Arts & Sciences

​New discoveries, a new campus, Star Wars economics and another presidential debate – these were among the most-read stories of 2015 at Washington University in St. Louis.​

The Moon was never a fully homogenized body like Earth, analysis of Moon rocks made by the Chinese rover, Yutu, suggests. The basalts the rover examined are a new type, chemically different from those retrieved by the Apollo and Luna missions 40 years ago.

Curious seismologists who looked at the recordings made by a seismic station four miles away from the “cook-off” of an ammunition holding area in Iraq in 2006 found they could distinguish, mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices, helicopters and drones. Seismology is increasingly being used for investigative purposes, they said, not just to detect earthquakes.

Wishing family and friends a “Happy New Year” is all well and fine, but if you’re serious about spreading cheer in the New Year, consider passing along more specific advice from a psychologist who studies the science of happiness at Washington University in St. Louis.

The brains of children who suffer clinical depression as preschoolers develop abnormally, compared with the brains of preschoolers unaffected by the disorder, according to university researchers. Their gray matter is lower in volume and thinner in the cortex, a part of the brain important in the processing of emotions.

Biologists have long thought that body size is correlated with temperature zone: larger animals live in colder regions and smaller ones in warmer ones. Newly compiled physiological data allowed this rule to be put to the test. Animals adapt by coordinated changes in their metabolic rates and “insulation.” Body size plays only a minor role.

An outburst from a distant quasar known as PKS 1441+25 in April of this year gave astronomers at the gamma-ray telescope VERITAS an opportunity to measure the density of the optical “fog” that lies between the quasar and Earth and to deduce the surprising separation of the high-energy emission from the black hole that drives it.

Few things are as certain as the end of life, so why is it so hard to talk about? That’s a question that many families will be grappling with over the holidays. And while it’s easy to put off dark discussions during festive times, it’s best to have them sooner than later, says Brian Carpenter, a psychologist who studies family relations in later life at Washington University in St. Louis.

Robert Blankenship, PhD, the Lucille P. Markey Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the St. Louis Section of the American Chemical Society’s 2015 Midwest Award.

The Performing Arts Department, in collaboration with The Center of Creative Arts (COCA) — one of the nation’s foremost community arts schools — will launch a new Master of Fine Arts in Dance in fall of 2016.