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.
Science
Scientists found that the habitat required for ringed seals — animals under consideration for the threatened species list — to rear their young will drastically shrink this century.
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.
Crows and humans share the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative and positive feelings. The way the brain activates during that process is something the two species also appear to share.
New UW research indicates that shortly before an asteroid impact spelled doom for the dinosaurs, a separate extinction triggered by volcanic eruptions killed life on the ocean floor.
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.
Scientists created comprehensive maps of elusive gene-controlling DNA and a dictionary of the human genome’s programming language
Most genetic changes linked to more than 400 common diseases affect regions of DNA that dictate when genes are switched on or off. Many of these changes affect circuits active during early human development.
Middle school and high school students from the Yakama Nation will have a chance this weekend to peer into space or learn the basics of rocket flight during a daylong festival with scientists from UW and other institutions.
Double flowers – though beautiful – are mutants. UW biologists have found the class of genes responsible in a plant lineage more ancient than the one previously studied, offering a glimpse even further back into the evolutionary development of flowers.
With the recent landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars, for the third time a timepiece assembled at the University of Washington has found a home on the Red Planet.
The UW’s Alaska Salmon Program, now in its 66th field season, focuses not just on fisheries management, but on ecology and evolution as well, and has just won a top fisheries prize.
A University of Washington scientist has proposed an experiment to test cloud brightening, a geoengineering concept that alters clouds in an effort to counter global warming.
Forest searches using specially trained dogs improved the probability of finding spotted owls by nearly 30 percent over traditional vocalization surveys.
University of Washington researchers used some new techniques this year in hopes of improving the accuracy of their annual prediction of the low point of Arctic sea ice.
David Montgomery, a University of Washington geologist, is the author of a new book that explores the long history of religious thinking on matters of geological discovery, particularly flood stories such as the biblical account of Noah’s ark.
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…
When Rachel Aronson travels this month to Alaska, she and a local research assistant will interview people who are in danger of being displaced by climate change. She will also send about 100 postcards to her funders. Aronson is among a growing number of University of Washington students, faculty and staff who are using online campaigns to pay for their research. Crowdsourcing uses the Internet to broadcast a question and pool the answers; crowd funding uses the Internet to post…
Despite the increasing awareness of the problem of obesity in the United States, most Americans don’t know whether they are gaining or losing weight, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also known at IHME, at the University of Washington. Obesity increased in the U.S. between 2008 and 2009, but in response to the questions about year-to-year changes in weight that were included in the most widespread public health survey in the country, on average,…
Salmon conservation shouldn’t narrowly focus on managing flows in streams and rivers or on preserving only places that currently have strong salmon runs. Instead, watersheds need a good mix of steep, cold-running streams and slower, meandering streams of warmer water to keep options open for salmon adapted to reproduce better in one setting than the other, new research shows. Preserving that sort of varied landscape serves not just salmon, it provides an all-summer buffet that brown bears, gulls and other…
The Washington State Academy of Sciences has named 35 new members, 25 of them from the University of Washington.
When a University of Washington researcher listened to the audio picked up by a recording device that spent a year in the icy waters off the east coast of Greenland, she was stunned at what she heard: whales singing a remarkable variety of songs nearly constantly for five wintertime months. Listen to the bowheads repeat their other-worldly song as they cross the Fram Strait. Bowhead whale song 1 Bowhead whale song 2 Kate Stafford, an oceanographer with UW’s Applied Physics…
The first U.S. cabled ocean observatory reached a milestone on July 14 with the installation of a node 9,500 feet deep off the coast of Oregon. Like a giant electrical outlet on the seafloor that also provides Internet connectivity, the node was spliced into a network of cable segments totalling some 560 miles that were laid in the summer of 2011. Six more of these primary nodes — each about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — are being installed…
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…
Jay Z. Parrish, University of Washington assistant professor of biology, has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Robert J. Naiman has received the highest award given by the Ecological Society of America, the world’s largest society of professional ecologists.
A new professional development program aims to nurture neuroscientists who are underrepresented minorities as they enter faculty positions.
UW researchers found that the decline in milk production due to climate change will vary across the U.S., since there are significant differences in humidity and how much the temperature swings between night and day across the country.
As scientists around the world celebrated the detection of what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson, University of Washington physicists took satisfaction in knowing they played a significant part in it.
Researchers have long believed that the longer days and calmer seas of spring set off an annual bloom of plants in the North Atlantic, but UW scientists discovered that warm eddies fuel the growth three weeks before the sun does.
Four incoming faculty members promise to make the University of Washington a leading institution in machine learning and the science of “big data.”
In one of the twists of scientific discovery, a UW duo working on fusion energy — harnessing the energy-generating mechanism of the sun — may have found a way to etch the next generation of microchips.
It’s been a decade since a swarm of relatively mild earthquakes shook up parts of Spokane. Now, armed with the right tools, scientists want to find out what was at fault.
A research team led by the University of Washington and Harvard University has discovered a bigger version of Earth locked in an orbital tug-of-war with a much larger, Neptune-sized planet as they orbit very close to each other around the same star.
New research from an international team that includes a UW professor emeritus confirms that the Arctic has gone through intensely warm periods, warmer than scientists thought was possible, during the last 2.8 million years.
University of Washington scientists are studying swirling whirlpools in the Sargasso Sea via a pioneering experiment that repeatedly sent profilers deep into the ocean and back to the surface in unison.
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.
Axial Seamount, an undersea volcano, gave warning signals hours before its eruption, scientists say in three papers published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.
An unappreciated aspect of chemical reactions on the surface of metal oxides could be key in developing more efficient energy systems, including more productive solar cells or hydrogen fuel cells efficient enough for automobiles.