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From a new president and lasers cooling liquids to spotting rare sea creatures and major collaborations, great things have happened at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½Â in 2015. Here’s a look back at the top stories of the year.

These stories were chosen based on the total number of views they received on our website and are not in any particular order.

UW Regents name Ana Mari Cauce president

October 13, 2015

The ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ Board of Regents selected Interim President Ana Mari Cauce to be the 33rd president of the University. She is the first woman to be named to the position and the first Latina.

 

November 18, 2015

ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ engineers developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router — a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments — to power devices.

 

July 27, 2015

New findings by researchers at the  (I-LABS) at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ demonstrated for the first time that an early social behavior called gaze shifting is linked to infants’ ability to learn new language sounds.

 

February 11, 2015

A new study by ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ researchers identifies a main culprit for that disparity: inaccurate stereotypes depicting computer scientists and engineers as geeky, brilliant and socially awkward males. And they say broadening those stereotypes is key to attracting more girls to the two fields.

 

October 15, 2015

An affordable camera technology being developed by the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ and Microsoft Research might enable consumers of the future to tell which piece of fruit is perfectly ripe or what’s rotting in the fridge.

 

April 27, 2015

A uses a smartphone to wirelessly test for sleep apnea events in a person’s own bedroom.

 

November 16, 2015

ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ researchers are the first to solve a decades-old puzzle — figuring out how to make a laser refrigerate water and other liquids under real-world conditions. UW Engineers (from left) Peter Pauzauskie, Xuezhe Zhou, Bennett Smith, Matthew Crane and Paden Roder (unpictured) are working on the technology.

 

February 25, 2015

As the world’s biggest social network, with more than 1.39 billion users, Facebook is uniquely positioned to provide online resources and support to help suicidal people. That’s the goal of a new collaboration between Facebook and researchers at , an interdisciplinary organization based in the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½â€™s .

 

April 9, 2015

Picture graph

A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of a larger pattern driven by the tropical Pacific that’s wreaking much of the weather mayhem across the U.S., according to two ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ papers.

 

Rare nautilus sighted for the first time in three decades

August 25, 2015

Nautilus and Allonautilus

In early August, biologist Peter Ward returned from the South Pacific with news that he encountered an old friend, one he hadn’t seen in over three decades. The ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ professor had seen what he considers one of the world’s rarest animals, a remote encounter that may become even more infrequent if illegal fishing practices continue. Nautilus pompilius (left) swimming next to a rare Allonautilus scrobiculatus (right) off of Ndrova Island in Papua New Guinea. This story reached over 400,000 people on our website, making it our most popular story of 2015.