Grand Challenges Exploration Grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will allow two UW-led teams to study the health determinants people share with other living creatures.
Environment
Washington Sea Grant’s “Pumpout Paddlers” are readying their kayaks for winter paddling to deliver more adapters so boaters have a cleaner, easier way to pump their sewage-holding tanks.
UW researchers this month are on missions to fly above the Arctic Ocean to measure glacier melt, polar storms and Arctic sea ice.
University of Washington researchers have found that tree cover actually causes snow to melt more quickly in warm, Mediterranean-type climates. Alternatively, open, clear gaps in the forests tend to keep snow on the ground longer into the spring and summer. Their findings were published this fall in Water Resources Research.
An intensive two week field course helped 20 University of Washington students learn firsthand about the challenges of managing dry, fire-prone forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Floods didn’t make floodplains fertile during the dawn of human agriculture in the Earth’s far north. Turns out early human inhabitants can mainly thank cyanobacteria. It raises the question of whether modern farmers might reduce fertilizer use by taking advantage of cyanobacteria that occur, not just in the floodplains studied, but in soils around the world.
A new comprehensive report co-authored by the UW’s Climate Impacts Group looks at what climate change will mean for Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
Atmospheric scientist Dan Jaffe tonight will present the first results of a crowd-funded study of train emissions, conducted with four undergraduates from the Seattle and Bothell campuses and funded by public donations.
Scientists found a way to use coastal redwood trees as a window into historic climate, using oxygen and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons.
A new study in Nature Geoscience explains a major feature of global precipitation, and shows how a current originating from the poles influences tropical rainfall in Africa and southern India.
Learn how to be more involved with campus sustainability during UW Sustainability Summit activities Oct. 23.
The UW, Boeing and an Everett company are building a carbon-fiber submersible that will carry five passengers almost 2 miles deep.
UW faculty members were among international researchers who compiled the fifth climate-change assessment report. The UW will host a seminar Tuesday, Oct. 1 with some of the Seattle-area authors.
Dried filters from the mouths of filter-feeding rays started appearing in apothecary shops in recent years, but there’s been no way to know which of these gentle-natured rays was being slaughtered. Now scientists have discovered enough differences to identify the giant manta and eight devil rays using the dried filters.
In a seven-week cruise this past summer, oceanographers and students laid 14 miles of extension cable and installed about a dozen instruments for a historic deep-sea observatory.
Despite warming temperatures, Antarctic sea ice is on track to hit a record high. A new study suggests stronger polar winds can explain the recent increase in Southern Hemisphere sea ice.
The residents of the Georgetown and South Park neighborhoods in Seattle’s Duwamish Valley now know how much diesel exhaust they are exposed to. A report on findings from an air pollution study comparing these neighborhoods to Beacon Hill and Queen Anne was published today, Sept. 13.
University of Washington engineers have received a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to design a better cookstove, which researchers say will use half as much fuel and cut emissions by 90 percent.
Oceanographers for the first time recorded an enormous wave breaking miles below the surface in a key bottleneck for global ocean circulation.
Computer-designed proteins that can recognize and interact with small biological molecules are now a reality. Scientists have succeeded in creating a protein molecule that can be programmed to unite with three different steroids.
UW researchers and federal scientists have developed the first long-term seasonal forecast of conditions for the Northwest ocean ecosystem.
The University of Washington has again been named to the Princeton Review’s Green Honor Roll, receiving the highest score possible for the 2012-13 academic year.
Washington’s governor and state legislators in the last session created a hub at the University of Washington to coordinate research and monitoring of ocean acidification and its effects on local sea life such as oysters, clams and fish.
UW researchers have discovered a high-performance polymer that could make inexpensive, organic solar cells competitive with silicon-based cells.
A UW atmospheric scientist is co-author of a review paper, published this week in the journal Science, looking at the ecological consequences of sea ice decline.
Biologist Robert Paine has been awarded this year’s International Cosmos Prize that carries a cash award of about $408,000 and has previously gone to well-known conservationists such as David Attenborough and the leaders behind the Census of Marine Life project.
Widespread media reports of a lake at the North Pole don’t hold water — but scientists who deployed the monitoring buoys are watching closely as Arctic sea ice approaches its yearly minimum.
It might not have been just happenstance that caused components of RNA and the earliest “cell” membranes to be in the right place at the right time to spark life.
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.
Nighttime heat waves — events where the nighttime low is unusually hot for at least three days in a row — are becoming more common in western Washington and Oregon.
New UW events calendar now available || Follow ocean expedition via bilingual blog, photo page
Julia Parrish was one of 12 “champions of change” invited to share their ideas on public engagement in science and science literacy June 25 at the White House.
Dozens of atmospheric scientists, including three University of Washington faculty members, are taking part in what’s being described as one of the largest atmospheric field campaigns in decades.
A model of great ape history during the past 15 million years has been fashioned through the study of genetic variation in a large panel of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans.
A UW research vessel leaves July 2 for six weeks at sea, during which oceanographers will install miles of cable for a new type of deep-sea observatory.
Leading experts on water issues in the Western U.S. have come together to establish what is known about the future of Colorado River water, and to understand the wide range of estimates for future flows.
Seeds gobbled by birds and dispersed across the landscape tend to fare better than those that fall near parent plants. Now it turns out it might not just be the trip through the air that’s important, but also the inches-long trip through the bird.
In the first broad-scale study of its kind, UW led research finds half a dozen regions that could provide some of the Western Hemisphere’s more heavily used thoroughfares for mammals, birds and amphibians seeking cooler environments in a warming world.
In “Spring Comes to the Cascades,” students don’t just read about the forests – they hike and snowshoe through them.
Air pollution in the Northern Hemisphere in the mid-20th century cooled the upper half of the planet and pushed rain bands south, contributing to the prolonged and worsening drought in Africa’s Sahel region. Clean air legislation in the 1980s reversed the trend and the drought lessened.