The latest news from the UW

Award-winning Alaskan naturalist-writer Richard Nelson will launch a 10-part lecture series exploring the complex relationship between cultural and biological diversity and the threats to both next Monday (Sept. 30) on the University of Washington campus.

Faculty and staff salaries, accountability to the public, enrollment growth, legislative and budget goals, cooperation among UW campuses, and –above all–the preservation of academic excellence–are among the topics to be discussed by University of Washington President Richard L. McCormick when he addresses the University community.

Presidents and executive officers of universities and colleges serving the east King and south Snohomish counties will meet in a public forum with state legislative candidates from noon to 1:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 7 in the auditorium at Lake Washington Technical College.

An innovative temperature-measuring instrument developed with the assistance of a University of Washington engineering professor has yielded improvements in processing semiconductors that may lead to faster, cheaper computer chips.

Researchers from the University of Washington, writing in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science, report that they have developed the first reproducible method demonstrating that subliminal messages do affect human cognition.

The seventh annual Fall Fling is expected to draw several thousand new and returning University of Washington students on Friday, Sept. 27.

A radical new technique for processing natural gas that could save the petrochemical industry billions of dollars in energy and maintenance costs has been developed by University of Washington researchers.

A virus associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma has been detected in the saliva of six of seven HIV-infected gay men with a current or previous history of Kaposi’s sarcoma, report University of Washington researchers.

The University of Washington Department of Family Medicine is strongly rooted in the outside community, with nearly 600 volunteer clinical faculty in towns throughout Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho; and 31 faculty members at the UW.

The University of Washington was ranked 10th among all public universities in the United States in the quality of undergraduate education in a recentissue of U.S. News & World Report (Sept. 9)

The University of Washington is participating in the second phase of the national Diabetes Prevention Trial/Type 1, being announced nationally on Sept. 10.

While almost all muscle tissue is either fast-twitch (like the sprinter’s) or slow- twitch (like the endurance runner’s), magnetic resonance studies at University of Washington Medical Center show that the rattlesnake’s tail muscles can sustain rapid firing over a long period of time, with great economy of energy.

At least two thousand freshmen, their parents and guests are expected to attend the 1996 University of Washington Freshman Convocation, to be held at noon Sunday, Sept. 29 in Meany Hall for the Performing Arts.

The United States could put four astronauts on Mars within 15 years using existing technology and at a fraction of the cost proposed by NASA, under a plan proposed by Adam Bruckner, professor of aeronautics and astronautics in the UW College of Engineering.

Nine public school teachers leave Monday morning to visit the site of one of the Northwest’s most dynamic geological features to study the life forms that may pervade much of the Earth’s crust.

In the first study of lesbian and bisexual women living in small towns and their behavior and knowledge concerning HIV, researchers have found that a significant percentage of them may be at risk for contracting the virus.

Gary Stielow, a transfer student coming to the University of Washington from Green River Community College, has been selected as the 1996 Martin Scholar.

American and Russian archaeologists have found the first fluted point — a common artifact in North America that is associated with early inhabitants of the New World — on the Russian or Old World side of the Bering Strait.

Ferry passengers traveling to and from Bainbridge Island no longer see the remnants of the last creosote plant on the south shore of Eagle Harbor. On shore, oily wastes foul the ground water and the soil below it, in some spots going deeper than 70 feet. Those marine sediments have polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in concentrations a hundred times greater than clean areas of Puget Sound.

David Salesin, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW. Salesin is the only professor at the UW and possibly in the nation to have received a Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator awards and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Salesin’s most recent achievement is having eight full-length research papers accepted for publication at the 1996 SIGGRAPH conference.

Thirty-three high school girls from seven rural school districts in the state are on the UW campus for a two-week camp designed to encourage them to pursue their interests in science, mathematics and engineering.