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.
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.
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.
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.
A new UW club has qualified to participate in an international underwater robot competition and has designed its robot to be used by UW oceanographers in the field.
Bioengineers have developed the first structure to grow small human blood vessels, creating a 3-D test bed that offers a better way to study disease, test drugs and perhaps someday grow human tissues for transplant.
Beth Kolko’s experimental course takes its cue from the hacker community, helping students of any major get a taste of what it means to build software and hardware.
A textured surface mimics a lotus leaf to move drops of liquid in particular directions. The low-cost system could be used in portable medical or environmental tests.
Last year, they were underdogs. This year, they’re a dynasty. A team of eight students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering reclaimed the top stop at last weekend’s National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.
The cells that line the pipes leading to the heart pull more tightly together in areas of fast-flowing blood. The cells’ mechanical response to their environment could aid understanding of heart disease.
A History Channel documentary on the Titanic airing Sunday includes materials testing in the UW’s Structural Research Laboratory. UW faculty and staff participated in the testing.
A magnetized ion plasma system devised by a UW researcher to propel spacecraft at ultra-high speeds could be adapted to clean up dead satellites and other debris crowded in Earth orbit.
The fourth Environmental Innovation Challenge was the biggest yet. The winning team proposes to replace concrete lane dividers with ones made from recycled rubber tires. Other student teams presented their prototypes for emergency shelters, rooftop gardens, nonstick cookware and other green businesses.
Students want better wireless and electrical connections on campus, while faculty would like more consistent and more flexible configurations of classroom technology, a new survey shows.
Greenroads, a rating system developed at the University of Washington to promote sustainable roadway construction, awarded its first official certification to a Bellingham project that incorporates porcelain from recycled toilets.
On the one-year anniversary of Japan’s great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, UW scientists said the devastating event has some important lessons for the Pacific Northwest – most notably, that a similar event will happen here, and this region is much less prepared than Japan.
Over the next three years, a team of UW students will convert a 2013 Chevy Malibu into a fuel-efficient, low-emissions vehicle that still meets consumer demands for a driver-friendly car. The UW is one of 15 schools participating in the EcoCAR 2 contest, sponsored by General Motors and the U.S. Department of Energy.
The Design Help Desk offers scientists a chance to meet with a student who can help them create more effective figures, tables and graphs. This visual equivalent of a Writing Help Desk is also a study on how to teach data visualization.
A business incubator unveiled today is one element in a larger commercialization initiative announced by UW President Michael Young that will double the number of startups produced by the university – from an average of 10 a year to 20 – during the next three years.
The walls of the aorta, the largest blood vessel carrying blood from the heart, exhibits a response to electric fields known to exist in inorganic and synthetic materials. The discovery could have implications for treating human heart disease.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded a grant of $3.5 million to a multi-university, regional transportation center led by the University of Washington. The newly established Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium, or PacTrans, will focus on safe and sustainable transportation systems.
Seven identical robots created and built at the UW will be flown to campuses across the country, where they will provide the first common research platform to develop the future of surgical robotics. The robots will be display Friday at an open house.
A new plasma pencil promises to give nutrition status in minutes that used to take 24 hours, and could improve health in developing world.
Bionic eye steps closer to reality.
Aeronautical engineers are devising ways to boost the efficiency of open-air refrigerated cases, which are increasingly common in supermarkets. Results could lower the energy use of existing cases by up to 15 percent — potentially saving $100 million in electricity costs each year.
Faculty and staff can now take advantage of new software licensing agreements that provide even more products for use on UW-owned computers at no additional cost.
Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things.
On the eve of the certification of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner by the Federal Aviation Administration, Washington Senator Maria Cantwell held a press conference on the UW campus highlighting the work of a federally funded research center that helped realize that goal.
On the 20-year anniversary of the World Wide Web, computer scientist Oren Etzioni has written a two-page commentary in the journal Nature that calls on the international academic and business communities to take a bolder approach when designing how people find information online.
Computer scientists have created a way to take images from the web or personal photos collections and in seconds create an animation of a persons face. The tool can make a face appear to age over time, or gradually change the expression from a smile to a frown.