Author: Vince Stricherz
I spent more than 20 years as a reporter and editor in broadcast, print and wire service news, and have been covering physical sciences at UW for more than a decade. I currently cover Earth and space sciences, chemistry and physics, and also handle some editing duties for UW Today and the Faculty & Staff Insider Web pages.
UW scientists have made the first-ever accurate determination of a solid-state triple point, the temperature and pressure at which three different solid phases can coexist stably.
Research shows reservoirs of silica-rich magma, which causes the most explosive volcanic eruptions, can persist in Earth’s upper crust for hundreds of thousands of years without erupting.
Earth scientists are laying plans for a two-year study designed to develop a better understanding of how Mount St. Helens gets its supply of volcanic magma.
New ice core research shows that the warming that ended the last ice age in Antarctica began at least 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.
UW researchers have discovered a high-performance polymer that could make inexpensive, organic solar cells competitive with silicon-based cells.
For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long Tsangpo Gorge, possibly the world’s deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed during the last 2 million years.
Swarms of small earthquakes before a volcanic eruption can come in such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor. A new eruption analysis from Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano shows the harmonic tremor glided to higher frequencies, then stopped abruptly just before six eruptions in 2009.
In 1936, when Jesse Owens made headlines by winning Olympic gold in front of Adolf Hitler, nine University of Washington rowers improbably did the same in competition that had been dominated by Germany. An upcoming book vividly tells the tale.
UW astronomer Woody Sullivan, who has made Seattle the unlikely sundial capital of North America, has re-created a Renaissance ceiling sundial in his home office.
New UW research shows that, in recent decades, fall is the only time of extensive warming over the entire Antarctic Peninsula, and it is mostly from atmospheric circulation patterns originating in the tropics.
A UW biologist is among scientists who have found that the abdominal movements of some insects play a large role in flight control.
A substance implicated in several mass extinctions could greatly enhance plant growth, with implications for global food supplies biofuels, new UW research shows.
In recent decades the thinning of glaciers at the edge of Antarctica has accelerated, but new UW-led research indicates the changes, though dramatic, cannot be confidently attributed to human-caused global warming.
