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 天美影视传媒 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. The creature in question is Allonautilus scrobiculatus, a species of nautilus that Ward and a colleague had previously discovered off of Ndrova Island…
A team of scientists has identified a new species of “pre-mammal” based on fossils unearthed in Zambia’s Luangwa Basin in 2009. The ancient, Dachshund-sized creature lived some 255 million years ago, in a time just before the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. Its discoverers include Christian Sidor, professor of biology at the 天美影视传媒 and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Sidor and his colleagues, who announced their finding in July…
A team of biologists from the 天美影视传媒 and the California Institute of Technology has cracked the cues mosquitoes use to find us.
The UW-based Conservation magazine has won a gold award in a national competition sponsored by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE. Conservation shares this top honor with a magazine from Stanford Medicine. The award recognizes magazines produced by universities or colleges for special external constituencies, including publications affiliated with individual colleges or devoted exclusively to an institution’s scholarly research. CASE judges noted Conservation’s dedication to stories of the “highest caliber,” as well as an “outstanding” layout…
UW researchers have produced cell-to-cell communication in baker’s yeast — a first step in learning to build multicellular organisms or artificial organs from scratch.
A team of UW biologists has identified a key mechanism plants use to decide when to release their floral scents to attract pollinators.
New research comparing traditional hunter-gatherer living conditions to a more modern setting shows that access to artificial light and electricity has shortened the amount of sleep humans get each night.
天美影视传媒 biologist Samuel Wasser uses DNA evidence to trace the origin of illegal ivory and help police an international trade that is decimating African elephant populations. New results show that over the past decade, ivory has largely come from just two areas in Africa.
A team of 天美影视传媒 researchers has identified a mechanism that some plant cells use to receive complex and contradictory messages from their neighbors.
What researchers have discovered about the hummingbird-sized hawkmoth could help the next generation of small flying robots operate efficiently under a broad range of lighting conditions. The research is published in the June 12 edition of Science.
Warming temperatures and decreasing levels of dissolved oxygen will act together to create metabolic stress for marine animals. Habitats will shift to places in the ocean where the oxygen supply can meet the animals’ increasing future needs.
Researchers at the 天美影视传媒’s Friday Harbor Laboratories are looking at how the biomechanics of clingfish could be helpful in designing devices and instruments to be used in surgery and even to tag and track whales in the ocean.
3-D printing has been used to make everything from cars to medical implants. Now, 天美影视传媒 ecologists are using the technology to make artificial flowers, which they say could revolutionize our understanding of plant-pollinator interactions.
A new center at the 天美影视传媒 funded by the U.S. Air Force will focus on how elements in nature can help solve challenging engineering and technological problems related to building small, remotely operated aircraft.
An international team led by the 天美影视传媒 has discovered a way to determine the tree cover and density of trees, shrubs and bushes in locations over time based on clues in the cells of plant fossils preserved in rocks and soil.
Within weeks of publishing surprising new insights about how zebrafish get their stripes, 天美影视传媒 researchers now explain how to “erase” them.
Using evolutionary biology is one way to try to outwit evolution where it is happening too quickly and to perhaps find accommodations when evolution occurs too slowly.
Using a songbird as a model, scientists have described a brain pathway that replaces cells that have been lost naturally and not because of injury.
Scientists writing in the current issue of Conservation Biology call for marine protected areas and partially protected areas to help penguins cope.
New research on how pollinators find flowers when background odors are strong shows that both natural plant odors and human sources of pollution can conceal the scent of sought-after flowers.
Stop outside the botany greenhouse to see an agave plant that’s grown a 9-foot-plus flower spike and is about to bloom for the first time in 25 years.
Comb jellies 鈥� and not sponges 鈥� may lay claim as the earliest ancestors of animals, according to new research in Nature.
Many have assumed that warmer winters as a result of climate change would increase the growth of trees and shrubs because the growing season would be longer. But shrubs achieve less yearly growth when cold winter temperatures are interrupted by temperatures warm enough to trigger growth.
A significantly greater number of students fail science, engineering and math courses that are taught lecture-style than fail with active learning according to the largest analysis ever of studies comparing lecturing to active learning in undergraduate education
At an event in Washington, D.C. a UW biology student presented her research into the global connections between consumers and goods that come from agriculture and forest production.
Benjamin Hall and Eric D鈥橝saro are among the 84 new members elected fellows the National Academy of Sciences.
Get on your 3-D glasses for one of the animations of tiny fruit flies employing banked turns to evade attacks just like fighter jets.
Seventeen North American scientists outline the importance of natural science and call for a revitalization of the practice.
That fruit fly appearing moments after you poured that first glass of cabernet, has just used a poppy-seed-sized brain to conduct a finely-choreographed search and arrive in time for happy hour.
Climate change is killing penguin chicks from the world’s largest colony of Magellanic penguins, not just indirectly but directly because of drenching rainstorms and heat.
Fish “stripped” to their skeletons and stained for UW research are now part of an art exhibit at the Seattle Aquarium.
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.
Biologist Robert Paine has been awarded this year’s International Cosmos Prize that carries a cash award of about $408,000 and has previously gone to well-known conservationists such as David Attenborough and the leaders behind the Census of Marine Life project.
The basics of how a muscle generates power remain the same: Filaments of myosin tugging on filaments of actin shorten, or contract, the muscle 鈥� but the power doesn’t just come from what’s happening straight up and down the length of the muscle, as has been assumed for 50 years. The rest of the force should be credited to the lattice work of filaments as it expands outward in bulging muscle 鈥� whether in a body builder’s buff biceps or the calves of a sinewy marathon runner.
Seeds gobbled by birds and dispersed across the landscape tend to fare better than those that fall near parent plants. Now it turns out it might not just be the trip through the air that’s important, but also the inches-long trip through the bird.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation names 173 fellows for 2013.
Newly discovered fossils reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs taking hold in Tanzania and Zambia, many millions of years before dinosaur relatives were seen in the fossil record elsewhere on Earth.
A substance implicated in several mass extinctions could greatly enhance plant growth, with implications for global food supplies biofuels, new UW research shows.
Book Q and A: To allow buildings on 34 million year-old fossils would be like using the Dead Sea Scrolls to wrap fish in, proclaimed the lawyer defending land that would eventually become Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.
New work in Argentina where scientists had previously thought Earth’s first grasslands emerged 38 million years ago, shows the area at the time covered with tropical forests rich with palms, bamboos and gingers. Grit and volcanic ash in those forests could have caused the evolution of teeth in horse-like animals that scientists mistakenly thought were adaptations in response to emerging grasslands.