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Tag: College of Arts & Sciences

September 15, 2025

ArtSci Roundup: September and October

Come curious. Leave inspired. We welcome you to connect with us this autumn quarter through an incredible lineup of more than 30 events, exhibitions, podcasts, and more. From thought-provoking talks on monsters to boundary-pushing performances by Grammy-nominated Mariachi ensembles, it’s a celebration of bold ideas and creative energy. ArtSci On Your Own Time Exhibition: Woven in Wool: Resilience in Coast Salish Weaving (Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture) Journey through the seasonal cycle of weaving, from gathering materials and…

Webb telescope finds clues to Earth’s creation in a cosmic butterfly

An image of the core of the Butterfly Nebula.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details in the core of the Butterfly Nebula, known to astronomers as NGC 6302. From the dense ring of dust that surrounds the nebula’s core to the tiny but bright star hidden within, the Webb observations paint a never-before-seen portrait of the nebula’s inner workings. Researchers at the UW and around the world are studying the imagery to learn more about the origins of cosmic dust and its role in the formation of planets like ours.

September 4, 2025

This common fish has an uncommon feature: Forehead teeth, used for mating

An illustration of a fish with teeth in its mouth and teeth on the tip of a trunk-like structure protruding from its forehead.

New findings call into question one of the core assumptions about teeth. Adult male spotted ratfish, a shark-like species native to the eastern Pacific Ocean, have rows of teeth on top of their heads, lining a cartilaginous appendage called the tenaculum, in addition to those in their jaws. They used their tenaculum teeth to grip females while mating in water.

Deep beneath the French Alps, dark matter hunters narrow their search

A mountain in the Alps, a lake below, and the Milky Way galaxy visible in a starry sky above.

Physicists have floated numerous theories to explain what dark matter might be, but to date, no experiment has turned up compelling evidence to support any of them. An international team of physicists, including researchers from the UW, is now working on a new kind of dark matter detector with the goal of capturing the first direct observation of the puzzling material. Results from the detector’s prototype have already ruled out one of the leading theories of how dark matter originated.

August 19, 2025

UW research shows Fresh Bucks program improves fruit and vegetable intake, food security

Fruits and vegetables on a shelf at a grocery store

A new study from the University of Washington shows that households enrolled in the City of Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program experience a 31% higher rate of food security and consume at least three daily servings of fruits and vegetables 37% more often than those assigned to a program waitlist. Fresh Bucks, a $40 a month benefit, works with local partners to help residents access fresh food.

August 18, 2025

Q&A: How marginalized artists invented the Broadway musical

An image of Times Square at night with Broadway musical billboards, including Wicked.

A new book from David Armstrong, University of Washington affiliate instructor of drama, is an historical and cultural account of how the Broadway musical was predominantly created by people marginalized from mainstream society. The book, “Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical,” traces this history through four major eras.

August 11, 2025

Fresh fossil finds in Africa shed light on the era before Earth’s largest mass extinction

An international team of paleontologists, led by researchers at the University of Washington and the Field Museum of Natural History, is identifying the animals that thrived in southern Pangea — the planet’s single supercontinent at the time — just before the so-called “Great Dying” wiped out about 70% of terrestrial species, and an even larger fraction of marine ones.

August 6, 2025

With just a few messages, biased AI chatbots swayed people’s political views

University of Washington researchers recruited self-identifying Democrats and Republicans to make political decisions with help from three versions of ChatGPT: a base model, one with liberal bias and one with conservative bias. Democrats and Republicans were both likelier to lean in the direction of the biased chatbot they were talking with than those participants who interacted with the base model.

June 23, 2025

UW helps bring the cosmos into focus as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory unveils a new glimpse into the solar system

Wide view of the universe

A new era of astronomy and astrophysics began Monday when the first images captured by the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory were released, demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of the new telescope and the world’s largest digital camera.

June 17, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 8: Ethics of Technology

Sara Goering

Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, can help people with severe injuries or impairments regain the ability to communicate or move their arms and legs through robotic substitutes. The devices, which are about the size of a dime and are implanted on the surface of a person’s brain, serve as a communication link between the brain’s neural activity and an external device, such as a computer or a robotic limb. In this episode, Sara Goering, a University of Washington professor of philosophy,…

June 12, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 7: Glitches

Mal Ahern

Imagine sitting in a movie theater watching a film you’ve been anticipating for months. Suddenly, the screen goes blank. It only lasts a second, but that’s long enough to disrupt the experience. It’s also long enough, says Mal Ahern, to remind you of the physical infrastructure behind what we so often see as an immaterial experience. Ahern, a University of Washington assistant professor of cinema and media studies, researches glitches in everything from printers to projectors. In this episode, she…

June 11, 2025

Faculty/staff honors: Innovation grant, best paper, outstanding research award

W statue in front of grass and trees

Recent recognition of the University of Washington includes an EarthLab Innovation Grant, the Best Paper Award from American Political Science Association and honorable recognition mention from the American Society for Theatre Research. UW professor Richard Watts and team awarded EarthLab Innovation Grant Richard Watts, UW associate professor of French, is part of an interdisciplinary team from the UW that received an EarthLab Innovation Grant to support their collaborative project, “Life in Spite of It All: Water, Wetlands, and Reclamation in…

New faculty books: Artificial intelligence, 1990s Russia, song interpretation, and more

A wood grain background with four book covers on it

Recent faculty books from the University of Washington include those from linguistics, Slavic languages and literature and French. UW News spoke with the authors of four publications to learn more about their work. Scrutinizing and confronting AI hype Emily M. Bender, UW professor of linguistics, co-authored “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” with Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. The book looks at the the…

June 10, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 6: Sound Studies

Golden Marie Owens

Virtual assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, can perform a range of tasks or services for users — and a majority of them sound like white women. Golden Marie Owens, assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Washington, says there is much to learn about a person from how they sound. The same holds true for technology. In this episode, Owens discusses her research into why a white woman is the default voice for virtual assistants in…

June 5, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 5: Abstract Pattern Recognition, or Math

Imagine an art class where you only did paint by numbers, or a music class where you weren’t allowed to play a song until you practiced scales for 20 years. This is often what it’s like to take a math class, where students spend most of their time learning to solve problems that have already been figured out. But while the basics are important in any subject, so is creativity. In this episode, Jayadev Athreya discusses mathematics as the language…

June 3, 2025

Millions of new solar system objects to be found and ‘filmed in technicolor’ – studies predict

A visualization of the solar system, black background with various colored dots

A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the University of Washington and led by Queen’s University Belfast, have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects will be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this year.  

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 4: Global Disability Studies

Since 2014, The European Union has been crafting policy on the rights of disabled people with “independent living” as a key element. Officials noticed the law wasn’t being followed in countries like Malta, so they moved these young people into their own apartments. But these were pretty much the only people in their 20s who weren’t still living at home. This is an example of Western bias in disability studies, says Stephen Meyers, a UW associate professor of law, societies…

Muon g-2 announces most precise measurement of the magnetic anomaly of the muon

a giant magnetic ring in a research facility. Inside the ring are towers and people are working on them.

On June 3, scientists working on the Muon g-2 experiment (pronounced “mew-on gee-minus-two”) released the third and final measurement of the muon magnetic anomaly. This result agrees with the published results from 2021 and 2023 but with a much better precision of 127 parts per billion, surpassing the original experimental design goal of 140 parts per billion.

May 28, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 3: Ge’ez

The kingdom of Aksum was one of the most powerful empires in the world in the fourth century. It played a major role in the histories of Egypt, Persia and Rome, as well as the early days of Christianity and Islam. But Aksum’s accomplishments have long been overlooked because they are recorded in the ancient African language of Ge’ez. Like Latin, Ge’ez is rarely spoken today. It’s taught at just three universities in the Western world, including by Hamza Zafer…

May 22, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 2: Paratext

There is more to literature than the text itself. Anything that surrounds the text — from the cover to chapter headings and author bios — is known as paratext. This is what transforms text into a book.   Richard Watts’s research focuses on this under-examined aspect of literature. In this episode, Watts, an associate professor of French at the University of Washington, explains how everything we read comes with accompanying discourse. Decisions have already been made about how readers should…

May 20, 2025

‘Ways of Knowing’ Episode 1: Digital Humanities

English, philosophy and comparative literature aren’t typically subjects that come to mind when thinking about big datasets. But the intersection between literature and data analysis is exactly where Anna Preus works.   Preus, a University of Washington assistant professor of English and of data science, digitally streamlined the process of documenting the number of non-British poets published in early 20th-century Great Britain. The number was enormous, but these poets are still absent from the literary canon — a discrepancy that…

April 15, 2025

ArtSci Roundup: May 2025

From campus to wherever you call home, we welcome you to learn from and connect with the College of Arts & Sciences community through public events spanning the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. We hope to see you this May. Innovation Month April 30 | An Evening with Christine Sun Kim (Public Lecture) May 1 | John Jennings: The AfroFuture Now (Public Lecture) May 3 | Third Coast Percussion and Jessie Montgomery: Strum, Strike, Bend (Meany Center) May…

March 31, 2025

Discovery of Quina technology challenges view of ancient human development in East Asia

Stone tools on a black background

Ben Marwick, a University of Washington professor of archaeology, was part of a team of researchers that uncovered a complete Quina technological system in the Longtan site in southwest China. The discovery challenges the widely held perception that the Middle Paleolithic period was mostly static in East Asia.

March 19, 2025

Faculty/staff honors: Best paper, collaborative innovation, young investigator award

bronze W

Recent recognition of the University of Washington includes the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS Pluralistic Alignment Workshop, Scialog: Early Science with the LSST Collaborative Innovation Award and 2024 AVS Thin Film Young Investigator Award. Professor wins ‘best paper’ at NeurIPS Pluralistic Alignment Workshop Max Kleiman-Weiner, assistant professor in the UW Foster School of Business, received the $1,000 Best Paper Award on Pluralistic Alignment at the NeurIPS 2024 Workshop. The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, is one of…

February 18, 2025

Three UW scientists named Sloan Fellows

Three professors

Three University of Washington faculty members have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows, announced Feb. 18, are Amy L. Orsborn, the Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering and bioengineering, Dianne J. Xiao, an assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Amy X. Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. 

February 3, 2025

Grasshopper size changes suggest how to predict winners and losers under climate change

closeup of grasshopper on dry dirt

Thousands of grasshopper specimens from mountains in Colorado show trends in how the insects changed in size over 65 years. With earlier emergence of spring greenery and earlier summer drought, grasshopper species that emerged early in the year grew larger, while grasshopper species that emerge later in the year grew smaller in size. The study, led by UW biologist Lauren Buckley, shows that changes in insect size can be predicted based on lifecycles and environmental conditions.

January 16, 2025

Panorama of our nearest galactic neighbor unveils hundreds of millions of stars

Andromeda Galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has generated the most comprehensive survey yet of the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest galactic neighbor to the Milky Way. The new mosaic of about 2.5 billion pixels yields new clues to the galaxy’s history. UW astronomers presented the findings Jan. 16 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

January 3, 2025

The carbon in our bodies probably left the galaxy and came back on cosmic ‘conveyor belt’

University of Washington scientists recently discovered that the giant ‘conveyor belt’ currents that push star-forged material out of our galaxy and pull it back in can also transport carbon atoms. That means that a good deal of the carbon here on Earth, including the carbon in our bodies, likely left the galaxy at some point!

December 19, 2024

ArtSci Roundup: January 2025

From campus to wherever you call home, we welcome you to learn from and connect with the College of Arts & Sciences community through public events spanning the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. We hope to see you this January. Featured: Global Connections Through January | Teamsters, Turtles, and Beyond: The Legacy of the Seattle WTO Protests — MOHAI exhibit (History) January 9 | Global Sport Lab: What Worlds Does Soccer Imagine? (Jackson School) January 15 | Autopsy…