The Polymer Physics Prize from the American Physical Society and a dissertation award from the Society for American Archaeology.
Science
After years in development, an earthquake early warning system known as ShakeAlert is on the cusp of being released in Oregon and Washington. Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, answers questions about the coming rollout.
How鈥檚 the snow on Northwest mountains this year? Overall a little deeper than normal, but it depends where you look. A new collaboration between the 天美影视传媒, the Northwest Avalanche Center lets you see how the current snow depth compares to past years for nine sites in Washington and two in Oregon.
Seven 天美影视传媒 scientists are included in Cell Mentor鈥檚 list of 1,000 inspiring Black scientists, published in December 2020. Cell Mentor is a collaborative resource between Cell Press and Cell Signaling Technology.
Even if all countries meet their Paris Agreement goals for reducing emissions, Earth has only a 5% chance of staying below 2 C warming this century, a previous study showed. But reductions about 80% more ambitious, or an average of 1.8% drop in emissions per year rather than 1% per year, would be enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.
Morales has authored a seven-part series for Ars Technica on quantum mechanics for a general audience. One article in the series is rolling out each week from Jan. 10 to Feb. 21. Morales sat down with UW News to talk about the series, quantum mechanics and what he hopes the public can learn about this seemingly odd and possibly intimidating realm of science.
Human-caused warming is responsible for increasing the risk of a glacial outburst flood from Peru鈥檚 Lake Palcacocha, threatening the city below. This study is the first to directly link climate change with the risk of flooding from glacial lakes, which are growing in number and size worldwide.
Single-celled organisms in the open ocean use a diverse array of genetic tools to detect sunlight, even in tiny amounts, and respond. The discovery of these new genetic 鈥渓ight switches鈥� could also aid in the field of optogenetics, in which a cell鈥檚 function can be controlled with light exposure.
A new 天美影视传媒 paper quantifies the tradeoffs between hydroelectric generation capacity and the impacts on river connectivity for thousands of current and projected future dams across Brazil. The findings confirm that small hydropower plants are far more responsible for river fragmentation than their larger counterparts due to their prevalence and distribution.
Sleep cycles in people oscillate during the 29.5-day lunar cycle: In the days leading up to a full moon, people go to sleep later in the evening and sleep for shorter periods of time. The team, led by researchers at the 天美影视传媒, observed these variations in both the time of sleep onset and the duration of sleep in urban and rural settings 鈥� from Indigenous communities in northern Argentina to college students in Seattle, a city of more than 750,000. They saw the oscillations regardless of an individual鈥檚 access to electricity, though the variations are less pronounced in individuals living in urban environments.
A 天美影视传媒-led team has revisited and comprehensively reinterpreted the radio telescope observations underlying a widely reported 2019 claim that phosphine gas was present in the atmosphere of Venus. In a paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, they report that sulfur dioxide, a common gas in the atmosphere of Venus, is likely what was detected instead of phosphine.
A study accepted by the Planetary Science Journal shows that the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system share similar densities. That could mean they all contain roughly the same ratio of materials thought to be common to rocky planets, such as iron, oxygen, magnesium and silicon — though they appear to differ notably from Earth.
Researchers at the 天美影视传媒 have developed a technique to modify naturally occurring biological polymers with protein-based biochemical messages that affect cell behavior. Their approach, published the week of Jan. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses a near-infrared laser to trigger chemical adhesion of protein messages to a scaffold made from biological polymers such as collagen, a connective tissue found throughout our bodies.
Astronomers have catalogued 126 years of changes to a binary star system called HS Hydrae. Analyzing observations from astro-photographic plates in the late 1800s to TESS observations in 2019, they show that the two stars in HS Hydrae began to eclipse each other starting around a century ago, peaking in the 1960s. The degree of eclipsing then plummeted over the course of just a half century, and will cease around February 2021.
Using physical therapy combined with a noninvasive method of stimulating nerve cells in the spinal cord, 天美影视传媒 researchers helped six Seattle area participants regain some hand and arm mobility.
Fish populations tend to do better in places where rigorous fisheries management practices are used, and the more measures employed, the better for fish populations and food production, according to a new paper published Jan. 11 in Nature Sustainability.
A study co-authored by UW’s Sunny Jardine finds that farmed Atlantic salmon, often labeled and sold as Pacific salmon or rainbow trout, is the second-most-consumed mislabeled seafood product in the U.S. Although not the most frequently mislabeled seafood, salmon’s popularity means it has one of the biggest environmental impacts.
The pressing concerns of climate change have placed the long-term health of the world鈥檚 coral reefs in jeopardy. However, new research inspires hope as some corals managed to survive a recent and globally unprecedented heatwave.
A model based solely on the past 40 years of weather events uses 7,000 times less computer power than today鈥檚 weather forecasting tools. An A.I.-powered model could someday provide more accurate forecasts for rain, snow and other weather events.
New research reveals significant changes to the circulation of the North Pacific and its impact on the initial migration of humans from Asia to North America. It provides a new picture of the circulation and climate of the North Pacific at the end of the last ice age, with implications for early human migration.
Antarctica鈥檚 next deep ice core, a 1.5-mile core reaching back to 130,000-year-old ice, will be carried out by a multi-institutional U.S. team led by UW’s Eric Steig. The site hundreds of miles from today鈥檚 coastline could provide clues to the most recent collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
A new 天美影视传媒 study provides the first look at how much noise pollution is impacting the Olympic Peninsula. The paper found that aircraft were audible across a large swath of the peninsula at least 20% of weekday hours, or for about one hour during a six-hour period. About 88% of all audible aircraft in the pre-pandemic study were military planes.
A team led by scientists at the 天美影视传媒 and the University of California, San Diego has discovered that cowpeas 鈥� a type of bean plant 鈥� harbor receptors on the surface of their cells that can detect a compound in caterpillar saliva and initiate anti-herbivore defenses.
A team led by researchers at UW Tacoma, UW and Washington State University Puyallup has discovered a chemical that kills coho salmon in urban streams before the fish can spawn.
The tiny Stingray Nebula unexpectedly appeared in the 1980s is by far the youngest planetary nebula in our sky. But a team of astronomers recently analyzed a more recent image of the nebula, taken in 2016 by Hubble, and found that it has faded significantly and changed shape over the course of just 20 years. If dimming continues at current rates, in 20 or 30 years the Stingray Nebula will be barely perceptible.
At the current rate of global warming, mass coral bleaching is expected to become more frequent and severe worldwide. An international consortium of scientists, including a coral researcher from the 天美影视传媒, has created the first-ever common framework for increasing comparability of research findings on coral bleaching.
A research team led by the 天美影视传媒 and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has shown that microbes taken from trees growing beside pristine mountain-fed streams in Western Washington could make phosphorus trapped in soils more accessible to agricultural crops. The findings were published in October in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
A new study reveals that 65 plant species have gone extinct in the continental United States and Canada since European settlement, more extinctions than any previous scientific study has ever documented.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has named four 天美影视传媒 faculty members as AAAS Fellows, according to a Nov. 24 announcement from the organization. The four are part of a cohort of 489 new fellows for 2020, which were chosen by their peers for 鈥渢heir scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.鈥�
The global pandemic is hurting the seafood industry, and American fishmongers may flounder without more government aid, according to the largest study of COVID-19鈥檚 impacts on U.S. fisheries.
A team of organizations 鈥� led by the space technology company Astrobotic and including the 天美影视传媒 and the UW spinout WiBotic 鈥� has received a $5.8 million contract to develop a line of lightweight, ultrafast wireless chargers that could help both humans and robots live and work on the moon.
Scientists from around the world, including the 天美影视传媒, have established the Arctic Animal Movement Archive, an online repository for data documenting the movements of animals in the Arctic and Subarctic. With this archive, scientists can share their knowledge and collaborate to ask questions about how animals are responding to a changing climate.
A 天美影视传媒 team led by Miqin Zhang, a professor of materials science and engineering and of neurological surgery, has developed a nanoparticle-based drug delivery system that can ferry a potent anti-cancer drug through the bloodstream safely. Their nanoparticle is derived from chitin, a natural and organic polymer that, among other things, makes up the outer shells of shrimp.
The biggest study yet of West Coast wildfire plumes shows how a smoke plume鈥檚 chemistry changes over time. Results suggest current models may not accurately predict the air quality downwind of a wildfire.
A new study led by paleontologists at the 天美影视传媒 indicates that the earliest evidence of mammal social behavior goes back to the Age of Dinosaurs. A multituberculate that lived 75.5 million years ago, Filikomys primaevus engaged in multi-generational, group-nesting and burrowing behavior, and possibly lived in colonies.
A preview of the Nov. 6 SPARC Symposium, which will feature a conversation with Andy Weir, author of “The Martian.”
The 天美影视传媒 is among leading U.S. oceanographic institutions that have received National Science Foundation funding to build and deploy 500 robotic ocean-monitoring floats to monitor the chemistry and biology of the world鈥檚 oceans.
Simple actions can dramatically improve a person’s chances of surviving a landslide, show records from 38 landslides in the U.S. and around the world. People who survived landslides tended to have moved upstairs or to higher ground, among other key actions.
The 天美影视传媒 moved up two spots to No. 8 on the聽U.S. News & World Report鈥檚 Best Global Universities rankings, released Tuesday. The UW maintained its No. 2 ranking among U.S. public institutions.
This fall, about three dozen people signed up to help count the salmon in their local streams and creeks. Recruited by 天美影视传媒 Bothell聽teaching professor Jeff Jensen, these volunteers agree to observe a stream location for聽at least half聽an聽hour聽per聽week (while taking coronavirus precautions) to gather vital information about salmon聽in聽streams that flow into Lake Washington and the Sammamish River.