McKelvey School of Engineering

Whether watching the All-Star Game, a World Series game or just a regular-season Tuesday afternoon game, it’s nearly guaranteed that fans will see daring slides, both feet-first and head-first, and even slides on bang-bang plays at first. Who gets there faster, the head-first slider or the feet-first? The head-first player, says David A. Peters, Ph.D., the McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and big-time baseball fan. He says it’s a matter of the player’s center of gravity.

A team of researchers headed by biologists at Washington University in St. Louis has sequenced the genome of a unique bacterium that manages two disparate operations — photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation — in one little cell during two distinct cycles daily.

Unicellular nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteriaA team of researchers headed by biologists at Washington University in St. Louis has sequenced the genome of a unique bacterium that manages two disparate operations — photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation — in one little cell during two distinct cycles daily.

A team of researchers headed by biologists at Washington University has sequenced the genome of a unique bacterium that manages two disparate operations — photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation — in one little cell during two distinct cycles daily.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are proposing to borrow a process used in breweries and wastewater treatment facilities to make corn ethanol more energy efficient. They are exploring the use of oxygen-less vats of microorganisms that naturally feed on organic waste produced from the ethanol fermentation process.

What should the Midwest do before and after a major earthquake?The earthquake that hit the lower Midwest on April 18 of this year was a hearty 5.2 on the Richter scale and got the attention of the St. Louis region. What if a larger quake — occurring either in the New Madrid Fault or Wabash Valley Fault — were to hit the region? How would we respond? To address these concerns, the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Structural Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is presenting a series of seminars and workshops on the topic of reducing the damage that could occur if a strong earthquake strikes the area again.

Image courtesy U.S. ArmyWUSTL’s Patrick Crowley is proposing a novel network for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to manage information better simultaneously in real-time.Patrick Crowley, a WUSTL computer architect, intends to design a new kind of network for the Department of Defense (DoD) to facilitate real-time information in the field so that every foot soldier, commander, tank and transport vehicle is networked. Crowley will use the WUSTL programmable network platform that can scale real-time information sharing over several orders of magnitude, from a handful of interconnected platforms to thousands and tens of thousands. He hopes to facilitate better information sharing in the military.

WUSTL computer scientists who work on robots say the machines still need the human touch.War casualties are typically kept behind tightly closed doors, but one company keeps the mangled pieces of its first casualty on display. This is no ordinary soldier, though — it is Packbot from iRobot Corporation. Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction, and WUSTL’s Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Few and Smart report that the military goal is to have approximately 30% of the Army comprised of robotic forces by approximately 2020.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoA group of about 45 sundial enthusiasts will tour 15 St. Louis area sundials.While we are bombarded daily with gloomy stories about Earth going to a hot place in a handbasket, a group of roughly 45 enthusiasts from around the country are meeting in St. Louis, August 7-10, to celebrate the beauty of the Earth moving around the sun.

Ultra-miniature bialy-shaped particles — called nanobialys because they resemble tiny versions of the flat, onion-topped rolls popular in New York City — could soon be carrying medicinal compounds through patients’ bloodstreams to tumors or atherosclerotic plaques. The nanobialys are an important addition to the stock of diagnostic and disease-fighting nanoparticles developed by researchers at the School of Medicine.