The UW is expanding its Training Xchange initiative to help researchers transmit innovations in healthcare and other fields to professionals locally and beyond the Northwest.
Engineering
The U.S. Department of Energy this month awarded $4 million to a team, led by UW chemical engineers, that aims to develop bacteria to turn the methane in natural gas into diesel fuel for transportation.
The ASL-STEM Forum is a crowdsourcing project, similar to Wikipedia or the Urban Dictionary, that creates a new sign language for the latest scientific and technical terms.
Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers show promise as a cheap, versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. New funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will further test the system’s versatility and feasibility.
These principles could allow scientists to custom-make, rather than re-purpose, protein molecules for vaccines, drugs, and industrial and environmental uses.
The UW Board of Regents yesterday approved a name change to the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, recognizing the shared history of UW aeronautics and The Boeing Company, and honoring the man who launched them both.
Three undergraduates won $100,000 to form a company that will work with partners in Oaxaca, Mexico, to build machines that can transform waste plastic into composting toilets and pieces for rainwater harvesting systems.
The Living Voters Guide, created by the UW and presented with Seattle’s CityClub, just won a regional award and has been updated for the 2012 election. This year the guide has expanded to include a California edition, and the Washington guide will include fact-checking of selected points by Seattle Public Library staff.
Maria Klawe, professor of computer science and president of Harvey Mudd College, will speak Tuesday at the UW about how her institution over three years quadrupled its female representation in undergraduate computer science majors, to 40 percent.
New hardware lets engineers maintain the plasma used in fusion reactors in an energy-efficient, stable manner, making the system potentially attractive for use in fusion power plants.
Three public lectures by UW engineering professors will give an overview of molecular engineering and applications in biotech and alternative energy.
Global health researchers are working on cheap systems like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other diseases. A new chemical technique makes medically interesting molecules stick to regular paper — a possible route to building such paper-based diagnostics from paper you could buy at an office-supply store.
As the U.S. presidential election approaches, many voters become voracious consumers of online political news. A new tool tracks whether all those articles really provide a balanced view of the debate – and, if not, suggests some sites that offer opinions from the other side of the political spectrum.
A tiny digital tag developed at the UW can for the first time see when birds meet in the wild, offering a window into animal social networks. A study in Current Biology used the tags to track the social habits of New Caledonian crows, and found a surprising amount of interaction among the tool-using birds.
The scientists were selected for their inventive ideas to transform their field of research and improve the health of the public.
Feeling wheezy? You could call the doctor. Or soon you could use your smartphone to diagnose your lung health, with a new app that uses the frequencies in the breath to determine how much and how fast you can exhale.
The UW’s new Molecular Engineering and Sciences Building opens this fall with a series of kick-off events focused on this emerging area of research. The associated Institute will focus on research applications in medicine and clean energy.
An international team of researchers has made headway toward a comprehensive listing of all the working parts of the human genome. More than 30 scientific papers appear today, include major work by UW researchers. The London Museum of Science celebrates with ceiling banners and aerial dancers.
This summer the UW hosted the first World Lab Summer Institute, which brings together computing and design students from the UW and Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The students spent seven weeks devising ways that technology could be used to address global issues in health, environment and education.
A team of University of Washington students designed a unique rocket motor and launched it 5 miles up to claim first prize this summer in the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition. The UW students built a new type of motor powered by a combination of solid paraffin and liquid nitrous oxide. So-called hybrid propulsion systems are a nontoxic, safer alternative to space agency rockets that use hazardous liquid propellants such as hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide and fuming nitric acid. Safe but powerful…
Do you have what it takes to be an ethical hacker? Can you step into the shoes of a professional paid to outsmart supposedly locked-down systems? Now you can at least try, no matter what your background, with a new card game developed by University of Washington computer scientists. “Control-Alt-Hack” gives teenage and young-adult players a taste of what it means to be a computer-security professional defending against an ever-expanding range of digital threats. The game’s creators will present it…
Mechanical engineering students last weekend braved uncharted waters as they paddled to the finish line at the annual Milk Carton Derby at Green Lake, in what they believe is the world’s first boat made using a 3-D printer.
University of Washington engineers and scientists are one step closer to deploying sophisticated equipment that will collect important information about ocean properties like currents and temperature and send the information via the Internet in real time to scientists around the world.
Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things.
The University of Washington has launched a new program, co-funded by Intel Corp., to make it easier and cheaper to build silicon photonic circuits. Sending information using light, instead of electrons, will allow for faster, lower-power and more versatile microchips.
The UW chapter of Engineers Without Borders hosts its biggest fundraiser of the year, a dessert and wine tasting and silent auction, on Monday, Jan. 31. See a slide show of the group’s work in Bolivia.
The On-Ramps into Academia workshop at the UW aims to lure women researchers working in government, industry or as consultants to academic positions. Applications for the second workshop, this spring, are due Feb. 15.
Students in the Biorobotics Laboratory hacked the Kinect, a motion-based controller for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming system, for research on telerobotic surgery.
UW scientists are helping to prepare for a tidal energy project in Puget Sound. Researchers say this pilot project will have the most comprehensive environmental monitoring of any tidal energy installation to date.
Engineers are developing computer models to study how changes in water pressure and current speed around tidal turbines affect sediment buildup and fish health.
Like a deep-sea bloodhound, Sentry — the newest in an elite group of unmanned submersibles able to operate on their own in demanding and rugged environments — has helped scientists pinpoint optimal locations for two observation sites of a pioneering seafloor laboratory being planned off Washington and Oregon.