Science & Technology

Using a planetary simulation chamber built at Washington University, scientists led by Alian Wang in Arts & Sciences discovered that electricity in dust storms could be the major driving force of the Martian chlorine cycle.

What changes and trends could we see this year? WashU experts in areas from artificial intelligence to climate to fashion share their insights.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. The study from the laboratory of Jeffrey Catalano in Arts & Sciences was published Dec. 22 in Nature Geoscience.

A team of scientists including physicist Johanna Nagy at Washington University in St. Louis successfully launched a balloon-borne experiment studying the early universe on Dec. 21. The instrument, called SPIDER, was carried aloft by a scientific balloon from its launch pad in Antarctica.

Physicist Johanna Nagy in Arts & Sciences chases traces of “the beginning of the universe” using a balloon-borne instrument that will be launched in the next few weeks.

A first-person account from NASA Flight Director Fiona Turett, BSME ’09, on how she approaches her work leading teams of flight controllers, engineers and professionals on missions like Artemis I.

Manel Errando in Arts & Sciences is part of a team that determined that particle acceleration within black hole jets is best explained by a shock wave within the jet.

New measurements from Cygnus X-1, reported Nov. 3 in the journal Science, represent the first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, an international collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. The lead author of the new study is physicist Henric Krawczynski in Arts & Sciences.

Kun Wang, in Arts & Sciences, was selected for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Participating Scientist Program. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will bring material from a near-Earth asteroid, Bennu, back to Earth in 2023.

Paul Byrne, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, is a science collaborator for a prototype aerial robotic balloon, or aerobot, built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Near Space Corp.