Arts & Sciences

Islands are hot spots of evolutionary adaptation that can also advantage species returning to the mainland, according to a study led by biologist Jonathan Losos in Arts & Sciences, published the week of Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New research from the laboratory of Jonathan Losos begins to unravel one of the major mysteries of invasion biology: why animals that tend not to hybridize in their native range abandon their inhibitions when they spread into a new land. The study is published the week of Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A lunar probe launched by the Chinese space agency recently brought back the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years. Now an international team of scientists, including Bradley Jolliff in Arts & Sciences, has determined the age of these moon rocks at close to 1.97 billion years old.

Richard Loomis, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, received a three-year $700,000 grant, with a collaborator at Marquette University, from the National Science Foundation to study highly energized molecules’ reaction pathways.

Dorothy, a publishing project — the independent book publisher co-founded by Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker — has entered into a sales and distribution agreement with the New York Review of Books that will amplify its book promotion and marketing efforts. Dutton, associate professor of English, and Riker, senior lecturer in English, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University […]

“Women of color, Black and Asian women in particular, have rarely been treated with dignity or nuance in the Bond series,” writes film scholar Colin Burnett. Whether that changes, with the Oct. 8 release of “No Time to Die,” the 25th Bond installment from Eon Productions, remains to be seen. But the films’ poor collective record belies how “writers in other official Bond media, especially comics and novels, have been tipping the gender and racial imbalance for some time.”

Neuroscientists in Arts & Sciences discovered that the daily release of hormones depends on the coordinated activity of clocks in two parts of the brain, a finding that could have implications for human diseases.

Shubham Tayal was distraught the first time he was rejected from the university’s elite Emergency Support Team. The second time wasn’t so bad. In the latest “Fail Better,” Tayal explains how Bollywood fusion helped him find his groove.

Matthew Kerr, professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, received a $164,784 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Asymptotic Hodge Theory, Fibered Motives and Algebraic Cycles.”

Sarah Anderson, a postdoctoral research associate in biology in Arts & Sciences, won the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a three-year fellowship valued at about $200,000.