Becca Krock

Contact | 22 articles


Obama proposal breathes new life into Mars exploration

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.

| Staff Reporter

Team of students ventures into synthetic biology

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

| Staff Reporter

Creationist group hands out Darwin’s ‘Origin’ on campus

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.

| Staff Reporter

WU physician giving new lives to outcast mothers

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.

| Staff Reporter

ETS offers personality test for graduate admissions

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.

| Staff Reporter

Record numbers at undergraduate research symposium

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.

| Staff Reporter

Researchers look to enriched crops to solve childhood malnutrition

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.

| Staff Reporter

Higher drinking age lowers binge drinking for all except college students

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.

| Staff Reporter

Obama taps WU biologist for science council

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 […]

| Staff Reporter

Univ. closes biology, math libraries due to budget cuts, reduced traffic

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.

| Staff Reporter

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