Tumors are composed of rapidly multiplying cancer cells. Understanding which biochemical processes fuel their relentless growth can provide hints at therapeutic targets. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have developed a technology to study tumor growth in another dimension — literally. The scientists established a new method to watch what nutrients are used at […]
People who endure the daily hassles of big cities often romanticize life in the country. But rural living is not necessarily the carefree, idyllic experience that many people imagine, said Emily Willroth, PhD, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Willroth co-authored a study in […]
Some mammals and birds have a clever way to preserve energy and heat by going into torpor, during which their body temperature and metabolic rate drop to allow them to survive potentially fatal conditions in the environment, such as extreme cold or lack of food. While a similar condition was proposed for scientists making flights […]
Depression and anxiety are among the most common mental health disorders in the United States, but more than half of people struggling with the conditions are not diagnosed and treated. Hoping to find simple ways to detect such disorders, mental health professionals are considering the role of popular wearable fitness monitors in providing data that […]
Like the lymphatic system in the body, the glymphatic system in the brain clears metabolic waste and distributes nutrients and other important compounds. Impairments in this system may contribute to brain diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases and stroke. A team of researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has […]
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has received two grants totaling $22.5 million to help lead national efforts to understand how DNA changes create differences in genomes across tissues within the same person. This variation — called somatic mosaicism — can change how cells operate and affect early development, disease risk, the aging […]
Every day, we face a series of opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes we seize those moments; other times, we don’t. So, why do we make these choices, and what drives some people to take the moral high ground? Jessie Sun, PhD, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences […]
A new deep learning tool from Keith Hengen allows scientists to give neurons a “computational fingerprint,” work that could significantly advance our understanding of the building blocks of thought. The 86 billion neurons of the human brain are involved in constant banter, sending and receiving codes written in strings of electrical impulses. Listening to these […]
A new study from a Washington University researcher offers fresh insights into how the brain goes to great lengths to process and remember everyday events. Zachariah Reagh, PhD, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and co-author Charan Ranganath of the University of California, Davis, used […]
A new study co-authored by Joshua Jackson, PhD, the Saul and Louise Rosenzweig Associate Professor in Personality Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, explores how parents’ personalities — boisterous or reserved, agreeable or cranky, concerned or care-free — can shape the lives of their children, for better or worse. The study […]
One of the more intriguing paradoxes emerging from the rubble of the COVID-19 pandemic is new evidence suggesting that older adults — those at the greatest risk of severe illness and death from the virus — fared much better than their younger counterparts when it comes to coping with pandemic-related distress, anxiety, depression and social […]
Computer software developed at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis can predict what happens to complex gene networks when individual genes are missing or dialed up more than usual. Such genetic networks play key roles in early embryonic development, guiding stem cells to form specific cell types that then build tissues and organs. […]
Several progressive neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, are defined by having tau proteins in the brain. Researchers are seeking to identify the mechanisms behind these tau proteins to develop treatments, however, their efforts to detect biomarkers in blood has been hampered by the protective blood-brain barrier. At Washington University in St. Louis, new research from […]
It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air. Or in the waxy coating on your skin, if you are a vinegar fly. That’s where flies encounter pheromones that play an important role in regulating sexual attraction. Flies use pheromones to ensure that they court and mate with members of the same species. As […]
A new multidisciplinary center focused on biomolecular condensates — distinct molecular communities that make up the building blocks of life — has launched at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. The center kicked off with an inaugural symposium Oct. 14, highlighted by the Condensates Colloquium Series. Center director Rohit Pappu, PhD, […]
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it wasn’t unusual to see and hear public health announcements geared toward older populations because they were more susceptible to severe illness. Over and over, older adults were referred to as “vulnerable.” Meghan McDarby, a former PhD student, Catherine Ju, a former undergraduate student, and Matthew Picchiello, a […]
Unfolded proteins are unhealthy proteins. When found inside of cells, they are rounded up, identified, and destroyed. This is an important quality-control process, especially in the brain and the heart. How these unfolded proteins are identified, however, has been a mystery. Now, research led by Kiersten Ruff, a senior research scientist in the lab of […]
Over the past several years, managing one’s mental health has become more of a priority with an increased emphasis on self-care. Depression alone affects more than 300 million people worldwide annually. Recognizing this, there is significant interest to leverage popular wearable devices to monitor an individual’s mental health by measuring markers such as activity levels, […]
Children who were exposed to cannabis in the womb continue to show elevated rates of symptoms of psychopathology — depression, anxiety and other psychiatric conditions — even as, at ages 11 and 12, they head toward adolescence, according to research from the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences’ BRAIN Lab, led by Ryan Bogdan, PhD, associate […]
People with spinal cord injuries often experience lifelong movement impairment or paralysis, for which there is no cure. When coupled with rehabilitative exercise, electrical spinal cord stimulation can help restore some movement, though the mechanisms of how the nerves in the spinal cord recover are unknown. Ismael Seáñez, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at […]
People who were more distressed — showing signs of anxiety or depression — during the COVID-19 pandemic were less likely to follow some best practice recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a new study by Washington University in St. Louis researchers. They found, however, that those same people were more […]
For over a century, cancer cell metabolism has been viewed as something of a paradox. New work from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis shows that it might not be such an anomaly after all. The study is published Aug. 15 in Molecular Cell. Glucose, a common sugar in food, is one of the most […]
Having positive social interactions is associated with older adults’ sense of purposefulness, which can fluctuate from day to day, according to research from the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. And although these findings, published in the July 2022 issue of the American Journal of Geriatric […]
Every cell contains millions of protein molecules. Some of them have the ability to phase-separate to form non-membrane-bound compartments, called biomolecular condensates, inside a cell. It has long been assumed that there was no further structure underlying these condensates, only solution-soluble proteins. A research group led by Rohit Pappu, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor […]
In one of the first studies to look at the association between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) medications and brain development in young children, research from the Behavioral Research and Imaging Neurogenetics (BRAIN)Lab at Washington University in St. Louis found no association between children’s exposure to the drugs in the womb and later childhood depression. The study […]
Research from the lab of Matthew Lew, PhD at Washington University in St. Louis offers entirely new ways to see the very small. The research — two papers by PhD students at the McKelvey School of Engineering — was published in the journals Optica and Nano Letters. They have developed novel hardware and algorithms that allow them to visualize the […]
Crows and ravens are well known for their black color and the harsh “caw” sound they make. They are intelligent birds that use tools, solve complex abstract problems and speak a volume of words. But what is less well appreciated is how diverse they are. Their diversity is accompanied by their ability to live all […]
Does being sentenced to juvenile detention or community service truly serve as a means to rehabilitation? One mechanism to rehabilitate a young person deemed by the justice system to be on the path to a life of crime is to change behaviors associated with crime. A research team at Washington University in St. Louis tested […]
During the pandemic, news reports surfaced of a surge of young adults showing up at doctors’ offices with unexplainable movement disorders that looked, perhaps to a nonspecialist, a little bit like Tourette syndrome. But when those patients were sent to see a specialist, “They’d say, ‘that doesn’t look at all like any of my first […]
Many North American migratory birds are shrinking in size as temperatures have warmed over the past 40 years. But those with very big brains, relative to their body size, did not shrink as much as smaller-brained birds, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. The study is the first to identify a […]
Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle. Research from Washington University in St. Louis will test how these daily patterns are set and maintained through the coordinated activity of certain neurons and hormones. The five-year $1.98 million project relies on new high-throughput machine learning techniques to determine the roles […]
Smell a cup of coffee. Smell it inside or outside; summer or winter; in a coffee shop with a scone; in a pizza parlor with pepperoni — even at a pizza parlor with a scone! — coffee smells like coffee. Why don’t other smells or different environmental factors “get in the way,” so to speak, […]
The labs of Tanja Mittag, PhD at St. Jude and Rohit Pappu, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, created a stickers-and-spacers model to discern the rules underlying the driving forces for phase separation. The “stickers” and “spacers” are different types of amino acids along the […]
Researchers from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Université de Montréal and McGill University have discovered a new mechanism by which membrane vesicles are made. The roles played by these self-contained nanoparticles are essential to the normal function of our cells. Their dysfunction is implicated in diseases ranging from cancers […]
When COVID-19 hit, many people were suddenly cut off from their social support systems, the people with whom we often share our emotional lives. They who listen to our grievances, share in our happiness, or just sit there, being bored with us. Is that a problem? How much do we depend on others to help […]
The National Academy of Inventors has elected three faculty members from Washington University in St. Louis to its 2021 cohort of fellows: Psychiatry professor Douglas F. Covey, PhD, geneticist Jeffrey Milbrandt, MD, PhD, both at the School of Medicine; and bioengineer Daniel Moran, PhD, at the McKelvey School of Engineering. The NAI fellowship is the highest professional distinction reserved solely […]
To assess how different styles of face masks affected speech intelligibility in normal hearing listeners, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis put some of the most popular mask designs to the test. Their research was published in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. The team, from the labs of Kristin Van Engen, PhD, assistant professor […]
When students were told to stay home after COVID-19 began to spread stateside, it’s not surprising that their social media use increased — there wasn’t much else to do. But was it all doom scrolling and catastrophizing or was social media living up to its promise to keep people connected and strengthen our ties to […]
In a new study from the lab of Deanna Barch, PhD, professor and chair of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry and of radiology at the School of Medicine, all at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers examined the association between distressing and persistent psychotic-like experiences […]
Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) allows researchers to see the smallest vessels inside a body, but it can generate some unwanted signals or noise. A team of researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis found a way to significantly reduce the noise and maintain image quality while reducing the laser energy […]
Glioblastomas are aggressive brain tumors that are commonly diagnosed through a risky and invasive surgical biopsy. A team of researchers led by Hong Chen, PhD at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a noninvasive diagnostic method that may one day replace the tissue biopsy with a simple blood test. Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering at […]
Change is upon us once again. Come the first Sunday of November, we will gain an hour of morning sunlight. The one-hour adjustment to the clock on the wall may not sound dramatic. But our biological clock begs to differ. Take, for example, the members of society blissfully unaware of social time: our youngest children […]
Although other studies have documented “representational drift” in neurons in the parts of the brain associated with odor and spatial memory, this result is surprising because neural activity in the primary visual cortex is thought to be relatively stable. The study published Aug. 27 in Nature Communications was led by Ji Xia, PhD, a recent PhD graduate of […]
Brains have evolved to do more with less. Take a tiny insect brain, which has less than a million neurons but shows a diversity of behaviors and is more energy efficient than current AI systems. These tiny brains serve as models for computing systems that are becoming more sophisticated as billions of silicon neurons can […]
Nanomaterials have been used in a variety of emerging applications, such as in targeted pharmaceuticals or to bolster other materials and products such as sensors and energy harvesting and storage devices. A team in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is using nanoparticles as heaters to manipulate the electrical activity […]
A collaborative effort between Washington University in St. Louis, Agilent Technologies and the biopharmaceutical company Merck aims to expand research in the field of metabolomics, the comprehensive study of small molecules within a biological system. Using top-of-the-line research instrumentation from Agilent, scientists in the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences will develop new metabolomics […]
American writer and humorist Mark Twain, a master of language and noted lecturer, once offered, “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” Electric fish and today’s TED talk speakers take a page from Twain’s playbook. They pause before sharing something particularly meaningful. Pauses also […]
When there’s a difficult task at hand, intuition tells us that the more motivated we are to complete it — the stronger the incentives — the harder we’ll work. And the assumption has been that the relationship is linear — the better the incentives, the harder people will work. Rarely, however, do people have just […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic surged last summer and contact tracers struggled to identify sources of infections, John Cirrito, PhD, an associate professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Carla Yuede, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry, began to kick around an idea. Could a biosensor they’d developed years ago for Alzheimer’s disease […]
The Association for Psychological Sciences (APS) has named Zachariah Reagh, PhD a “Rising Star.” Reagh is assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on representation and remembrance of experiences and how they change as we age. The Rising Star designation is given to […]
