Honors and awards

August 17, 2011

Work by UW profs included in ‘100 New Scientific Discoveries’ collection

TIME Books recently came out with a special publication called 100 New Scientific Discoveries: Fascinating, Unbelievable and Mind Expanding Stories, which includes work by UW researchers. In the introduction, TIME noted that the whole of science is “too huge for even the most knowledge-hungry to sample and digest completely.” That leads, it said, “not only to overload, but to the risk of non-science masquerading as the real thing.”

To address this issue, the book was created by TIME’S team of science reporters, who surveyed the disciplines looking for research that matters, that “moves the knowledge needle in ways that affect us all.”

Projects involving UW researchers:

Dialectical behavior therapy, a treatment for people who have borderline personality disorder — a mental illness that leaves them “without emotional skin” — was singled out as a breakthrough.  That treatment was created by UW Psychology Professor Marsha Linehan, who has been working with borderline patients in the UWs Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinic for years. Time dubbed the treatment “fixing a busted personality,” saying it is successful with patients who were once considered incurable.

Stardust spacecrafts second visit to a comet last February was singled out. On Valentines night Stardust flew past the comet Tempel 1 — which it had visited in 2005 — and snapped 72 photos. Analyzing the data from those photos will be well worth it, Time said, because “comets are among the oldest artifacts of the ancient solar system; a good look at them is a good look at our origins.”  UW Astronomy Professor Donald Brownlee was the principal investigator on the 2005 Stardust mission and co-investigator on this one.

A Time entry headed “Keeping an Eye on the Forests from Space” cited a project by Google called Google Earth Engine, a new technology platform to “enable global monitoring of change in the planets environment.” Computer Science Professor Gaetano Borriello and his graduate students have contributed to that project by using Android, the open-source mobile operating system, to turn a cell phone into a versatile data-collection device. Organizations that want a fully customizable way to, say, snap pictures of a deforested area, add the location coordinates and instantly submit that information to a global environmental database have a flexible and free way to do it.

TIME pointed to recent research showing that, if uninfected partners of a person with HIV took a daily tablet containing an HIV medication – either the antiretroviral medication tenofovir or tenofovir in combination with emtricitabine – they significantly reduced the risk of an HIV infection, compared to those who received a placebo pill. These findings are evidence that this new HIV prevention strategy, called pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP), substantially reduces HIV infection risk.The study was led by Connie Celum and Jared Baeten, from the UWs International Clinical Research Center.

TIME also cited findings on the genetic distinctions between human and Neandertal genomes that may reveal what set ancient humans apart from the now-extinct, human-like beings, who died out about 30,000 years ago. Researchers in  Evan Eichler’s genome sciences lab contributed to this international effort. The UW offered  its latest developments in analyzing duplicated segments of DNA, in determining the number of copies of particular sequences, and in locating deletions in sequences. Deletions, duplications, and differences in copy-number account for many genome variations between species, between populations of the same species, and between individuals. Eichler’s lab worked on DNA sequence data from the Max Planck Institute, which led the overall project.