The latest news from the UW

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.