologist-in-chief at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

WashU Expert: There is no end to forever

The swift fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban apparently signals the end of a nearly 20-year conflict. But is it, asks Krister Knapp, a teaching professor of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Or is this simply the beginning of the next chapter of U.S/Afghan entanglements?

WashU Expert: Play it again, Uncle Sam

Rick and Ilsa, “Casablanca’s” ill-fated lovers, will always have Paris. Uncle Sam will always have Kabul. And Saigon. And Baghdad. In the long-running tragedy of American foreign entanglements, Uncle Sam has become less a hapless romantic idealist and more a cynical “love ’em and leave ’em” serial abuser, says veteran filmmaker Richard Chapman.

For larger, older trees, it’s all downhill from here

Sunlight through trees
Jonathan Myers, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and William Farfan-Rios, a postdoctoral research fellow of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University, are co-authors of a study that found that trees’ fecundity — or physical potential to reproduce — peaked or plateaued as they reached an intermediate size.