Researchers at the 91探花 have developed a new test for COVID-19 that combines the speed of over-the-counter antigen tests with the accuracy of PCR tests that are processed in medical labs and hospitals. The Harmony COVID-19 test is a diagnostic test that, like PCR tests for COVID-19, detects genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But whereas conventional PCR tests can take several hours, the Harmony kit can provide results in less than 20 minutes for some samples and with similar accuracy.
With a low supply of and high competition for key nutrients, scientists have puzzled over the vast diversity of microbial species found in the open ocean. A new study shows that time of day is key, with species of marine microbes specializing in different shifts throughout the day and night.
The release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for almost a quarter of global warming, is being studied around the world, from Arctic wetlands to livestock feedlots. A 91探花 team has discovered a source much closer to home: 349 plumes of methane gas bubbling up from the seafloor in Puget Sound, which holds more water than any other U.S. estuary.
Many nations are calling for protection of 30% of the world鈥檚 oceans by 2030 from some or all types of exploitation, including fishing. Building off this proposal, a new analysis led by the 91探花 looks at how effective fishing closures are at reducing accidental catch. Researchers found that permanent marine protected areas are a relatively inefficient way to protect marine biodiversity that is accidentally caught in fisheries. Dynamic ocean management 鈥� changing the pattern of closures as accidental catch hotspots shift 鈥� is much more effective.
Like humans, wild animals often return to the same places to eat, walk on the same paths to travel and use the same places to raise their young. A team led by researchers at the 91探花 and the University of Wyoming has reviewed the scientific literature and found that, while 鈥渃onsistent鈥� behavior may be beneficial when environmental conditions don鈥檛 change very fast, those benefits may not be realized in the ever-changing world dominated by humans.
A team of researchers led by the 91探花 drew upon the field of environmental justice 鈥� which primarily has focused on harms to people and public health 鈥� and applied its concepts to wildlife management, considering forms of injustice that people, communities and animal groups might experience. Lead author and 91探花assistant professor Alex McInturff talks with 91探花News about this work and why it’s significant.
In 2019, 91探花 researchers witnessed the consequences of an extreme heat event in Argentina at one of the world鈥檚 largest breeding colonies for Magellanic penguins. On Jan. 19, temperatures at the site in Punta Tombo, on Argentina鈥檚 southern coast, spiked in the shade to 44 C, or 111.2 F. As the team reports in a paper published Jan. 4 in the journal Ornithological Applications, the extreme heat wave killed at least 354 penguins, based on a search for bodies by 91探花researchers in the days following the record high temperature. Nearly three-quarters of the penguins that died 鈥� 264 鈥� were adults, many of which likely died of dehydration, based on postmortem analyses.
New research from an interdisciplinary team at the 91探花, Duke University and The Nature Conservancy shows how local temperature increases in the tropics 鈥� compounded by accelerating deforestation 鈥� may already be jeopardizing the well-being and productivity of outdoor workers.
91探花researchers investigated disparities in exposure to six major air pollutants in 1990, 2000 and 2010 by comparing models of air pollution levels to census data. While overall pollutant concentrations have decreased since 1990, people of color are still more likely to be exposed to all six pollutants than white people, regardless of income level, across the continental United States.
New research shows that machine learning 鈥� computer algorithms that improve themselves without direct programming by humans 鈥� can be used to improve forecasts for lightning, one of the most destructive forces of nature.
A team led by the 91探花has developed a new, non-destructive method that images entire 3D biopsies instead of a slice for determining prostate cancer aggressiveness. The 3D images provided more information than a 2D image 鈥� specifically, details about the tree-like structure of the glands throughout the tissue.
A team at the 91探花 and the University of Bern has computationally simulated more than 200,000 hypothetical Earth-like worlds all in orbit of stars like our sun. As they report in a paper accepted to the Planetary Science Journal and submitted Dec. 6 to the preprint site arXiv, on these simulated exoplanets, one common feature of present-day Earth was often lacking: partial ice coverage. About 90% of these potentially habitable hypothetical worlds lacked partial surface ice like polar caps.
Seismologists used 30 detailed simulations of magnitude-9 slips on the Cascadia Subduction Zone to evaluate how the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system would perform in these events. Results show the alerts generally work well, but suggest that lower alert thresholds provide more timely warnings over the full area that will feel the shaking.
Underwater microphones show that killer whales, or orcas, have spent more time in the Arctic Ocean in recent years. The increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean may give orcas more opportunity to hunt for prey off the west and north coasts of Alaska.
A new effort to reconstruct Earth’s climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change, and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system.
An oceanographer at the 91探花 is part of a new project to study how glacial dust, created as glaciers grind the rock beneath them into a powder, reacts with seawater to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Results show that by the end of this century, lower-oxygen water on the Pacific Northwest coast will pose the biggest threat to Dungeness crabs. And while these crabs start as tiny, free-floating larvae, it鈥檚 the sharp-clawed adults that will be most vulnerable.
In a rare stroke of luck, researchers from the 91探花, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, were able to track a group of black-tailed deer during and after California鈥檚 third-largest wildfire, the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire. The megafire, which torched more than 450,000 acres in northern California, burned across half of an established study site, making it possible to record the movements and feeding patterns of deer before, during and after the fire.
Many animals have tusks, from elephants to walruses to hyraxes. But one thing tusked animals have in common is that they鈥檙e all mammals 鈥� 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 91探花 and Idaho State University traced the first tusks back to dicynodonts 鈥� ancient mammal relatives that lived before the dinosaurs.
A 91探花 researcher is part of an international team that has used modern tools to explain repeating patterns of stones that form in frost-prone landscapes.
Shyam Gollakota, a 91探花professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, has taken inspiration from nature鈥檚 tiniest creatures, creating inventions that allow humans to use technology to go where they haven鈥檛 gone before. He is being celebrated for those inventions as a 2021 Moore Inventor Fellow.
A new study has found that recent bigleaf maple die-off in Washington is linked to hotter, drier summers that predispose this species to decline. These conditions essentially weaken the tree鈥檚 immune system, making it easier to succumb to other stressors and diseases.
91探花 oceanographer Parker MacCready is one of 59 new fellows elected this year by the American Geophysical Union.
For researchers around the world working to understand and treat Alzheimer鈥檚 and eventually find a cure, data from clinical exams of patients suffering from this complex neurodegenerative disease needs to be standardized and accessible. Since 1999, that鈥檚 what the National Alzheimer鈥檚 Coordinating Center (NACC), housed in the 91探花School of Public Health鈥檚 Department of Epidemiology, has been doing. With funding from the NIH鈥檚 National Institute on Aging, the 91探花center began collecting data from another set of centers housed in…
On Sept. 28, the National Science Foundation announced $15 million, five-year grant to integrate AI tools into the scientific research and discovery process. The award will fund the Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery Institute 鈥� or A3D3 Institute 鈥� a partnership of nine universities, led by the 91探花.
The 91探花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鈥檚 Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program.
Researchers at the 91探花 and 91探花Tacoma have been studying arsenic levels in the mud, water and in creatures from lakes in the south Puget Sound area. Eating contaminated fish or snails from these lakes could lead to health risks.
A team of paleontologists from the 91探花 and its Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture excavated four dinosaurs in northeastern Montana this summer. The four dinosaur fossils are: the ilium 鈥� or hip bones 鈥� of an ostrich-sized theropod, the group of meat-eating, two-legged dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and raptors; the hips and legs of a duck-billed dinosaur; a pelvis, toe claw and limbs from another theropod that could be a rare ostrich-mimic Anzu, or possibly a new species; and a Triceratops specimen consisting of its skull and other fossilized bones.
91探花 glaciologists will join colleagues from around the country in a new effort to retrieve an ice core more than 1 million years old from East Antarctica, to better understand the history of our planet鈥檚 climate and predict future changes.
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 鈥� or IMOD 鈥� a collaboration of scientists and engineers at 11 universities led by the 91探花.
The new Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub, led by Oregon State University and the 91探花, will study coastal hazards and community resilience. The National Science Foundation awarded $18.9 million for the hub over five years.
A new analysis of 2.5-billion-year-old rocks from Australia finds that volcanic eruptions may have stimulated population surges of marine microorganisms, creating the first puffs of oxygen into the atmosphere. This would change existing stories of Earth鈥檚 early atmosphere, which assumed that most changes in the early atmosphere were controlled by geologic or chemical processes.
The 91探花 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 鈥� known as LINCC 鈥� and will fundamentally change how scientists use modern computational methods to make sense of big data.
A study published Aug. 11 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers at the 91探花 and Stony Brook University reports on how bats and pepper plants in Central America have coevolved to help each other survive.
New research by scientists at the 91探花 and Duke University is shedding light on how the nasal passage of dolphins and whales shifts during embryonic development from emerging at the tip of the snout to emerging at the top of the head as a blowhole. The findings, published July 19 in the Journal of Anatomy, are an integrative model for this developmental transition for cetaceans.
Astronomers have long suspected that superflares, extreme radiation bursts from stars, can cause lasting damage to the atmospheres 鈥� and thus habitability 鈥� 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.
Seeing the urgent need for change, a team of scientists from leading research universities, conservation organizations and government laboratories across the West has produced a synthesis of the scientific literature that clearly lays out the established science and strength of evidence on climate change, wildfire and forest management for seasonally dry forests. The goal is to give land managers and others across the West access to a unified resource that summarizes the best-available science so they can make decisions about how to manage their landscapes.
A study published June 16 in Biotropica by a team of researchers at the 91探花, the 91探花Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, WWF Hong Kong and the University of Colombo has provided an important road map to conserving rough-nosed horned lizards in Sri Lanka.
Climate change is further exacerbating human-wildlife conflicts by straining ecosystems and altering behaviors, both of which can deepen the contacts 鈥� and potential competition 鈥� between people and animals. In an article published July 30 in the journal Science, Briana Abrahms, an assistant professor of biology at the 91探花 and its Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, calls for expanding research into the many ways that climate change will impact the complex interplay between human activities and wildlife populations.
The 91探花will lead a new artificial intelligence research institute that will focus on fundamental AI and machine learning theory, algorithms and applications for real-time learning and control of complex dynamic systems, which describe chaotic situations where conditions are constantly shifting and hard to predict.