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“Science and Technology for Sustainability,” a free, public lecture by Harvard University’s William Clark, will focus on linking research to policy by, for instance, moving from arguments over statistics and reports generated by hundreds of different businesses, non-profits and government agencies to debates based on mutually agreed-on environmental data.

It was two years ago this month that scientists surveying the seafloor in the mid-Atlantic were startled to come upon a field of hydrothermal vents with pale “chimneys” the height of skyscrapers, far taller than any seen before, leading scientists to believe they were looking at a field unlike any previously discovered.

Orawin Velz, senior economist with Fannie Mae in Washington, D.C., will give the keynote address and John Mitchell, western regional economist with U.S. Bancorp out of Portland, is the luncheon speaker Thursday, the first day of an international forest-products markets conference sponsored by the University of Washington’s Center for International Trade in Forest Products.

Log on starting Aug. 21 for Lake Stevens High School teacher Gail Grimes’ reports as University of Washington’s Rebecca Woodgate leads an expedition on the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star to a region of the Arctic where Atlantic and Pacific ocean waters interact in ways that could help explain the warming of the Arctic Ocean and thinning of the ice pack.

In what is only the second meeting of its kind, the first conducted in the United States, more than 200 researchers and students are expected in Seattle for presentations Tuesday through Aug. 1 as part of an international symposium on therapeutic ultrasound. Presentations will be conducted at the Washington Athletic Club.

For the first time in decades hundreds of summer chum returned to Big Beef Creek Fish Research Station last fall. This follows five years of work to re-establish the run, an effort involving the UW, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the citizens of the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group.

University of Washington professor of fisheries and aquatic sciences Vince Gallucci has studied shark population dynamics for more than a decade. During the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston earlier this month, Gallucci presented findings during the session “Not Enough Sea Lions, Too Many Sharks: Global Warming Signal?”

The quest to predict toxic-algae outbreaks, estimate how much of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the oceans and gain other insights into the lives of phytoplankton — microscopic plants that generate about half the oxygen we breathe — are subjects of a free, public lecture, “Molecular Explorations of the Oceans: New Ways to Study Marine Ecosystems,” by University of Washington oceanographer Virginia Armbrust.