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New research from an interdisciplinary team at the 91̽»¨, Duke University and The Nature Conservancy shows how local temperature increases in the tropics – compounded by accelerating deforestation – may already be jeopardizing the well-being and productivity of outdoor workers.

As students resume in-person classroom education, 91̽»¨ staff with the Educational Talent Search (ETS) program also move back into 14 partner middle and high schools in six Washington school districts, helping them gain the skills and confidence to pursue a college degree.

Many animals have tusks, from elephants to walruses to hyraxes. But one thing tusked animals have in common is that they’re all mammals — no known fish, reptiles or birds have them. But that was not always the case. In a study published Oct. 27 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of paleontologists at Harvard University, the Field Museum, the 91̽»¨ and Idaho State University traced the first tusks back to dicynodonts — ancient mammal relatives that lived before the dinosaurs.

The 91̽»¨Climate Impacts Group, along with nine community, nonprofit and university partners, is launching a program of community-led, justice-oriented climate adaptation work across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative will be founded with a five-year, $5.6 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. The program will be one of eleven across the country funded through NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program.

The National Science Foundation has announced it will fund a new endeavor to bring atomic-level precision to the devices and technologies that underpin much of modern life, and will transform fields like information technology in the decades to come. The five-year, $25 million Science and Technology Center grant will found the Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand — or IMOD — a collaboration of scientists and engineers at 11 universities led by the 91̽»¨.

The 91̽»¨ and Carnegie Mellon University have announced an expansive, multi-year collaboration to create new software platforms to analyze large astronomical datasets generated by the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, which will be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile. The open-source platforms are part of the new LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing — known as LINCC — and will fundamentally change how scientists use modern computational methods to make sense of big data.

Astronomers have long suspected that superflares, extreme radiation bursts from stars, can cause lasting damage to the atmospheres — and thus habitability — of exoplanets. A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reports that they pose only a limited danger to planetary systems.

Recent honors for 91̽»¨faculty include the 2021 Presburger award for theoretical computer science, an Early Career Faculty Innovator research grant for a collaboration in environmental studies with the Karuk Tribe in California, and a fellowship to explore war regulations and raiding norms among early Arabian Jewish communities.

Creative Destruction Lab, a nonprofit organization for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies, will launch its third U.S.-based location, CDL-Seattle, this fall. Based at the UW’s Foster School of Business, CDL-Seattle will be a partnership with Microsoft Corporation, the 91̽»¨College of Engineering, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and CoMotion, UW’s collaborative innovation hub. The initial area of focus for CDL-Seattle is computational health.

In 2016, the Consulting and Business Development Center at the UW’s Foster School of Business partnered with global financial services firm JPMorgan Chase to launch Ascend, a national network of business schools, non-profit lenders and suppliers focused on a goal of accelerating growth of businesses owned by people of color, women and military veterans, especially those operating in inner cities.

Sally Jewell, U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama and former CEO of REI, has been appointed as the Edward V. Fritzky Endowed Chair in Leadership at the 91̽»¨Foster School of Business for the 2021-2022 school year. Established in 2002, this prestigious faculty position is designed to bring distinguished leaders to campus to share their expertise with faculty and students.

Ice core data from Greenland shows why air pollution is dropping more slowly than sulfur emissions reductions. As cloud droplets become less acidic, the chemical reaction that turns sulfur dioxide into sulfate aerosol gets more efficient. The new results can improve the models that project air quality and climate change.

The newest experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is now in place at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. FASER, or Forward Search Experiment, was approved by CERN’s research board in March 2019. Now installed in the LHC tunnel, this experiment, which seeks to understand particles that scientists believe may interact with dark matter, is now undergoing tests before data collection commences next year.

The 91̽»¨ is the No. 4 higher education institution in the country in terms of total economic impact as a result of federal research expenditures. The 91̽»¨alone contributed $306.8 million to the U.S. gross domestic product and helped to produce more than 3,908 jobs, according to The Science Coalition’s fourth Sparking Economic Growth report, released earlier this month.