Arts & Sciences

Two graduates of the Washington University in St. Louis Class of 2017 — Carl Stanley Hooks and Kenneth Sng — have been named Yenching Scholars at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing. The two will complete a fully funded one-year residency at the Yenching Academy, where they will pursue master’s degrees in China studies.

Most organisms share the biosynthetic pathways for making crucial nutrients because it is is dangerous to tinker with them. But now a collaborative team of scientists has caught plants in the process of altering where and how cells make an essential amino acid.

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.

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.