Slideshow includes with images sketched by Jack DeLap, UW doctoral candidate in environmental and forestry sciences.
Science
The national, decade-long ACTIVE study showed that cognitive training can help the elderly maintain certain thinking and reasoning skills useful in everyday life.
A clinical trial in Seattle is testing a technique developed at the UW that uses low-power ultrasound to reposition kidney stones.
University of Washington seismologists this week installed two strong-motion seismometers at CenturyLink Field in Seattle to augment an existing station in recording shaking from “earthquakes” expected on Saturday during the NFC divisional game between the Seattle Seahawks and New Orleans Saints. The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network is preparing a special website at www.pnsn.org/seahawks for the game to display seismograms from all three seismic stations in near-real time, and seismologists will also be available to explain interesting signals. Seismologists also will highlight…
Despite their scary reputation, carnivores deserve credit for all kinds of ecological services when they eat grazing animals that gobble down young trees and other vegetation that could be holding carbon and protecting streams.
University of Washington astronomers and colleagues have measured the distance to galaxies six billion light-years away — about halfway back to the Big Bang — to an accuracy of just 1 percent.
Population growth since 1980 drives increases in the number of smokers in countries including China and Russia, while Canada, Mexico, and the United States see strong declines
University of Washington engineers hope a new type of vaccine they have shown to work in mice will one day make it cheaper and easy to manufacture on-demand vaccines for humans. Immunizations could be administered within minutes where and when a disease is breaking out.
The UW’s new “Future of Ice” initiative includes several new research hires, a new minor in Arctic studies and a free winter lecture series.
David Catling’s new book, part of an Oxford University Press series, aims to explain astrobiology to a general audience.
A new study in Science, co-authored by the British Antarctic Survey and UW authors, shows that melting of the floating Pine Island ice shelf is tied to global atmospheric patterns associated with El Niño.
When a bacterial cell divides into two daughter cells there can be an uneven distribution of cellular organelles. The resulting cells can behave differently from each other, giving them an evolutionary advantage.
Clark was recognized for his work in the neurobiology of motivated behavior. His award will support investigations of how alcohol exposure during the teen years might lead to chronic alcoholism in adults.
Fish “stripped” to their skeletons and stained for UW research are now part of an art exhibit at the Seattle Aquarium.
Cell surface lipids hide molecular patterns that infection-killing cells might recognize as dangerous.
Virulent, drug-resistant forms of E. coli that recently have spread around the world emerged from a single strain of the bacteria, not many different strains, as has been widely supposed.
A special interdisciplinary issue of the journal Climatic Change includes the most detailed description yet of the proposed Oxford Principles to govern geoengineering research, and surveys the technical hurdles, ethics and regulatory issues related to deliberately manipulating the planet’s climate.
A new University of Washington institute to develop efficient, cost-effective solar power and better energy storage systems launched Dec. 12 with an event attended by UW President Michael K. Young, Gov. Jay Inslee and researchers, industry experts and policy leaders in renewable energy.
Finding a second code hiding in the genome casts new light on how changes to DNA impact health and disease.
As the Endangered Species Act nears its 40th birthday at the end of December, conservation biologists are coming to terms with a danger not foreseen in the 1970s: global climate change.
An atmospheric peculiarity the Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, University of Washington astronomers have found, and knowing that may help in the search for potentially habitable worlds.
Like humans, some song sparrows are more effusive than others, at least when it comes to defending their territories. New UW findings show that consistent individual differences exist not only for how aggressive individual song sparrows are but also for how much they use their signals to communicate their aggressive intentions.
New research indicates that a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement” could be intrinsically linked with the creation of wormholes.
Five University of Washington researchers are among new fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The mystery of how the surface of Mars, long dead and dry, could have flowed with water billions of years ago may have been solved by research that included a University of Washington astronomer.
Filtered from a vast sodium sea, more than 1 million calcium ions per second gush through our cells’ pores to generate charges
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.
UW researchers this month are on missions to fly above the Arctic Ocean to measure glacier melt, polar storms and Arctic sea ice.
Rapamycin, an anti-rejection drug for organ transplant patients, has now been shown to increases survival in and delayed symptoms of Leigh’s syndrome. The drug appears to cause a metabolic switch that bypasses the mitochondrial deficiency.
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.
The method may help overcome a major obstacle that has delayed progress in designing rapid, low-cost — but still accurate — ways to assemble genomes from scratch. It also may validate certain types of chromosomal abnormalities in cancer.
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.
Brainy crows subject of TEDx talk Saturday || Town Hall talk “Stories from My Pet Rocks” tonight
Future diabetes treatment approaches might target regulatory systems in both the brain and the pancreas to achieve better blood glucose control, or even put the disease into remission.
Physicists are using a detector at the UW to search for a particle called an axion, which would be the first physical evidence of the universe’s dark matter.
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.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery for adults, but for babies it’s their foremost tool for learning. Now researchers from the University of Washington and Temple University have found the first evidence revealing a key aspect of the brain processing that occurs in babies to allow this learning by observation.
UW injury expert Dr. Fred Rivara was vice chair of the committee. Its report recommends actions to reduce the occurrence and consequences of youth concussions in sports and in the military, and stresses the need to better understand their nature and treatment.