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A new collaborative study led by a research team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Washington could provide engineers new design rules for creating microelectronics, membranes and tissues, and open up better production methods for new materials.

This week in the arts, learn about the history of art and its politics in Japan post-1945, see the final performances of Fefu and Her Friends, take a workshop at the Henry Art Gallery, and more! Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan December 7, 3:30 PM| Thomson Hall Justin Jesty, associate professor at the University of Washington Department of Asian Languages and Literature will be giving a talk on his newly published book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar…

A study by an international team of researchers, including from the University of Washington, determines that carved stone tools, also known as Levallois cores, were used in Asia 80,000 to 170,000 years ago. With the find — and absent human fossils linking the tools to migrating populations — researchers believe people in Asia developed the technology independently, evidence of similar sets of skills evolving throughout different parts of the ancient world.

This week in the arts, shop for hand-printed gifts, attend a sonic-theatrical performance, dive into lectures about Indian Painting in Mewar and Marwar, and more! Print Sale November 14 to 15, 8:00 AM–7:00 PM | Art Building Hand-printed artwork, cards, soft goods, and more! UW student members of the UW Printmaking Association and UW printmaking alums invite the community and public to their Print Sale. More Info Kurbasy November 16, 8:00 PM | Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theater From the Carpathian mountains,…

In a paper published Oct. 8 in the journal Nano Letters, a team from the University of Washington and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan announced that it has constructed functional metalenses that are one-tenth to one-half the thickness of the wavelengths of light that they focus. Their metalenses, which were constructed out of layered 2D materials, were as thin as 190 nanometers — less than 1/100,000ths of an inch thick.

This week in the arts, attend “Unbelievable: Reflections on Caravaggio’s Religious Art” lecture, go to a Print Sale, see Brooklyn Rider perform, and more! Faculty Lecture: Estelle Lingo on Caravaggio November 8, 5:30–6:30 PM | Art Building Estelle Lingo, Associate Professor of Art History and Donald E. Peterson Professor in the Arts,  will give the lecture “Unbelievable: Reflections on Caravaggio’s Religious Art.” Lingo was recently in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National…

Researchers from the University of Washington have shown how Magellanic penguins fare during the winter months when they spend months at sea feeding. They have discovered that oceanographic features are more likely to negatively impact the body conditions of Magellanic penguin females, but not males, when the penguins return to their nesting grounds in spring.

Jiun-Haw Chu, a University of Washington assistant professor of physics and faculty member at the UW’s Clean Energy Institute, has been named a 2018 fellow by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for his research on quantum materials — substances that exhibit novel combinations of quantum-mechanical properties that could one day transform information technology.

A study led by the University of Washington is the first large-scale trial of hundreds of PTSD patients, including veterans and survivors of sexual assault, to measure whether patient preference in the course of treatment impacts the effectiveness of both cognitive behavioral therapy and use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a type of antidepressant often prescribed for PTSD.

Today, Britain is not known as a land of camps, but through much of the 20th century — from after World War I to the 1980s —  the country was home to dozens of refugee camps housing thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians and Vietnamese. As University of Washington history professor Jordanna Bailkin writes in her latest book, these camps “were never only for refugees.” They shared such spaces with “Britons who had been displaced by…

This week in the arts, UW faculty take us into the community, from the Seattle Art Museum to the Royal Room. There will be music, art history lectures, drama, and more! SAM Talks: Peacock in the Desert Discussion October 18, 7:00 pm | Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Avenue, Seattle Dr. Karni Singh Jasol, Director of the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur, and Dr. Sonal Khullar, Associate Professor of Art History at University of Washington, discuss the themes and works on…

This week in the arts, attend the 2018 Chamber Dance Concert, see the works by ten second year MFA students, attend Cello faculty artist-in-residence Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir’s recital, and more. Chamber Dance Company October 11 to 14 | Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theater For its 28th season, the Chamber Dance Company received a National Endowment for the Arts: Art Works grant to present choreography by Harald Kreutzberg (1902-1968). The 2018 concert, Unspoken, addresses matters that are expressed most poignantly with movement––these voiceless works speak fully and…

Pablo García Borboroglu, president of the Global Penguin Society and a UW affiliate associate professor of biology, has won the Whitley Gold Award and the National Geographic/Buffett Award for Leadership in Conservation, as well as accolades from the Argentine National Congress, for his research and advocacy for penguin conservation.

A new book by University of Washington history professor George Behlmer seeks to improve understanding of the British colonial era by “reconsidering the conduct of islanders and the English-speaking strangers who encountered them.”

When levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rise, most plants do something unusual: They thicken their leaves. Now two University of Washington scientists have shown that this reaction by plants will actually worsen climate change by making the global “carbon sink” contributed by plants was less productive.

  For more than 2 million years, the native forests on the Pacific islands of Guam and Rota were home to several thousand crows, members of a species found nowhere else on Earth. But over the last 60 years, the Mariana crow — called the Aga in the Chamorro language — has completely disappeared from the island of Guam and rapidly declined on neighboring Rota. Today there are only about 175 Aga left in the wild. To ensure the survival…

This week in the arts, celebrate Dawg Daze with the Meany Center and ArtsUW, visit the Henry Art Gallery to see Muse, and more. LAST WEEK | Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs tête-à-tête Last day is September 30 | Henry Art Gallery “As the exhibition title suggests, MUSE is a visual love letter to the people who inspire her—both the women who appear as her subjects and the multigenerational roster of other artists who constitute her artistic community.” — Emily Pothast,…

For angiosperms — or flowering plants — one of the most important decisions facing them each year is when to flower. It is no trivial undertaking. To flower, they must cease vegetative growth and commit to making those energetically expensive reproductive structures that will bring about the next generation. Knowledge of this process at the cellular level is critical for understanding how plants allocate resources and produce the components we care most about — including the grains, tubers, leaves, nuts…

The international trade in elephant ivory has been illegal since 1989, yet African elephant numbers continue to decline. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature cited ivory poaching as a primary reason for a staggering loss of about 111,000 elephants between 2005 and 2015 — leaving their total numbers at an estimated 415,000. For media Download soundbites, b-roll and images In a paper published Sept. 19 in the journal Science Advances, an international team led by scientists at…

Margaret O’Mara, UW professor of history, explores the impact of a December 1968 computer presentation that came to be called “the mother of all demos” in an essay and podcast from the news website The Conversation.

When Tony Greenwald and his colleagues developed the online Implicit Association Test two decades ago, it enjoyed quick success in the pre-laptop, pre-smartphone, nascent Internet world, with some 45,000 participants in the first month. The test, which requires classifying words and images rapidly according to their meanings, captures unconscious biases toward — depending on the test version — race, gender, age and dozens of other traits and preferences. Since its debut in 1998, the test has been taken online more…

The National Science Foundation announced on Sept. 11 that it is awarding grants totaling $8.5 million to 19 collaborative projects at 23 universities for the study of complex and entrenched problems in data science. Three of these projects will be based at the University of Washington and led by researchers in the College of Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences.

The University of Washington today opened the doors to a new Life Sciences Building that will transform learning, teaching and research for generations.

The $171 million Life Sciences complex includes seven floors and 207,000 square feet that encourages and makes possible team-oriented science. Designed by Perkins+Will and built by Skanska, the building encompasses a 187,000-square-foot research and teaching facility and a 20,000-square-foot research greenhouse with UW plant collections.

On Sept. 4 the National Science Foundation announced the creation of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics, or IRIS-HEP. The institute is a coalition of 17 research institutions, including the University of Washington, and will receive $25 million from the NSF over five years.