Author: Anne Davis Cleary

Images from on and around the Washington University campuses.

Images from on and around the Washington University campuses.

WashU Response to COVID-19 Visit coronavirus.wustl.edu for the latest information about WashU updates and policies. See all stories related to COVID-19. The Office of Public Affairs has launched a project to encourage you – all students, faculty, medical professionals, staff, alumni, friends – to document your personal experiences and stories during the COVID-19 outbreak and […]

Unlike everyday objects, quantum particles can be linked over long distances, behaving as one integrated whole, even though they are so widely separated they can’t communicate, even at the speed of light. Einstein hated the idea, which he called “spooky action at a distance.” Physicist Mark Alford explains the logic behind a famous experiment designed […]

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 […]

As everyone has probably heard, antibiotics are less and less effective and there are fewer and fewer replacements for failing drugs in the pipeline. So what would happen if you got an infection that was resistant to all the known antibiotics? Would you die, or is there something else doctors could try as a last […]

Lately it’s been fashionable to say that hunter-gatherers lived better than we do. They had more free time, they followed more natural sleep cycles, and so on. But is our picture of hunter-gatherer society right? A giant earth mound in Louisiana suggests we know less than we think. Washington University anthropologist Tristram R. Kidder explains.

Scientists find gravity very puzzling. For one thing, they don’t understand why it is so weak; that is, why it takes so much stuff (like a planet’s worth) to generate much gravitational force. Perhaps, they say, it is leaking out of our universe. Physicist Adam Archibald, MA ’14, explains how this could be and describes an […]

We take so many things for granted. Why do trees grow only so tall and no taller? Why do some potatoes have those mysterious brown holes in them? And why do plants grow right-side up instead of upside-down? Eric Hamilton, PhD ’16, explores the question.

Pulsars are dead stars that emit intense beams of radio waves that sweep through space with the regularity of a clock. That’s strange enough but what’s even stranger, they sometimes speed up — in a universe where the norm is for everything to slow down. What could possibly give them the extra energy? S Kumar Mallavarapu, […]