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Technology
Bacteria speed up their evolution by positioning specific genes along the route of expected traffic jams in DNA encoding. Collisions can result in mutations.
Scientists come closer to boosting heart muscle by powering its contractile machinery.
UW Botanic Gardens is digitizing 55 years of handwritten plant records and creating an interactive GIS map for the Washington Park Arboretum.
UW’s Field Research and Consultation Group in Environmental and Occupational Health assess ventilation systems and airborne lead levels in firing ranges, and offer advice on lowering exposure.
Atmospheric scientists are using pressure readings from some new smartphones and tablet computers to improve short-term thunderstorm forecasts. A weather station in every pocket would offer an unprecedented wealth of data.
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.
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.
Daniela Witten named one of Forbes’ rising stars
The new procedure may improve the quality of life for men with spinal cord lesions or injuries.
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
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.
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.
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.
The approach could lead to cell therapy treatments for some of the blood-forming disorders that accompany the common genetic condition.
Three undergraduates won $100,000 to form a company that will work with partners in Oaxaca, Mexico, to build machines that can transform waste plastic into composting toilets and pieces for rainwater harvesting systems.
The Living Voters Guide, created by the UW and presented with Seattle’s CityClub, just won a regional award and has been updated for the 2012 election. This year the guide has expanded to include a California edition, and the Washington guide will include fact-checking of selected points by Seattle Public Library staff.
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.
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.
Two young UW researchers sought to reduce the error rate in DNA sequencing to better pinpoint cells that are mutating.
As the U.S. presidential election approaches, many voters become voracious consumers of online political news. A new tool tracks whether all those articles really provide a balanced view of the debate – and, if not, suggests some sites that offer opinions from the other side of the political spectrum.
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 scientists were selected for their inventive ideas to transform their field of research and improve the health of the public.
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.
Christopher Marshall underwent a seven-hour heart transplant surgery yesterday, Sept. 12, a UW Medical Center.
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.
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.
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.
This summer the UW hosted the first World Lab Summer Institute, which brings together computing and design students from the UW and Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The students spent seven weeks devising ways that technology could be used to address global issues in health, environment and education.
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.
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…
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…
A memorial for R.L. “Bob” Morgan, 57, an expert in “identity management” for UW Information Technology, will be held in Kane Hall 225 (the Walker-Ames Room) at 11 a.m. Sunday, July 29. He died July 12 during cancer treatment at UW Medical Center. Besides his work in identity management, which provides the foundation for safe access to digital resources such as email and online banking, he also was recognized internationally for his work in “federated identity,” a more secure approach…
A group of Washington high-school students will arrive at the University of Washington campus this week for the annual DO-IT Scholars Summer Study program. It’s the 20th anniversary of the summer program, which has now helped launch the careers of hundreds of students from Washington and beyond who have a wide range of disabilities. DO-IT Scholars, July 17-27 DO-IT stands for Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology. The students learn about challenging careers in fields including science, technology, engineering and mathematics….
Students in the UW’s new 3-D printing club plan to enter tomorrow Milk Carton Derby at Green Lake with what they believe is the world’s first 3-D printed boat, made from more than 150 recycled, melted and extruded milk cartons.
A senior class in Aeronautics & Astronautics won a national competition with the students’ detailed plan to travel to the moon, establish a mining outpost and jettison the product back to Earth.
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.