After six months of repair and restoration — assisted by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø astronomer and sundial expert Woody Sullivan — Olympia’s iconic Territorial Sundial is back in place.
News releases
A team of astronomers including Eric Agol of the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø has found that the seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are all made mostly of rock, and some could even have more water — which can give life a chance — than Earth itself. The research was led by Simon Grimm of the University of Bern in Switzerland, and published Feb. 5 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Agol is among about two dozen co-authors. The scientists…
The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø announced the creation of the Northwest Institute for Materials Physics, Chemistry and Technology — or NW IMPACT — a joint research endeavor to power discoveries and advancements in materials that transform energy, telecommunications, medicine, information technology and other fields.
Archaeologists are a little like forensic investigators: They scour the remains of past societies, looking for clues in pottery, tools and bones about how people lived, and how they died. And just as detectives might re-create the scene of a crime, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø archaeologists have re-created the weapons used by hunter-gatherers in the post-Ice Age Arctic some 14,000 years ago. Looking for clues as to how those early people advanced their own technology, researchers also considered what…
Nearly one-third of Washington college students have experienced depression in the last year, and more than 10 percent have had thoughts of suicide, according to a new survey of young adults attending schools around the state. The survey of more than 10,000 students at 13 of Washington’s two- and four-year institutions shows the need for mental health services on campus, advocates say, especially as the state Legislature considers two bills that would fund suicide-prevention resources in higher education and…
Dan Berger, associate professor in the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, discusses his new book, “Rethinking the American Prison Movement.”
In a published Jan. 25 in Current Biology, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø researchers report that mosquitoes can learn to associate a particular odor with an unpleasant mechanical shock akin to being swatted. As a result, they’ll avoid that scent the next time.
A ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø study has found a simple approach to look for life that might be more promising than just looking for oxygen.
Researchers from the Molecular Information Systems Lab at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø and Microsoft are looking to collect 10,000 original images from around the world to preserve them indefinitely in synthetic DNA manufactured by Twist Bioscience. DNA holds promise as a revolutionary storage medium that lasts much longer and is many orders of magnitude denser than current technologies.
By developing a synthetic version of the plant hormone auxin and an engineered receptor to recognize it, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø biology professor Keiko Torii and her colleagues are poised to uncover plants’ inner workings, raising the possibility of a new way to ripen fruits such as strawberries and tomatoes.
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø researchers have published the first major assessment of small hydropower dams around the world — including their potential for growth — and highlight the incredibly variability in how dams of varying sizes are categorized, regulated and studied.
The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø and TheDream.US announced a new partnership this week that will provide scholarships to qualified undocumented students who graduate from two-year colleges and transfer to the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.
An experiment using hundreds of plastic drifters in the Gulf of Mexico shows that rather than simply spread out, as current calculations would predict, many of them clumped together in a tight cluster.
A new study in the Journal PLOS ONE details what removing the two dams on the Elwha River meant for the nearshore marine ecosystem.
A small group of fishes — possibly the world’s cleverest carnivorous grazers — feeds on the scales of other fish in the tropics. A team led by biologists at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø’s Friday Harbor Laboratories is trying to understand these scale-feeding fish and how this odd diet influences their body evolution and behavior.
Get interrupted at work much? Making a quick plan for returning to and completing the task you’re leaving will help you focus better on the interrupting work, according to new research from the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.
Drug treatments can save lives, but sometimes they also carry unintended costs. After all, the same therapeutics that target pathogens and tumors can also harm healthy cells. To reduce this collateral damage, scientists have long sought specificity in drug delivery systems: A package that can encase a therapeutic and will not disgorge its toxic cargo until it reaches the site of treatment — be it a tumor, a diseased organ or a site of infection. In a paper published Jan….
Touch is the first of the five senses to develop, yet scientists know far less about the baby’s brain response to touch than to, say, the sight of mom’s face, or the sound of her voice. Now, through the use of safe, new brain imaging techniques, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø researchers provide one of the first looks inside the infant’s brain to show where the sense of touch is processed — not just when a baby feels a touch to…
Can the president single-handedly toss out environmental rules designed to combat global warming? Force states like Washington to help enforce federal immigration laws? Fire Robert Mueller? No, no, and not directly, say Lisa Manheim and Kathryn Watts, professors of law at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, in a new book. The answers, of course, are more complicated than a word or two. But every news cycle seems to raise a variation of the same question: Can he do that? Manheim and Watts,…
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø President Ana Mari Cauce today named Mark Richards provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. The appointment is effective July 1, 2018. Richards, a geophysicist, is a professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he previously served as dean of mathematical and physical sciences from 2002 to 2014, and simultaneously as executive dean of the College of Letters and Science from 2006 to 2014. “Our University is gaining an outstanding…
The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Reality Lab is launching with $6 million from Facebook, Google, and Huawei to accelerate innovation in augmented and virtual reality and educate the next generation of researchers and practitioners.
Jeff Hou, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø professor of landscape architecture, discusses the new book he co-edited with Sabine Knierbein, “City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy.”
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø astronomers Brett Morris and James Davenport assisted in new research on “Tabby’s Star,” named for Louisiana State University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian.
For African-American students, data, alongside societal attitudes and stereotypes, often present a negative picture: a wide academic achievement gap separating them from their white peers. Higher rates of discipline and absenteeism. Discrimination by other students, teachers and the larger community. And just last summer, a study indicated that black girls, from an early age, are perceived as more aggressive and sexual – less innocent – than white girls. But what if, a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø education professor reasoned,…
Recognizing that many large dams are here to stay, a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø team is investigating an emerging solution to help achieve freshwater conservation goals by re-envisioning the ways in which water is released by dams.
The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø celebrated two major fundraising and construction milestones on Wednesday for the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering, which will allow the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø to double its annual computer science and engineering degree production.
Bloomberg News columnist Noah Smith has listed a paper by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø economist Fabio Ghironi as among “must-read” papers and books on economics in the year 2017.
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø is among the first schools to announce public commitments through the American Talent Initiative. The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø aims to graduate an additional 125 low- to low-middle-income students per cohort by 2025.
The Anthropocene epoch — the proposed name for this time of significant human effect on the planet and its systems — represents a new context in which to study literature. A new book of essays co-edited by Jesse Oak Taylor, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø associate professor of English, argues that literary studies, in turn, also can help us better understand the Anthropocene.
The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, Arizona State University and other collaborators have proposed a method in the Dec. 8 issue of Science that allows hydroelectric dam operators to generate power in ways that protect — and possibly improve — food supplies and businesses throughout the Mekong river basin in Southeast Asia.
Scientists at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø show for the first time that the complex distribution of molecules within a membrane of a living yeast cell arises through demixing.
The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø has launched a new institute aimed at accelerating research at the nanoscale: the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems, or NanoES. The institute will pursue impactful advancements in a variety of disciplines — including energy, materials science, computation and medicine. Yet these advancements will be at a technological scale a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.
An interdisciplinary team is using a covert sound-based approach, worthy of an avian CSI, to study the link between crows’ calls and their behavior.
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø engineers have developed the first 3-D printed plastic objects that can connect to other devices via WiFi without using any electronics, including a laundry bottle that can detect when soap is running low and automatically order more.
Three ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø astrobiologists will discuss their research and introduce the new 3-D IMAX movie “The Search for Life in Space” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 6, in the PACCAR Theater of the Pacific Science Center.
Ana Gómez-Bravo created a class about Spanish food and culture a few years ago as a way to teach the language, but found no appropriate textbook for the material — so she wrote one herself. Her book “Comida y cultura en el mundo hispánico” — “Food and Culture in the Hispanic World” — was published in October by Equinox Publishing.
A cosmic photobomb found as a background object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly coupled pair of supermassive black holes ever seen.
The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø welcomed the most diverse class of new students across all three campuses, and the largest number of Washington residents in ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø history, according to the finalized Fall 2017 census of enrolled students released by all three campuses.
The ocean’s deepest fish doesn’t look like it could survive in harsh conditions thousands of feet below the surface. Instead of giant teeth and a menacing frame, the fishes that roam in the deepest parts of the ocean are small, translucent, bereft of scales — and highly adept at living where few other organisms can. Meet the deepest fish in the ocean, a new species named the Mariana snailfish by an international team of researchers that discovered it. The Mariana…
The amount of biomass – life – in Earth’s ancient oceans may have been limited due to low recycling of the key nutrient phosphorus, according to new research by the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.