The latest news from the UW

A UW postdoctoral scientist is among six nationwide recipients of the 2015 Carl Sagan Exoplanet Postdoctoral Fellowships. The Sagan Fellowships support recent postdoctoral students in research related to the scientific goals of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program — specifically, to discover and characterize planetary systems and Earth-like planets around stars. Daniel Foreman-Mackey , an incoming postdoctoral researcher in the UW Department of Astronomy, will focus on using statistical methods to research exoplanet discoveries, with the goal of developing a framework for…

The country of El Salvador was torn apart by a brutal civil war from 1980 to 1992 that took the lives of 75,000 civilians, many the victims of massacres that wiped out entire villages. Throughout that war, thousands of children were forcibly disappeared from their homes and communities by agents of the Salvadoran state as a tactic to instill terror in the population. Faculty and 10 students of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights in its Jackson School…

The United States imprisons a larger percentage of African Americans than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., three out of every four young black men are likely to serve time in prison, according to projections. Those stark facts are found in Michelle Alexander’s 2012 book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” In a searing indictment of the U.S. criminal justice system, Alexander argues that mass incarceration is a system of…

Robots such as household helpers, driverless cars and personal drones are — or will soon be —available to consumers. But what protections guarantee they won’t spy on us or surreptitiously sell us things? Could a robot be used to verify an alibi in a criminal court case? Who is liable if a driverless car crashes into a person? We Robot 2015, a conference being held April 10 and 11 at the University of Washington School of Law, will explore these…

The UW Astronomy Department celebrates its 50th anniversary this school year. Julie Lutz, research professor emeritus of astronomy, will review that history in a free public talk at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 9, in the Physics/Astronomy Auditorium. The astronomy department was formed in 1965 by George Wallerstein, Paul Hodge and Theodor Jacobson, for whom a UW observatory is named. At the time, NASA’s Gemini program was underway, Sputnik 1 was seven years in the past and the moon landing lay…

Each year the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the fields of applied mathematics and computational science. A University of Washington mathematician is among 31 new fellows honored this year from academic, industrial and government institutions around the world. Anne Greenbaum, a UW professor of applied mathematics, is being recognized for her contributions to theoretical and numerical linear algebra. Her research interests are in non-normal matrices, numerical linear algebra, iterative methods for…

The University of Washington has three programs in the top 10 on LinkedIn’s rankings of university graduate school programs based on job outcomes in some select fields. The UW’s graduate program for software developers (ranked third), designers (fourth) and accounting professionals (seventh) were in the top 10 in their fields. “By analyzing the employment patterns of over 347+ million LinkedIn members from around the world, we were able to determine which graduate schools are the most successful in launching their…

On the UW campus, most people’s focus at this time of year is on pink cherry blossoms. But this time of year in the northern Atlantic Ocean, a massive bloom soon to appear at the ocean’s surface is a major event in our planet’s carbon cycle. Now UW-developed robots have captured what happens to these ocean blooms as they dissipate. Swirling ocean eddies carry microscopic plants far beneath the surface, creating a surprising end to the bloom that could have…

We are attached to our devices nearly 24/7. As our number of activities and time spent outdoors shrinks, it’s perhaps no coincidence that the larger society faces higher occurrences of depression, child and adult obesity and attention deficit disorder. Getting more people outside and engaged with nature is the topic of this year’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences annual Sustaining Our World Lecture, 6-7 p.m. Thursday, April 2, in Kane Hall 210. The talk is free and open to…

One would imagine a glacier’s melt to be fairly quiet. That would be wrong. Recordings by current and former University of Washington researchers in fjords shows that melting at glacier edges in the narrow rock-edged canyons are some of the noisiest places in the sea. The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, recorded the sound near glacier tongues in narrow fjords in the Arctic and Antarctica. The sounds were louder than any natural or human-generated ocean noise, at least within…

The Labor Archives of Washington, part of UW Libraries Special Collections Department, is creating an online resource called the Minimum Wage History Project to document the 2013-2014 campaign that succeeded in mandating a $15 minimum hourly wage in the cities of Seattle and Sea-Tac. The effort kicks off with a public program, “Preserving Solidarity Forever: The Minimum Wage History Project,” 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 11, in Kane Hall’s Walker-Ames Room. James Gregory, UW professor of history, will speak,…

No one would argue that exposing children to secondhand smoke is bad, but should it be considered child abuse? Taryn Lindhorst, a UW associate professor of social work, says no. In an opinion piece published online in the Annals of Family Medicine earlier this month, Lindhorst argues that treating children’s exposure to secondhand smoke as child abuse and reporting parents to authorities takes a punitive approach to addiction and harms both children and families. “Removing kids from their families, their…

Years ago, a fellow educator made a comment that stuck in Christine Stickler’s head. University students don’t need to travel to a foreign country for spring break to immerse themselves in another culture, she said — they can do that right here in Washington state. That observation led Stickler to launch the UW’s Alternative Spring Break program, which sends out teams of undergraduates to small rural and tribal communities throughout Washington to work with elementary and middle school students on…

The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Everett-based company OceanGate this month unveiled the first model of its joint project to build a new type of submarine for human research and exploration in the deep sea. Cyclops 1 was a developed over the past year and a half in the Applied Physics Lab’s co-laboratory space down by the Ship Canal. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush introduced the vessel and gave tours of the inside March 11 on the dock of…