David Montgomery, a 91探花 geologist, is the author of a new book that explores the long history of religious thinking on matters of geological discovery, particularly flood stories such as the biblical account of Noah’s ark.
Science
A team of 91探花 students designed a unique rocket motor and launched it 5 miles up to claim first prize this summer in the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition. The 91探花students built a new type of motor powered by a combination of solid paraffin and liquid nitrous oxide. So-called hybrid propulsion systems are a nontoxic, safer alternative to space agency rockets that use hazardous liquid propellants such as hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide and fuming nitric acid. Safe but powerful…
When Rachel Aronson travels this month to Alaska, she and a local research assistant will interview people who are in danger of being displaced by climate change. She will also send about 100 postcards to her funders. Aronson is among a growing number of 91探花 students, faculty and staff who are using online campaigns to pay for their research. Crowdsourcing uses the Internet to broadcast a question and pool the answers; crowd funding uses the Internet to post…
Despite the increasing awareness of the problem of obesity in the United States, most Americans don鈥檛 know whether they are gaining or losing weight, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also known at IHME, at the 91探花. Obesity increased in the U.S. between 2008 and 2009, but in response to the questions about year-to-year changes in weight that were included in the most widespread public health survey in the country, on average,…
Salmon conservation shouldn鈥檛 narrowly focus on managing flows in streams and rivers or on preserving only places that currently have strong salmon runs. Instead, watersheds need a good mix of steep, cold-running streams and slower, meandering streams of warmer water to keep options open for salmon adapted to reproduce better in one setting than the other, new research shows. Preserving that sort of varied landscape serves not just salmon, it provides an all-summer buffet that brown bears, gulls and other…
The Washington State Academy of Sciences has named 35 new members, 25 of them from the 91探花.
When a 91探花 researcher listened to the audio picked up by a recording device that spent a year in the icy waters off the east coast of Greenland, she was stunned at what she heard: whales singing a remarkable variety of songs nearly constantly for five wintertime months. Listen to the bowheads repeat their other-worldly song as they cross the Fram Strait. Bowhead whale song 1 Bowhead whale song 2 Kate Stafford, an oceanographer with UW鈥檚 Applied Physics…
The first U.S. cabled ocean observatory reached a milestone on July 14 with the installation of a node 9,500 feet deep off the coast of Oregon. Like a giant electrical outlet on the seafloor that also provides Internet connectivity, the node was spliced into a network of cable segments totalling some 560 miles that were laid in the summer of 2011. Six more of these primary nodes — each about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — are being installed…
Do you have what it takes to be an ethical hacker? Can you step into the shoes of a professional paid to outsmart supposedly locked-down systems? Now you can at least try, no matter what your background, with a new card game developed by 91探花 computer scientists. “Control-Alt-Hack” gives teenage and young-adult players a taste of what it means to be a computer-security professional defending against an ever-expanding range of digital threats. The game’s creators will present it…
Jay Z. Parrish, 91探花 assistant professor of biology, has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Robert J. Naiman has received the highest award given by the Ecological Society of America, the world’s largest society of professional ecologists.
A new professional development program aims to nurture neuroscientists who are underrepresented minorities as they enter faculty positions.
91探花researchers found that the decline in milk production due to climate change will vary across the U.S., since there are significant differences in humidity and how much the temperature swings between night and day across the country.
As scientists around the world celebrated the detection of what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson, 91探花 physicists took satisfaction in knowing they played a significant part in it.
Researchers have long believed that the longer days and calmer seas of spring set off an annual bloom of plants in the North Atlantic, but 91探花scientists discovered that warm eddies fuel the growth three weeks before the sun does.
Four incoming faculty members promise to make the 91探花 a leading institution in machine learning and the science of “big data.鈥�
In one of the twists of scientific discovery, a 91探花duo working on fusion energy — harnessing the energy-generating mechanism of the sun — may have found a way to etch the next generation of microchips.
It’s been a decade since a swarm of relatively mild earthquakes shook up parts of Spokane. Now, armed with the right tools, scientists want to find out what was at fault.
A research team led by the 91探花 and Harvard University has discovered a bigger version of Earth locked in an orbital tug-of-war with a much larger, Neptune-sized planet as they orbit very close to each other around the same star.
New research from an international team that includes a 91探花professor emeritus confirms that the Arctic has gone through intensely warm periods, warmer than scientists thought was possible, during the last 2.8 million years.
91探花 scientists are studying swirling whirlpools in the Sargasso Sea via a pioneering experiment that repeatedly sent profilers deep into the ocean and back to the surface in unison.
91探花 engineers and scientists are one step closer to deploying sophisticated equipment that will collect important information about ocean properties like currents and temperature and send the information via the Internet in real time to scientists around the world.
Axial Seamount, an undersea volcano, gave warning signals hours before its eruption, scientists say in three papers published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.
An unappreciated aspect of chemical reactions on the surface of metal oxides could be key in developing more efficient energy systems, including more productive solar cells or hydrogen fuel cells efficient enough for automobiles.
Not having enough Chinook salmon to eat stresses out southern resident killer whales more than having boatloads of whale watchers nearby, according to hormone levels of whales summering in the Salish Sea. In lean times, however, the stress normally associated with boats becomes more pronounced, further underscoring the importance of having enough prey.
In a study published this week in Nature Climate Change, 91探花 and European scientists project that in the next 50 years global climate change will disrupt power generation in the U.S. and Europe. Warmer water and lower flows are predicted to interrupt the supply of cooling water.
A new 91探花club has qualified to participate in an international underwater robot competition and has designed its robot to be used by 91探花oceanographers in the field.
New research shows some of the steepest mountain slopes in the world got that way because of the interplay between terrain uplift associated with plate tectonics and powerful streams cutting into hillsides, leading to large landslides.
Mathematician Gunther Uhlmann and colleagues have devised an amplifier to boost light, sound or other waves while hiding them inside an invisible container. The findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bioengineers have developed the first structure to grow small human blood vessels, creating a 3-D test bed that offers a better way to study disease, test drugs and perhaps someday grow human tissues for transplant.
Conservation Remix, a daylong event June 2 organized by 91探花staff with Conservation Magazine and biology, offers an eclectic mix of topics for discussion 鈥� from designing superefficient buildings that generate their own energy to controlling invasive species by eating them.
Scientists try to find which single-letter switches in the genetic code influence health risks.
A safe haven could be out of reach for 9 percent of the Western Hemisphere’s mammals, and as much as 40 percent in certain regions, because the animals just won’t move swiftly enough to outpace climate change, according to new research from the 91探花School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.
A textured surface mimics a lotus leaf to move drops of liquid in particular directions. The low-cost system could be used in portable medical or environmental tests.
91探花researchers have discovered a problem with a climate record that is often cited by climate change skeptics.
Changes in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland’s contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century might be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible, a new study shows.
Big trees three or more feet in diameter accounted for nearly half the biomass measured at a Yosemite National Park site, yet represented only 1 percent of the trees growing there.
The cells that line the pipes leading to the heart pull more tightly together in areas of fast-flowing blood. The cells’ mechanical response to their environment could aid understanding of heart disease.
Decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean, conducted by skimming only the surface, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, according to a 91探花 oceanographer publishing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.