UW atmospheric scientists leave next week for a six-week field campaign in South America to study the most intense storms on the planet.


UW atmospheric scientists leave next week for a six-week field campaign in South America to study the most intense storms on the planet.

Today, Britain is not known as a land of camps, but through much of the 20th century — from after World War I to the 1980s —  the country was home to dozens of refugee camps housing thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians and Vietnamese. As ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ history professor Jordanna Bailkin writes in her latest book, these camps “were never only for refugees.” They shared such spaces with “Britons who had been displaced by…

In a new UW-authored book, a cartoon robot takes young readers on a School of Oceanography voyage to explore the deep ocean.

The ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½â€™s Urban Freight Lab at the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center has been looking for solutions to Seattle’s traffic congestion: Parcel lockers that aren’t owned by a specific company could alleviate the strain. Now the researchers have identified five viable locker locations at three different Seattle Link light rail stations for a future pilot test.

Researchers at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ have developed a new machine-learning system, called Prescience, which uses input from patient charts and standard operating room sensors to predict the likelihood that a patient will develop hypoxemia — a condition when blood oxygen levels dip slightly below normal. Prescience also provides real-world explanations behind its predictions.

Engineers at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ have developed 3D printed devices that can track and store their use — without using batteries or electronics. Instead, this system uses a method called backscatter, through which a device can share information by reflecting signals that have been transmitted to it with an antenna.

A new study led by the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ found that while dead whales are valuable sources of fat and protein for some polar bears, this resource will likely not be enough to sustain most bear populations in the future when the Arctic becomes ice-free in summers.

A new analysis that uses high-resolution data for 24 ocean regions in Africa, Europe, North and South America and Australasia shows that 14 percent of the overall seafloor shallower than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) is trawled. The paper shows that the footprint of bottom-trawl fishing on continental shelves and slopes across the world’s oceans often has been substantially overestimated.

A new book by ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ history professor George Behlmer seeks to improve understanding of the British colonial era by “reconsidering the conduct of islanders and the English-speaking strangers who encountered them.”

On a small island in Indonesia, ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ researchers found evidence of nutmeg as residue on ceramic potsherds and is estimated to be 3,500 years old — about 2,000 years older than the previously known use of the spice.

Former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell brings a lifetime of experience in business, nonprofits, government and the outdoors to the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½, where one of her tasks is to help shape the future of EarthLab, a new university-wide institute that seeks to connect scholars with community partners to solve our most difficult environmental problems.

This fall, the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½’s annual engineering lecture series will feature three College of Engineering faculty whose research is accelerating positive impact here and around the world.

When levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rise, most plants do something unusual: They thicken their leaves. Now two ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ scientists have shown that this reaction by plants will actually worsen climate change by making the global “carbon sink” contributed by plants was less productive.

For more than 2 million years, the native forests on the Pacific islands of Guam and Rota were home to several thousand crows, members of a species found nowhere else on Earth. But over the last 60 years, the Mariana crow — called the Aga in the Chamorro language — has completely disappeared from the island of Guam and rapidly declined on neighboring Rota. Today there are only about 175 Aga left in the wild. To ensure the survival…

People who have submitted photos to the #MemoriesInDNA project have selected images of family members, favorite places and tasty food that will be preserved for years in the form of synthetic DNA. Now this collection will be headed to the final frontier: space.

For angiosperms — or flowering plants — one of the most important decisions facing them each year is when to flower. It is no trivial undertaking. To flower, they must cease vegetative growth and commit to making those energetically expensive reproductive structures that will bring about the next generation. Knowledge of this process at the cellular level is critical for understanding how plants allocate resources and produce the components we care most about — including the grains, tubers, leaves, nuts…

A ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ study finds that 18-month-old toddlers conduct a form of cost-benefit analysis, making choices based on how much effort they want to expend, or on whether they like the people involved.

The international trade in elephant ivory has been illegal since 1989, yet African elephant numbers continue to decline. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature cited ivory poaching as a primary reason for a staggering loss of about 111,000 elephants between 2005 and 2015 — leaving their total numbers at an estimated 415,000. For media Download soundbites, b-roll and images In a paper published Sept. 19 in the journal Science Advances, an international team led by scientists at…

The National Science Foundation will support a state-of-the-art marine facility that continues delivering data and new insight to the ocean science community, policymakers and the public worldwide.

Rapid deoxygenation in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is caused by shifts in two of the ocean’s most powerful currents: the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. A detailed model shows that large-scale climate change is causing oxygen to drop in the deeper parts of this biologically rich waterway.

The assistant state climatologist, Karin Bumbaco, looks back on an unusually hot and dry summer — the third-hottest summer that Washington state has experienced since 1895.

The National Science Foundation announced on Sept. 11 that it is awarding grants totaling $8.5 million to 19 collaborative projects at 23 universities for the study of complex and entrenched problems in data science. Three of these projects will be based at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ and led by researchers in the College of Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences.

Justin Marlowe, a professor in the UW’s Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, has been named a member of Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s Council of Economic Advisors. He will be among those advising the governor on local and state economic conditions and national developments that affect state policies.

Two UW polar scientists were among a dozen experts who advised NASA on its upcoming ICESat-2 mission to monitor the 3D surface of the Earth. The mission is scheduled to launch Sept. 15 from California.

Evidence left by a volcano under the ice sheet suggests that the observed bulging of ice in West Antarctica is a short-term feature that may not affect the glacier’s motion over the long term.

On Sept. 4 the National Science Foundation announced the creation of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics, or IRIS-HEP. The institute is a coalition of 17 research institutions, including the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½, and will receive $25 million from the NSF over five years.

The Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering is updating its name to the Center for Neurotechnology (CNT) to highlight the key role that neurotechnologies play in its mission.

In a paper published Aug. 31 in the journal Science, a team led by scientists at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ reports that insect activity in today’s temperate, crop-growing regions will rise along with temperatures. Researchers project that this activity, in turn, will boost worldwide losses of rice, corn and wheat by 10-25 percent for each degree Celsius that global mean surface temperatures rise.

A study by the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ and Cornell University shows that the risk of being killed by police, relative to white men, is 3.2 to 3.5 times higher for black men, and between 1.4 and 1.7 times higher for Latino men.

An exploration of UW Libraries’ Labor Archives of Washington with labor archivist Conor Casey.

A team from the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley has developed an interactive workshop in data science for researchers at multiple stages of their careers. The course format, called “hack week,” blends elements from both traditional lecture-style pedagogy with participant-driven projects.

Last year, King County Metro and the Seattle Department of Transportation started a pilot program that allowed Microsoft’s and Seattle Children’s Hospital’s private shuttles to pick up employees at a few public bus stops throughout Seattle. Now a recent study from researchers at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ suggests that public buses are unaffected by private shuttles most of the time.

ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ researchers argue that further study of why infants persist, and to what end, may shed new light on how they learn and what the future yields.

ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ researchers have found policies are shifting toward restoration projects that include input from more groups and offer a range of benefits to Puget Sound, including flood control, salmon recovery, recreation and habitat protection.

Meticulously tracking of 423 species before, during and after the worst droughts to hit California in more than a thousand years shows surprising patterns. Key prey species plummeted in the third year of the drought, and carnivores were hardest hit in later years.

A new UW-led study shows that males and female process visual motion differently, a variation that may be attributable to a neural regulatory process that is different in the male brain.

Researchers at the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ have developed a new method that gives aircraft a backup system in case GPS fails: An antenna on the ground that can tell a drone where it is. The team successfully tested their system in June.

A new study led by the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ uses data gathered by floating drones in the Southern Ocean over past winters to learn how much carbon dioxide is transferred by the surrounding seas. Results show that in winter the open water nearest the sea ice surrounding Antarctica releases significantly more carbon dioxide than previously believed.

Hans Scholl, professor in the UW Information School, discusses the challenges and opportunities of digital government. The website Apolitical has named him among the “Top 100 Most Influential People in digital government.”

In a paper published online July 23 in the journal Nature, a UW-led research team reports that the 2-D form of tungsten ditelluride can undergo “ferroelectric switching.” Materials with ferroelectric properties can have applications in memory storage, capacitors, RFID card technologies and even medical sensors — and tungsten ditelluride is the first exfoliated 2-D material known to undergo ferroelectric switching.