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January 29, 2013

News Digest: Explore global food law Feb. 8, Honor: Nina Isoherranen

Explore global food law at Feb. 8 UW conference || Nina Isoherranen honored for early-career achievement


Pioneer of human values in technology design to give University Faculty Lecture

Drumheller Fountain and Gerberding Hall on the UW campus.

Information School professor Batya Friedman will give the University Faculty Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7 in Room 130 of Kane Hall.


Beer’s bitter compounds could help brew new medicines

A humulone molecule is superimposed on a hops vine and a glass of beer.

A UW researcher has determined the precise configuration of substances derived from hops that give beer its distinctive flavor, a finding that could lead to important new pharmaceuticals.


January 24, 2013

Astronomy to go: UW readies new portable planetarium

The University of Washington astronomy department is readying a traveling planetarium to take to schools for outreach — and collaboration — in Seattle and beyond. It may look like a carnival bouncy house or an inflatable igloo, but the portable planetarium is in fact an innovative tool for teaching and spreading interest in astronomy. The…


Organic ferroelectric molecule shows promise for memory chips, sensors

Image of electric response

A paper in Science describes an organic crystal that shows promise as a cheap, flexible, nontoxic material for the working parts of memory chips, sensors and energy-harvesting devices.


January 23, 2013

Greenland ice core shows Antarctica vulnerable to warming

A core section of Greenland ice.

A UW scientist’s work aided a Greenland ice study that could indicate where Earth is headed with climate change.


Better outlook for dwindling black macaque population in Indonesia

a group of black macaques in Indonesia

Hunting and habitat loss harm the critically endangered Sulawesi black macaque, but new research shows the population has stabilized in the past decade.


January 22, 2013

Brain structure of infants predicts language skills at 1 year

One year old baby with experimenters

Researchers at UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas – the hippocampus and cerebellum – can predict children’s language abilities at 1 year of age.


January 18, 2013

Documents that changed the world: The fraudulent ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’

The cover the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Joe Janes investigates the 1900-era anti-Semitic manifesto “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”


January 17, 2013

Early signals warn of prolonged sports concussion symptoms

A play from the 2005 Poinsettia Bowl.

Researchers found little correlation between loss of consciousness and duration of concussion symptoms.


January 16, 2013

High school athletes take lead from coaches in reporting concussive symptoms

New laws in many states require school athletes to be taught about concussion, but education alone is ineffective if it does not translate into students reporting possible symptoms.


A family’s lost story found, and the Sephardic Studies Initiative

Devin Naar with 1910-1920 wedding announcement

For Devin Naar, the Sephardic Studies Initiative is not just a valuable historical archive, it has also been a personal journey revealing an untold family story from World War II.


January 15, 2013

International study: Where there’s smoke or smog, there’s climate change

Scientists taking snow samples in Greenland.

A new international assessment found that soot, or black carbon, is a major contributor to global warming — second only to carbon dioxide.


January 14, 2013

Salmon runs boom, go bust over centuries

Mountains surround lake, stream in Alaska

Salmon runs are notoriously variable: strong one year, and weak the next. New research shows that the same may be true from one century to the next.


Potential harvest of most fish stocks largely unrelated to abundance

Big eye tuna on ice

Fisheries managers should sharpen their ability to spot environmental conditions that hamper or help fish stocks, and not assume that abundance translates to sustainable harvest.


New book by James Wellman explores the rise, effect of Pastor Rob Bell

The cover of "Rob Bell and a new American Christianity."

James Wellman, UW associate professor of American religion, talks about his book, “Rob Bell and a New American Christianity.”


January 10, 2013

Multiple sclerosis study reveals how killer T cells learn to recognize nerve fiber insulators

Misguided killer T cells may be the missing link in sustained tissue damage in the brains and spines of people with multiple sclerosis, research in immunologist Joan Goverman’s lab suggests.


Life possible on extrasolar moons

Exomoons, or moons orbiting planets outside the solar system, might be as good candidates for life as exoplanets, research shows.


January 9, 2013

UW, Pacific NW National Lab join forces on computing research

Hyak supercomputer at UW.

The University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have formed the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, a joint institute based at the UW that will foster collaborative computing research.


January 8, 2013

‘The Philosophical Child’: A book for when your child asks, ‘Why are we here?’

Art from the cover of Philosophy for Children.

Children are natural philosophers, says Jana Mohr Lone of the UW Department of Philosophy and author of a new book titled “The Philosophical Child.”


January 2, 2013

While in womb, babies begin learning language from their mothers

Baby with image of vowels

Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.


December 31, 2012

News Digest: Honor: Daniela Witten

Headsot of Daniela Witten

Daniela Witten named one of Forbes’ rising stars


Study shows naloxone kits cost-effective in preventing overdose deaths

Giving heroin users kits with the overdose antidote naloxone can help save lives. Efforts are under way to make similar kits available for prescription opioid users.


December 27, 2012

Academic medicine has major economic impact on the state and the nation

The Association of American Medical Colleges reports that its member medical schools and teaching hospitals had a combined economic impact of more than $587 billion in the United States in 2011


December 26, 2012

Piranha kin wielded dental weaponry even T. rex would have admired — with video

Head, teeth and ribs of a piranha skeleton

Taking into consideration size, an ancient relative of piranhas weighing about 20 pounds delivered a bite with more force than prehistoric whale-eating sharks or – even – Tyrannosaurus rex.


December 21, 2012

Training Xchange puts UW research advances into practitioners’ hands

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.


December 20, 2012

Mild brain cooling after head injury prevents epileptic seizures in lab study

EEG superimposed over images of a brain.

Traumatic head injury is the leading cause of acquired epilepsy in young adults, and at present there is no treatment to prevent or cure it.


December 19, 2012

American Academy of Pediatrics issues policy statement on pesticide exposure in children

A child picks and admires a flower during outdoor play.

Chronic low levels of pesticides are detrimental to children’s health: evidence suggests they may induce neurodevelopmental and behavioral problems, birth defects, asthma and cancer.


Composting confusion rampant in UW waste bins, study finds

students sort trash

A study of waste bins at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus revealed that 88 percent of the contents in trash bins could have been recycled or composted. Most – 72 percent – of what didn’t belong in trash bins turned out to be compostable items, such as food, carry-out containers and paper coffee cups.


December 17, 2012

Plumes across the Pacific deliver thousands of microbial species to West Coast

Mount Bachelor observatory.

Microorganisms – 99 percent more kinds than had been reported in findings published just four months ago – are hitching rides in the upper troposphere from Asia.


December 13, 2012

Energy Dept. funds UW project to turn wasted natural gas into diesel

ARPA-E logo

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.


Dark Ages scourge enlightens modern struggle between man and microbes

Discoveries reported today help explain how the stealthy agent of Black Death avoids tripping a self-destruct mechanism inside germ-destroying cells.


December 12, 2012

Intracranial pressure monitoring for traumatic brain injury questioned

Researchers in United States and Latin America re-examine standard of care for severe head injury.


December 11, 2012

Documents that Changed the World: ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’

Cover of the 1867 Robert's Rules of Order.

Joe Janes of the UW Information School visits the arcane world of parliamentary procedure in the latest entry to his Documents that Changed the World podcast series.


December 10, 2012

Armbrust shares $35 million to investigate tiniest ocean regulators

statue of George Washington on UW campus

Oceanographer Ginger Armbrust has received a multi-million dollar award to spend as she wishes on her research into ocean microbes and their role in regulating ocean environments and our atmosphere.


Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested

A graphical representation of two theoretical views of our universe.

A British philosopher once suggested the possibility that our universe might be a computer simulation run by our descendants. A team of physicists at UW has devised a potential test to see if the idea has merit.


December 7, 2012

Crowdsourcing site compiles new sign language for math and science

Richard Ladner and students

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.


December 6, 2012

Moths wired two ways to take advantage of floral potluck

Moths are able to enjoy a pollinator’s buffet of flowers because of two distinct “channels” in their brains, scientists have discovered.


December 4, 2012

Crowdsourcing the cosmos: Astronomers welcome all to identify star clusters in Andromeda galaxy

Astronomers are inviting the public to search Hubble Space Telescope images of the Andromeda galaxy to help identify star clusters and increase understanding of how galaxies evolve. The new Andromeda Project, set to study thousands of high-resolution Hubble images, is a collaboration among scientists at the University of Washington, the University of Utah and several…


Scientists find oldest dinosaur – or closest relative yet

Artist's drawing of what Nyasasaurus parringtoni looked like

Researchers have discovered what may be the earliest dinosaur, a creature the size of a Labrador retriever, but with a five foot-long tail, that walked the Earth about 10 million years before more familiar dinosaurs.



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