Arts & Sciences

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.

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.

Through her blog, Scary Mommy, and two parenting books, best-selling author Jill Smokler (right), BFA ’99, takes a look at parenting in all its irritating, sleepless, joyful and hilarious glory.

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.

Just when we thought we knew it all, scientists have discovered that there are microbes that eat electricity, which is about as strange as people snacking by shoving a finger in an electric socket. What’s more, these microbes are very common. Scientists are finding them in many different places. They’ve remained hidden so long because […]

Washington University in St. Louis is one of 24 schools selected to receive $1 million grants as part of a new HHMI initiative to help colleges and universities foster success in science for all students, especially undergraduates who enter four-year institutions via nontraditional pathways.

Using genomics, a chemistry lab has worked out the biosynthetic machinery that makes a new class of antibiotic compounds called the beta-lactones. Like the beta-lactams, such as penicillin, they have an unstable four-member ring. The key to their antibiotic activity, it is also difficult to synthesize.

The discovery of anomalously high levels of mercury in rocks from the Ordivician geological period has led to a new interpretation of the ensuing mass extinction. A sequence of disturbances may have led to catastrophic cooling by reflective sulfate aerosols injected into the atmosphere by massive volcanism. The finding is important since aerosol cooling is under consideration as a way to temper global warming.

Joshua Jackson has been installed as the Saul and Louise Rosenzweig Associate Professor of Personality Science at Washington University in St. Louis. A ceremony and reception were held March 21 in Holmes Lounge in Ridgley Hall to celebrate the occasion.

Rohan Khazanchi, a senior majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences, will receive the 2017 Harrison D. Stalker Award. The award is given annually to a graduating biology major whose undergraduate career combines outstanding scientific scholarship with significant contributions in the arts and humanities.