Research and stories

Despite efforts to reduce the use of plastic or recycle it, most plastic produced in the world ends up in landfills, the oceans or dumped, bringing with it catastrophic effects on the environment, the ecosystem and the economy. To address this, a team of researchers has established the Synthetic Biology Manufacturing of Advanced Materials Research Center.

There is no good reason to abandon the Chevron deference, a landmark Supreme Court decision in place for 40 years that says courts must defer to federal agencies’ expertise in interpreting laws, according to an expert on administrative law and regulatory reform at Washington University in St. Louis.

Students in the McKelvey School of Engineering at WashU designed prototypes for a device that could help environmental engineers monitor the air quality impact of factory farms in Missouri.

Washington University in St. Louis’ Center for the Environment, a key initiative of the university’s strategic plan “Here and Next,” will host a weeklong series of kickoff events next month designed to encourage the entire campus community to become more familiar with WashU’s work to advance environmental research.

Roch Guerin, professor, and collaborators received an NSF grant to improve speed of GEOS-Chem, a 3D atmospheric simulation software designed to study climate change.

Red colobus monkeys are the most threatened group of African monkeys. A Washington University in St. Louis team will model viral transmission dynamics among red colobus monkeys and their human neighbors near Kibale National Park, Uganda. The collaboration got its start with support from Arts & Sciences under its Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures research cluster, “The Human-Wildlife Interface.”

Many kids dream of being astronauts when they grow up, but Millie Savage is contributing to something bigger: helping future space explorers manufacture their own supplies in space conditions.

A large study involving 43 research plots in the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) Network — including a swath of trees at Tyson Research Center — has helped clarify the power of underground fungi to shape forests.

The year 2023 was the hottest in recorded history. WashU professor Michael Wysession explains four factors that drove 2023’s extreme heat and climate disasters — and what this means for the future.

Nathan Jacobs leads team that developed BirdSAT, a tool for classification and ecological mapping of global bird species.