Daniela Witten named one of Forbes’ rising stars


Daniela Witten named one of Forbes’ rising stars

The Seahawks win four times as many home games as they lose when the weather is inclement, compared to less than two to one when it’s not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Research suggests rising atmospheric acidity is probably why levels of the isotope nitrogen-15 in Greenland ice samples dropped around the time of the Industrial Revolution.

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

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 other partners. “It’s an amazing opportunity to discover something new,” said Julianne Dalcanton, UW astronomy professor. “Anyone can look at these beautiful Hubble images and…

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.

The Kamchatka Peninsula and Kuril Islands, long shrouded in secrecy by the Soviet government, are a seismic and volcanic hotbed with a potential to trigger tsunamis that pose a risk to the rest of the Pacific Basin.

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.

Climatologists have reconciled their measurements of ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland during the past two decades. A second article looks at how to monitor and understand accelerating losses from the planet’s two largest continental ice sheets.

The spectrum of human genetic diversity today is vastly different than what it was only 200 to 400 generations ago.

Food webs needed by young salmon in the Columbia River basin are likely compromised in places, something that should be considered when prioritizing expensive restoration activities.

Studying the molecular basis of progressive muscle weakness may lead to therapies to prevent or reduce symptoms.

UW astronomers find that planets orbiting white and brown dwarfs are unlikely to be good candidates for sustaining life.

UW researchers find the flash flood was set off by a string of unusual weather events similar to those that caused catastrophic U.S. floods in the 1970s.

The approach could lead to cell therapy treatments for some of the blood-forming disorders that accompany the common genetic condition.

The Stanford University faculty member will talk about a group of cell membrane receptors that are crucial for emotion, behavior, memory, vision, motion and many other activities. About 40 percent of medications act via these receptors.

Representatives of the Encyclopedia of Earth and the Encyclopedia of Life will be on the University of Washington campus Wednesday, Oct. 24, for the public launch of an encyclopedia unique to Puget Sound.
It’s time to think differently about how we interact with nature because we’re increasingly disconnected from the natural world, said Dan Ashe during visit to campus.

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.

New UW research shows that 2,047 research papers that have been retracted since 1977, misconduct—blatantly falsified data or data manipulation— was the cause in 41 percent of the cases.

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.

UW scientists are teaming with the U.S. Coast Guard to study the new frontier in the Arctic Ocean opened up with the melting ice.

Two young UW researchers sought to reduce the error rate in DNA sequencing to better pinpoint cells that are mutating.

Findings suggest new ways to study controls of early human development, causes of birth defects, and regeneration of damaged tissue.

The New York Times’ Scientist at Work blog is featuring posts from Jim Thomson, an oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, as he seeks big waves in the North Pacific.

New University of Washington research suggests that early microbes might have been widespread on land, producing oxygen before the atmosphere was oxygen-rich.

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 National Science Foundation has awarded a $20 million grant over five years in reauthorizing the Center for Enabling New Technologies Through Catalysis based at the University of Washington.

The scientists were selected for their inventive ideas to transform their field of research and improve the health of the public.