The latest news from the UW

President Bush has declared Friday, September 14 to be a national day of mourning for the victims of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Governor Locke has announced a statewide day of prayer and remembrance, highlighted by an observance at Westlake Center from 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Joining Governor Locke will be King County Executive Ron Sims, Mayor Paul Schell and religious leaders. At sites around the state, sirens will sound at 12:29 in honor of fallen emergency response personnel, followed by a minute of silence and concluding at 12:31 with the ringing of bells.

The University of Washington suffered a terrible, sad loss yesterday when a number of very good friends and supporters went down in a plane crash in Mexico.

Minoru Yamasaki, designer of New York’s World Trade Center, was born in a Seattle tenement and put himself through the University of Washington by working in Alaskan fish canneries. His most famous work was destroyed today by terrorist attacks, 35 years after the twin towers were completed.

The unspeakable attacks this morning are an assault on America and on civilized society everywhere. These acts come from a source that combines hatred, ignorance and remorseless violence.

Coastal Washington and Oregon are being left to the mercy of Mother Nature because federal Doppler radar installations don’t provide meteorologists with enough information to come up with more accurate short-term forecasts, a University of Washington scientist says.

At least two thousand freshmen, their parents and guests are expected to attend the 2001 UW Freshman Convocation, to be held at noon, Sunday, September 30 in Meany Hall for the Performing Arts. The annual event officially marks the beginning of the new academic year, with classes starting on Monday, October 1.

Today’s U.S. News & World Report 2002 rankings of undergraduate business programs at public and private universities in the United States moves the University of Washington Business School up five notches from 21 to 16.

While the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier this year that the number of African American- and Hispanic-owned businesses are on the rise, such businesses still do not receive equal access to the venture capital crucial to staying competitive, according to a University of Washington researcher.

The University of Washington has received two five-year grants of $15 million each from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) for inaugurating the next phase of research into understanding how the human genome functions.

Dorothy Van Soest, professor and associate dean of the School of Social Work of The University of Texas at Austin, has been selected as dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Washington, UW President Richard L. McCormick announced today.

The University of Washington Medical Clinic-Roosevelt, at 4245 Roosevelt Way NE in Seattle, is the only local site for an international study of the use of digital imaging in mammography. The research study currently recruiting about 2,500 patients will examine the ability of digital mammography to find breast cancer as compared it to current film-based techniques.

Growing numbers of Washington state residents are working extra hours and multiple jobs just to keep up with the cost of living, according to a new University of Washington study.

The University of Washington Business School will announce a gift today of $1 million from The Boeing Co.

As the federal government inches toward listing Puget Sound’s orca whales for protection under the Endangered Species Act, University of Washington researchers have launched a multiyear effort to determine the cause of the marine mammals’ plummeting population.

Society may honor the homemaker, but it’s the family wage-earner who is more likely to control household spending.

Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine, DuPont and the University of Campinas in Brazil, with partial funding from the National Science Foundation, have sequenced the genome of an important organism, Agrobacterium, and made it freely available on the Internet.

About three quarters of the water pouring into the Pacific Ocean from the West Coast comes from the Columbia River.

The University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will hold their first nanoscience workshop since joining forces in the spring to form the Joint Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.

The 2001 Harborview Classic golf tournament is set for Monday, September 10

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced today that the company has given $7.2 million toward a new building to house the University of Washington’s nationally ranked Department of Computer Science & Engineering.

If marriage counselors made predictions like weather forecasters they might describe the impact of a new baby on a marriage this way: The arrival of a little bundle of sunshine to be followed by stormy weather and frequent declining marital satisfaction.

Jason Emhoff, the firefighter burned in the Thirty Mile Fire in Okanogan County last month, was upgraded yesterday afternoon to satisfactory condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Emhoff was transferred out of the Burn Intensive Care Unit to the Acute Burn Center patient floor. If all goes as planned, his next surgery by Harborview surgeons will involve removing his left hand from the abdominal pocket and applying allograft, and autografting his ears and neck.

Two of the Northwest’s largest research institutions, the University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have agreed to jointly study the biological process that could hold the key to longer and better life.

Dr. Stephen H. Petersdorf, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Washington (UW), has been named the first holder of the Endowed Chair in Cancer Care.

An astrobiology conference is being hosted by the University of Washington’s Center for Astrobiology and Early Evolution.

A brief non-confrontational intervention program administered to high-risk college-age drinkers when they entered college had long-lasting effects that persisted over four years in reducing the number of alcohol-related problems.

The Parent-Child Assistance Program (P-CAP) at the University of Washington has received funding from the March of Dimes Washington State Chapter for a project called “Prevent Double Jeopardy” that will provide services to women who have a birth defect. The goal is to protect the next generation of children from this same debilitating birth defect.

A team of robot dogs programmed by University of Washington computer science students to kick, pass and head-bump their way to victory on a small-scale soccer field is undergoing final preparations for an international competition in Seattle that begins at the end of the week.

Some Seattle-area middle school and high school students and their science teachers soon will be assisting University of Washington scientists in a major effort aimed at solving one of the most vexing puzzles in physics.

A new cross-campus center at the University of Washington Business School will provide research faculty and students with the opportunity to study the real-world problems involved in turning leading-edge technology into viable companies.

One of the scientists leading the effort to understand exactly how infants go about learning language told a White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development today that the fundamental steps in language acquisition later play a critical role in the ability to read.

Descendants of Takuji Yamashita yesterday donated $65,000 to endow a University of Washington School of Law scholarship in international law and human rights, a century after the start of Yamashita’s own quest for justice.

Today, Monday, July 23, Jason Emhoff underwent his second surgery to skin graft the majority of his burns and evaluate his hands to see if further skin grafts are needed.

A summer camp of a different stripe will begin later this month at the University of Washington. More than 40 college-bound high school students with disabilities from Washington and other states will gather at the UW campus in Seattle for the summer study sessions of the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology (DO-IT) Program.

One of the joys of summer is finding a great new book to read. But it’s a pleasure that eludes millions of children and adults who have difficulty reading because of dyslexia. Because so many children have trouble reading, as well as with spelling or handwriting, researchers at the University of Washington’s Learning Disabilities Center have launched a major effort designed to find a genetic marker that will allow for the early identification of youngsters with dyslexia and specific writing disability.

New kinds of instruments and experiments — made possible with a just announced $5 million award from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles — could give scientists the best way yet to study the rich microbial life that flourishes wherever the seafloor twists and buckles, and which is part of a biosphere beneath the Earth’s surface that may dwarf all life on land or in the sea.

Dr. Robert F. Rushmer, a pioneer in applying engineering advances to the creation of new instruments for medical research and patient care, died in Redmond, Wash., Friday, July 13, after a long illness. He was 86.

University of Washington Medical Center moved up a notch in its ranking among the top hospitals in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2001 annual guide to “America’s Best Hospitals,” which was updated in its July 23 issue, available July 16.

The remarkable hydrothermal vent structures serendipitously discovered last December in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, including a massive 18-story vent taller than any seen before, are formed in a very different way than ocean-floor vents studied since the 1970s, according to findings published July 12 in the journal Nature.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s controversial “Reg FD,” or fair-disclosure regulation, may be closing the gap in fair trading between large and small investors, a University of Washington Business School researcher reports.