As the Endangered Species Act nears its 40th birthday at the end of December, conservation biologists are coming to terms with a danger not foreseen in the 1970s: global climate change.
Science
An atmospheric peculiarity the Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, University of Washington astronomers have found, and knowing that may help in the search for potentially habitable worlds.
Like humans, some song sparrows are more effusive than others, at least when it comes to defending their territories. New UW findings show that consistent individual differences exist not only for how aggressive individual song sparrows are but also for how much they use their signals to communicate their aggressive intentions.
New research indicates that a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement” could be intrinsically linked with the creation of wormholes.
Five University of Washington researchers are among new fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The mystery of how the surface of Mars, long dead and dry, could have flowed with water billions of years ago may have been solved by research that included a University of Washington astronomer.
Filtered from a vast sodium sea, more than 1 million calcium ions per second gush through our cells’ pores to generate charges
Grand Challenges Exploration Grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will allow two UW-led teams to study the health determinants people share with other living creatures.
UW researchers this month are on missions to fly above the Arctic Ocean to measure glacier melt, polar storms and Arctic sea ice.
Rapamycin, an anti-rejection drug for organ transplant patients, has now been shown to increases survival in and delayed symptoms of Leigh’s syndrome. The drug appears to cause a metabolic switch that bypasses the mitochondrial deficiency.
University of Washington researchers have found that tree cover actually causes snow to melt more quickly in warm, Mediterranean-type climates. Alternatively, open, clear gaps in the forests tend to keep snow on the ground longer into the spring and summer. Their findings were published this fall in Water Resources Research.
An intensive two week field course helped 20 University of Washington students learn firsthand about the challenges of managing dry, fire-prone forests of the Pacific Northwest.
The method may help overcome a major obstacle that has delayed progress in designing rapid, low-cost — but still accurate — ways to assemble genomes from scratch. It also may validate certain types of chromosomal abnormalities in cancer.
Floods didn’t make floodplains fertile during the dawn of human agriculture in the Earth’s far north. Turns out early human inhabitants can mainly thank cyanobacteria. It raises the question of whether modern farmers might reduce fertilizer use by taking advantage of cyanobacteria that occur, not just in the floodplains studied, but in soils around the world.
Brainy crows subject of TEDx talk Saturday || Town Hall talk “Stories from My Pet Rocks” tonight
Future diabetes treatment approaches might target regulatory systems in both the brain and the pancreas to achieve better blood glucose control, or even put the disease into remission.
Physicists are using a detector at the UW to search for a particle called an axion, which would be the first physical evidence of the universe’s dark matter.
A new comprehensive report co-authored by the UW’s Climate Impacts Group looks at what climate change will mean for Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
Atmospheric scientist Dan Jaffe tonight will present the first results of a crowd-funded study of train emissions, conducted with four undergraduates from the Seattle and Bothell campuses and funded by public donations.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery for adults, but for babies it’s their foremost tool for learning. Now researchers from the University of Washington and Temple University have found the first evidence revealing a key aspect of the brain processing that occurs in babies to allow this learning by observation.
UW injury expert Dr. Fred Rivara was vice chair of the committee. Its report recommends actions to reduce the occurrence and consequences of youth concussions in sports and in the military, and stresses the need to better understand their nature and treatment.
This year, in an annual trek to the Nevada desert, UW students deliberately launched rockets from altitude directly into a dry lakebed. These were early tests of a concept that eventually could be used to collect and return samples from an erupting volcano, a melting nuclear reactor or even an asteroid in space.
Scientists found a way to use coastal redwood trees as a window into historic climate, using oxygen and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons.
Eleven regions of the human genome have been newly discovered to influence the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The UW was one of 145 academic centers worldwide participating in this research, which involved analyzing genes from more than 74,000 people.
Based at the University of Washington, the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing’s first public event on Oct. 30 will feature speakers from the UW, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and industry, as well as breakout sessions that explore various aspects of science and engineering technologies.
The next big earthquake on the Seattle fault could trigger destructive landslides in the city, potentially affecting a much larger area than previously thought, and in areas outside those currently considered to be landslide prone, a new UW-led study shows.
Blood disease specialist Dr. Janis Abkowitz and drug safety expert Dr, Bruce Psaty today were named new members of the prestigious Institute of Medicine, an honorary and national advisory group.
A new study in Nature Geoscience explains a major feature of global precipitation, and shows how a current originating from the poles influences tropical rainfall in Africa and southern India.
A team of University of Washington computer scientists has created a software program that watches a user’s movements and gives spoken feedback using a Microsoft Kinect on what to change to accurately complete a yoga pose.
A San Diego company has licensed UW-developed technology capable of reading the sequence of a single DNA molecule.
University of Washington scientists have developed a new way of processing the signals in cochlear implants to help users hear music better. The technique lets users perceive differences between musical instruments, a significant improvement from what standard cochlear implants can offer.
Wansink explores mindless eating and how cues in our environment lead us to eat too much of the wrong foods.
Pharmacists and physicians will be looking at prescription and illicit drugs taken during pregnancy to evaluate risks to mothers and their fetuses.
The UW, Boeing and an Everett company are building a carbon-fiber submersible that will carry five passengers almost 2 miles deep.
A recent observational study comparing the safety of estradiol and conjugated equine estrogen associated estradiol with a lower risk of leg vein and lung clots.
Three University of Washington faculty members are among those honored with a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s High Risk-High Reward program.
UW faculty members were among international researchers who compiled the fifth climate-change assessment report. The UW will host a seminar Tuesday, Oct. 1 with some of the Seattle-area authors.
A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices.
Dried filters from the mouths of filter-feeding rays started appearing in apothecary shops in recent years, but there’s been no way to know which of these gentle-natured rays was being slaughtered. Now scientists have discovered enough differences to identify the giant manta and eight devil rays using the dried filters.
In a seven-week cruise this past summer, oceanographers and students laid 14 miles of extension cable and installed about a dozen instruments for a historic deep-sea observatory.