UW News


November 9, 2011

Carbon mitigation strategy uses wood for buildings first, bioenergy second

Pacific Northwest trees grown and harvested sustainably can both remove existing carbon dioxide from the air and help keep the gas from entering the atmosphere in the first place. Thats provided wood is used primarily for such things as building materials, instead of cement and steel, and secondarily that wood wastes are used for biofuels.


November 4, 2011

Ringing in 150th – W Day slideshow

W Day festivities captured Friday by Mary Levin, University Photographers.


November 2, 2011

Wavechasers condemn gummy bears to crushing ocean depths

Follow the serious science – and the development of novel “Will it crush?” segments inspired by the YouTube hit “Will it blend?” – as University of Washington Wavechasers work in the South Pacific near Samoa.


October 19, 2011

Beyond ecological insubordination: Speaker urges us to rethink invasive species

Ignoring the potential beneficial roles of non-native species is no longer a valid option, says UWs Julian Olden. His public talk Oct. 25, “Invasive Species: Exonerating Crimes to Envision a New Global Future,” is the annual deans lecture from the College of the Environment.


Fiery volcano offers geologic glimpse into land that time forgot — with video

The first scientists to witness exploding rock and molten lava from a deep sea volcano, seen during a 2009 expedition, also collected boninite, a rare lava that accompanies the formation of Earths subduction zones. Current subduction zones are continually evolving but most formed 5 million to 200 million years ago.


October 12, 2011

Bioblitz volunteers to catalog living things in arboretum Oct. 21-22

Naturalists, kayakers and other volunteers – including University of Washington students, faculty and staff – are needed to look for as many birds, plants, insects, mammals and fungi as possible during the 24-hour Bioblitz 2011 at the Washington Park Arboretum.


October 10, 2011

Summit helps mark first anniversary of Campus Sustainability Fund

Learn about some of the inaugural projects by students, faculty and staff using money from the student-funded Campus Sustainability Fund as part of the second annual Sustainability Summit on campus Oct. 26.


September 28, 2011

NW biofuels coming of age with $80 million in separate projects led by UW, WSU

The University of Washington and Washington State University are leads for two separate grants of $40 million each that will use Pacific Northwest woody biomass to expand whats been a Midwest-centric biofuels industry into Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana and northern California.


September 15, 2011

President Young announces new chief of staff, office reorganization

University of Washington President Michael K. Young announced today the appointment of Jack Johnson to a new chief of staff position in his office, effective Oct. 24.


September 14, 2011

Salmon and other fish predators rely on ‘no guts, no glory survival tactic

The phrase “no guts, no glory” doesnt just apply to athletes who are striving to excel. Salmon and other fish predators take the adage literally.


August 25, 2011

Ocean acidification science, societal needs meld in new training program

Students already knowledgeable about the science behind ocean acidification and warming will learn more about the challenges those ocean changes pose for tribes, shellfish growers and other sectors of society – as well as helping seek solutions ¬– under a just-announced National Science Foundation grant of $3 million.


August 3, 2011

University of Illinois selects UWs Phyllis Wise as Urbana-Champaign chancellor

The University of Illinois today announced the appointment of Phyllis M. Wise, provost and executive vice president at the University of Washington, as its next vice president of the university and chancellor at Urbana-Champaign.


July 22, 2011

The cable has landed: Ocean science history in the making — with slideshow

Submarine cables for the nations first regional cabled ocean observatory, a project led by the University of Washington, made landfall last week on the Oregon coast.


July 13, 2011

Wood products part of winning carbon-emissions equation, researchers say

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow, so forests have long been proposed as a way to offset climate change. But rather than just letting the forest sit there for a hundred or more years, the amount of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere could be quadrupled in 100 years by harvesting regularly and using the wood in place of fossil-fuel intensive steel and concrete.


July 7, 2011

Hubble makes one millionth science observation

Earlier this week, NASAs Hubble Space Telescope logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanets atmosphere 1,000 light years away, according to a UW faculty member conducts theoretical interpretation of data from the Hubble.


July 6, 2011

Sarah Reichard becomes director of UW Botanic Gardens

A forest resources professor whos an expert on invasive species and rare plants became director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens July 1.


June 21, 2011

Ocean measurements by UW will be part of just-launched satellite mission

With the launch earlier this month of NASAs satellite Aquarius, more than half a dozen University of Washington researchers are involved in projects to calibrate data from space with actual measurements of ocean salinity.


June 16, 2011

Boost for plant scientists, including UW prof, comes at critical time

Keiko Torii, professor of biology, is among 15 of the “nations most innovative plant scientists” selected to share $75 million for fundamental plant science research.


June 9, 2011

Scientists find recent snowpack declines in the West nearly unprecedented

The snowpack decline of the last 50 years in the Rocky Mountains is highly unusual in context of the past 800 years, according to findings published June 10 in “Science.”


June 7, 2011

Corpse flower blooms overnight Wednesday

An Amorphophallus titanum, also known as a corpse flower in its native Sumatra and elsewhere because of its foul odor, has bloomed at the University of Washington botany greenhouse. Visit weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. while the bloom lasts.


June 2, 2011

Revamped bio course improves performance – especially among educationally disadvantaged students – in spite of budget cuts

Students overall performed better – and educationally disadvantaged students generally made even greater strides than everyone else – in an introductory biology course at the University of Washington where recent budget woes doubled class sizes for the course, cut lab times and reduced the number of graduate teaching assistants.


April 27, 2011

Era of canopy crane ending; certain research and education activities remain – view slideshow

The 25-story construction crane used since 1995 to investigate such things as how Pacific Northwest forests absorb carbon dioxide, obtain sufficient water and resist attacks by pests and diseases is being pruned back to just the tower.


Essington wins Pew fellowship to evaluate trade-offs in fisheries

Timothy Essington, UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, is one of four Pew fellows in marine conservation in the world this year.


8 percent of women physical oceanographers in tenure track, down from 23 percent – with audio clip

The gender gap for physical oceanographers in tenure-track positions has almost doubled since the mid-1990s.


April 14, 2011

Data catches up with theory: Ocean front is energetic contributor to mixing

For more than two decades scientists have suspected theres a substantial source of energy for ocean mixing at ocean fronts. Researchers with the Applied Physics Laboratory are the first to devise a way to prove it.


April 13, 2011

Forest resources special events mark UN International Year of Forests

In observation of the UN International Year of Forests, the UW School of Forest Resources has scheduled a forest film festival, a talk May 6 with alums who are leaders in global forestry and a look at forestry education, research and management May 10.


March 30, 2011

Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon – event looks at spills, shifting media landscape

This Saturday, join local and nationally known speakers as they compare the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills and look in particular at how people and organizations told stories about the two events.


March 2, 2011

Algal antifreeze makes inroads into ice

Sea-ice algae – the important first rung of the food web each spring in places like the Arctic Ocean – can engineer ice to its advantage, according to the first published findings about this ability.


March 1, 2011

Narwhal, polar bear research subject of talk Thursday

APLs Kristin Laidre talks Thursday at the Seattle Aquarium about working in the high Arctic and her projects on narwhals and polar bears.


February 25, 2011

Learn about research in some of the most challenging places on Earth

With live presentations and 40 exhibit and activity stations, Polar Science Weekend March 3-6 offers opportunities to learn about extreme polar environments from those who work there.


February 9, 2011

Sustaining forests and ourselves is topic Feb. 24

The speaker at the School of Forest Resources annual public lecture has climbed trees on four continents using ropes and mountain-climbing techniques to study animals and plants that live in the treetops.


February 8, 2011

Follow the field work: researcher blogging about fishing tech and turtles

On her plane trip to Ecuador Wednesday, UWs Kiki Jenkins will write her first entry for the “New York Times” blog “Scientist at work: Notes from the Field.”


February 1, 2011

Invader abundance not always explosive

When invasive plants gain a foothold in new territory they become about as abundant as on their home turf, a new finding that challenges a widely held assumption.


January 12, 2011

Iceberg snaps, produces strange song

Want to hear one of the biggest icebergs of the last decade crack up? UW researchers compressed a five-hour event in Antarctica into a two-minute audio file that you can listen to.


December 13, 2010

For news media: La Nina, PNW climate experts

Reporters can turn to UW experts on PNW climate variability, effects of La Nina and flooding.


November 17, 2010

Scientists question widely adopted indicator of fisheries health and evidence for ‘fishing down marine food webs’

Scientists question widely adopted indicator of fisheries health


November 8, 2010

UW losing 60-year tradition of salmon returning to campus

The decades-long tradition of salmon returning to campus each fall is ending because of new directions in fisheries research and budget cuts.


November 4, 2010

UW losing 60-year tradition of salmon returning to campus

New directions in fisheries research, along with budget cuts, led the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences faculty to decide to discontinue the research salmon run created some 60 years ago at the campus.


Eat a fish, save a rainforest: Professor says to weigh alternatives before we curtail fishing

Alarming news reports and journal articles in recent years about fisheries facing ruin the world over has led to calls to curtail, or more drastically, to completely cease harvesting fish from coastal and ocean waters.


October 31, 2010

UW losing 60-year tradition of salmon returning to campus

New directions in fisheries research, along with budget cuts, led the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences faculty to decide to discontinue the research salmon run created some 60 years ago at the campus.



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