Mars exploration is a specialty at Washington University. If President Obama’s proposal for NASA to aim for a human landing on Mars by 2030 is enacted, University scientists would be part of this grand endeavor. Ray Arvidson, the James S.

A team of students earned international recognition for their design of an efficient light-harvesting bacterium with the potential to improve biofuel production.

Last Wednesday, local non-student Christians handed out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” with a new introduction containing creationist arguments against evolution.

A professor of obstetrics and gynecology is building a hospital in Niger dedicated to repairing vesicovaginal fistulas in African women whose injuries in childbirth result in a lifetime of loneliness and poverty.

Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the Graduate Record Exam, is offering a new personality index tool for graduate applications this fall for a fee of $20 per report, but most schools are waiting to see if it is worthwhile.

Across the hall from an analysis of pedophilic overtones in haute couture, a group of students demonstrated a robot they built that follows moving sounds. Just outside, art students sold glass earrings alongside multicolored paintings of dead fish on plywood. This year’s fall Undergraduate Research Symposium saw a record number of participants and, according to the program coordinator, an unusually diverse variety of topics.

A Washington University doctor is leading a collaborative effort to end childhood malnutrition in Africa by developing and deploying enriched staple crops. The Global Harvest Alliance (GHA) is a three-way collaboration between the Danforth Plant Science Center, the St. Louis Children’s Hospital and the department of pediatrics in the School of Medicine.

Setting the national drinking age to 21 in 1984 brought about a steady decline in binge drinking in the general population—except in college students, a recent study found.

Biology professor Barbara Schaal is one of 18 leaders President Obama appointed to the newly convened President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The council has already delivered a report on the H1N1 virus. President Obama and his team selected Schaal, vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton [...]

In light of departmental budget cuts, Washington University closed its biology and math libraries this summer, reflecting a nationwide trend in universities to cut satellite libraries that are becoming increasingly obsolete as more materials go online.