Author: Sandra Hines

Dealing with pressing issues of the nation’s 3.4 million square miles of ocean and the wise use of marine resources elsewhere around the world requires the integration of natural and social science with policy decisions, according to Professor Thomas Leschine, the new director of the University of Washington’s School of Marine Affairs.

Hummingbirds visited nearly 70 times more often after scientists altered the color of a kind of monkeyflower from pink — beloved by bees but virtually ignored by hummingbirds — to a hummer-attractive yellow-orange.

Researchers writing in the Nov. 13 issue of Nature say perhaps it was a major change or two, such as petal color, that first forged the fork in the evolutionary road that led to today’s species of monkeyflowers that are attractive to and pollinated by hummingbirds and separate species of monkeyflowers that are pollinated by bees.

It was something polar veteran Jamie Morison hadn’t seen in that part of the Arctic Ocean before.

400 researchers traveled to Seattle this week for the first and largest meeting of international scientists studying all aspects of change in the Arctic

400 to attend landmark SEARCH meeting in Seattle on all aspects of Arctic change

When fires turn eastern Washington and Oregon forests into wastelands, valuable wildlife habitat is lost and it costs between $1,300 and $2,100 per acre in fire-fighting costs, lost buildings, economic suffering by nearby communities and degraded waterways, say UW researchers in a recently published report.

The Center for Urban Horticulture broke ground yesterday on a replacement for Merrill Hall, which was torched more than two years ago by self-styled ecoterrorists. The new building should be ready in a year.

The remaining shell of Merrill Hall is coming down and construction fencing is going up at the Center for Urban Horticulture. A groundbreaking ceremony tomorrow will mark the start of construction to replace the building, which was fire bombed May 2001 by domestic terrorists.

When fires turn eastern Washington and Oregon forests into wastelands, valuable wildlife habitat is lost and it costs between $1,300 and $2,100 per acre in fire-fighting costs, lost buildings, economic suffering by nearby communities and degraded waterways, say University of Washington researchers in a recently published report.

They are the Earth’s tiniest organisms capable of photosynthesis and, because there are so many of them, they alone are responsible for two-thirds of the carbon absorbed by the world’s oceans each year from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Showdown in the Arctic: Polar bear attacks nuclear submarine!” blared the headline in the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News last month.

They are the Earth’s tiniest organisms capable of photosynthesis and, because there are so many of them, they alone are responsible for two-thirds of the carbon absorbed by the world’s oceans each year from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Showdown in the Arctic: Polar bear attacks nuclear submarine!” blared the headline in the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News last month.

The world’s smallest photosynthetic organisms, microbes that can turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into living biomass like plants do, are in the limelight this week. Three international teams of scientists announced the genetic blueprints for four closely related forms of these organisms, which numerically dominate the phytoplankton of the oceans.

When internal waves up to 300 feet first form they cause a mighty churning of ocean waters — something invisible to and unfelt by anyone at the surface.

This year, as players kicked the first balls around Grass Lawn Park’s $1.

In a novel use of mooring data, a University of Washington researcher has calculated just how much punch waves appear to carry as they travel thousands of miles from where they originate.

How global climate change may alter how we live in the Pacific Northwest will be discussed by University of Washington research scientist Nate Mantua Tuesday, May 27, 7 p.m., Kane Hall 120.

The manager of a multi-million dollar research program for the Office of Naval Research and an expert on using sound energy to “see” inside the world’s oceans has been named director of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, a center for research and teaching that last fiscal year brought in $43 million in grants and contracts.

Students grabbed sediment, sieved for shrimp and viewed plankton with a video microscope during Puget Sound research cruises led by UW alumnus Jim Norris.

Retrieving the second year-round mooring ever used at the North Pole was among the challenges faced April 21 to May 9 during North Pole Environmental Observatory work led by James Morison, an oceanographer with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

The manager of a multi-million dollar research program for the Office of Naval Research and an expert on using sound energy to “see” inside the world’s oceans has been named director of the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory, a center for research and teaching that last fiscal year brought in $43 million in grants and contracts.

The resilience of sockeye salmon runs in Alaska’s Bristol Bay -– after a century of fishing they’re as healthy as they’ve ever been – is about strength in numbers.

The resilience of sockeye salmon runs in Alaska’s Bristol Bay — after a century of fishing they’re as healthy as they’ve ever been — is about strength in numbers.

WHAT:
The annual Arbor Day Fair for first-, second- and third graders.

An oceanographer striving to find the limits of life, a marine policy expert helping resource managers and citizens prepare for global climate change and a neurobiologist investigating the mechanism underlying the sense of smell became the University of Washington’s newest members of the National Academy of Sciences today.

The bizarre hydrothermal vent field discovered a little more than two years ago surprised scientists not only with vents that are the tallest ever seen — the one that’s 18 stories dwarfs most vents at other sites by at least 100 feet — but also because the fluids forming these vents are heated by seawater reacting with million-year-old mantle rocks, not by young volcanism.

The remarkable Lost City hydrothermal vent field, so named partly because it sits on a seafloor mountain named the Atlantis Massif, was discovered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean about 1,500 miles off the East Coast of the United States during an expedition that wasn’t even looking for hydrothermal vents. Now the two scientists who were the first to travel in a submersible to the field after its serendipitous discovery Dec. 4, 2000, are leading a National Science Foundation-funded expedition to map and farther investigate the field.

Samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion that life is widespread within oceanic crust, according to H. Paul Johnson, a University of Washington oceanographer.

A Noah’s ark of sorts, meant to protect seeds of rare and endangered native plants in Washington, has just been launched at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture.

Adding composted biosolids rich with iron, manganese and organic matter to a lead-contaminated home garden in Baltimore appears to have bound the lead so it is less likely to be absorbed by the bodies of children who dirty their hands playing outside or are tempted to taste those delicious mud pies they “baked” in the backyard.

A warming climate the last 50 years has, through early melting, relentlessly reduced the water content of the Pacific Northwest’s springtime snowpack, straining the supply of water for drinking, irrigation and other uses during the region’s typically dry summers, new research at the University of Washington has found.