A research team led by 91探花 biology professor Tom Daniel has teased out how hawkmoths integrate signals from two sensory systems: vision and touch.
Tag: College of Arts & Sciences
“The Institutions Curse,” a new book by 91探花political scientist Victor Menaldo, finds a new explanation for the “resource curse” problem — the idea that resource-rich countries tend to be burdened with corrupt governments and underdeveloped economies.
A 91探花panel discussion Oct. 27 will look at immigration-related questions from philosophical, sociological and historical perspectives. It’s part of a two-day international conference on immigration.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has awarded a prestigious fellowship to 91探花 assistant professor Thomas Rothvoss to fuel his passion to balance precision and efficiency in complex mathematical calculations. The Packard Foundation Fellowships for Science and Engineering honor early-career academics pursuing innovative research in all fields of science and engineering. “It’s a great honor 鈥� and frankly, I’m still digesting the news,” said Rothvoss, who has joint appointments with the Department of Mathematics and the Department of…
Estella Leopold, a 91探花 professor emeritus of biology, has written a new memoir of her formative years, “Stories from the Leopold Shack: Sand County Revisited.” She describes life on the land where her father, Aldo Leopold, practiced the revolutionary conservation philosophy described in his famous book of essays “A Sand County Almanac.”
Prof. Devin Naar of the Jackson School’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies discusses the book “A Hug from Afar: One Family’s Dramatic Journey Through Three Continents to Escape the Holocaust,” by Claire Barkey Flash, for which Naar wrote the foreword.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that David James Thouless, professor emeritus at the 91探花, will share the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics with two of his colleagues. Thouless splits the prize with Professor F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and Professor J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University 鈥渇or theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,鈥� according to the prize announcement from the Academy. Half the prize goes to Thouless while Haldane and Kosterlitz divide the remaining half. Thouless is the UW鈥檚 seventh Nobel laureate, and second in physics after Hans Dehmelt in 1989.
The UW’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project has an important new component 鈥� the LGBTQ Activism in Seattle History Project. There will be a public launch at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 10, in Room 340 of the HUB.
Researchers at the 91探花 have developed a novel toolkit based on modified yeast cells to tease out how plant genes and proteins respond to auxin, the most ubiquitous plant hormone. Their system, described in a paper published Sept. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, allowed them to decode auxin’s basic effects on the diverse family of genes that plants utilize to detect and interpret auxin-driven messages.
Finding a long-buried outhouse might not sound exciting to most people, but to Sara Gonzalez and her crew, it was a holy grail of sorts. An assistant professor of anthropology at the 91探花, Gonzalez led an archaeological field school this summer on a tribal reservation in northwestern Oregon. Gonzalez and a team of students and students spent six weeks working at an abandoned encampment where tribal members once lived and a former schoolhouse property about two miles away….
Charles Johnson, 91探花professor emeritus of English, wrote a statement to accompany an item to be displayed in the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. What he wrote also was featured in a special issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
91探花 biologist Dee Boersma and her colleagues combed through 28 years’ worth of data on Magellanic penguins to search for signs that natural selection 鈥� one of the main drivers of evolution 鈥� may be acting on certain penguin traits. As they report in a paper published Sept. 21 in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, selection is indeed at work on the penguins at the Punta Tombo breeding site in Argentina.
Amid a decline in funding for scientific research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Simons Foundation to launch a new Faculty Scholars program. Announced Sept. 22 by HHMI, the inaugural crop of early-career scientists includes 5 faculty members from the 91探花.
“Denial,” a new movie about an American historian’s lengthy court battle with a British Holocaust denier, has a 91探花connection 鈥� Deborah Lipstadt, the film’s protagonist, taught at the 91探花early in her career.
A team of conservationists at the 91探花 is among the Grand Prize Winners of the Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge for a proposal to identify poaching hotspots for pangolins, one of the most trafficked group of mammals in the world.
Jim Pfaendtner, 91探花 associate professor of chemical engineering, is leading a new endeavor funded by the National Science Foundation to bring big data to graduate education in clean energy research at the UW.
Many popular long-term drought estimates ignore the fact that plants will be less thirsty as carbon dioxide goes up. Plants’ lower water use could roughly halve some current estimates for the extent of future drought, especially in central Africa and temperate Asia.
To everything there is a season 鈥� even divorce, new research from 91探花 sociologists concludes. Associate sociology professor Julie Brines and doctoral candidate Brian Serafini found what is believed to be the first quantitative evidence of a seasonal, biannual pattern of filings for divorce. The researchers analyzed filings in Washington state between 2001 and 2015 and found that they consistently peaked in March and August, the periods following winter and summer holidays. Their research, presented Aug. 21 at…
Death and mourning were largely considered private matters in the 20th century, with the public remembrances common in previous eras replaced by intimate gatherings behind closed doors in funeral parlors and family homes. But social media is redefining how people grieve, and Twitter in particular 鈥� with its ephemeral mix of rapid-fire broadcast and personal expression 鈥� is widening the conversation around death and mourning, two 91探花 sociologists say. In a paper presented Aug. 20 at the annual…
Faculty members from the 91探花College of Built Environments, Jackson School of International Studies and departments of French and Italian studies and history will team up in 2017 to give a new, three-week course for university and college instructors on urban environmental humanities.
Visitors to Seattle’s Volunteer Park Conservatory are in for a stinking treat, courtesy of the Department of Biology at the 91探花. The conservatory has taken in a young corpse lily, affectionately known as Dougsley, which is set to blossom this week or next.
Paleontologists with the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and the 91探花have discovered a Tyrannosaurus rex, including a very complete skull. The find, which paleontologists estimate to be about 20 percent of the animal, includes vertebrae, ribs, hips and lower jaw bones.
91探花 biologist Peter Ward’s body of research has helped policymakers recognize the impact nautiluses have on ocean ecosystems, as well as how they can 鈥� and cannot 鈥� replenish their numbers in the face of unrestricted, unregulated fishing. At a CITES meeting in September, Ward and his team hope nautiluses will get much-needed protections from trade and harvesting.
A team of researchers from the 91探花 and the University of Trento in Italy unveiled an engineered protein that they designed to repress a specific cancer-promoting message within cells.
Scientists from the 91探花 recently reported a relatively simple method swell the tiny, complex structures within cells, bringing them within range of a common microscope’s resolving range.
Scientists from the 91探花 have found evidence that ocean acidification caused by carbon emissions can prevent mussels attaching themselves to rocks and other substrates, making them easy targets for predators and threatening the mussel farming industry.
What are the policies of global rising powers regarding the use of orbital and outer space, and what are the implications of those policies for international cooperation? A capstone event for junior fellows of the Jackson School’s Space Security Initiative explored such questions in a recently with space industry, media and government representatives also on hand.
Singer-songwriter Paul Simon recorded with instruments created by composer and inventor for a song on his well-received album, “Stranger to Stranger.” The instruments are now in residence at the UW.
91探花 professor Peter Kahn recently co-authored an opinion piece in the journal Science about the importance of interacting with nature in urban areas. 91探花Today asked Kahn a few more questions about the broader implications of his work.
The authors of a Science perspective piece discuss the growing tension between an arguably necessary role urban areas play in society and the numbing, even debilitating, aspects of cities that disconnect humans from the natural world.
A look at the annual exhibit of thesis work by students graduating from the 91探花School of Art + Art History + Design’s Master of Fine Arts and Master of Design programs, on display at the Henry Art Gallery.
Electrical energy fuels our modern lives, from the computer screen that keeps us up after sunset to the coffee maker that greets us at sunrise. But the electricity underlying our 21st century world, by and large, is generated at a cost 鈥� through the unsustainable expenditure of fossil fuels. For decades this demand for cheap, fast and non-renewable electricity has promoted pollution and global warming. The key to reversing this downward spiral is deleting the “non” in “non-renewable electricity.” In…
Poet and author Alice Fulton will give the 53rd annual Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading at 8 p.m. Friday, May 27, in Room 130 of Kane Hall, also known as the Roethke Auditorium. The event is free and the public is invited.
The malaria parasite can cause unusually severe cases of the eponymous disease in patients, leading to higher mortality and poorer health outcomes among survivors. But scientists have long struggled to understand why some patients develop severe malaria. The 91探花’s International Center of Excellence for Malaria Research in South Asia 鈥� along with partners at the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) and Goa Medical College (GMC) of India 鈥� have discovered that specific types of parasite proteins, when…
In traditional light-harvesting methods, energy from one photon only excites one electron or none depending on the absorber’s energy gap, transferring just a small portion of light energy into electricity. The remaining energy is lost as heat. But in a paper released May 13 in Science Advances, Wu, 91探花associate professor Xiaodong Xu and colleagues at four other institutions describe one promising approach to coax photons into stimulating multiple electrons. Their method exploits some surprising quantum-level interactions to give one photon multiple potential electron partners.
Over their 52-million-year history, a few bats have evolved a taste for their fellow vertebrates. Now biologists at the 91探花 and the Burke Museum of History and Culture are shedding light on how these so-called “carnivorous bats” adapted to the daunting task of chowing down their backboned prey.
91探花history professor Vicente Rafael says his new book, “Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation,” asks longstanding questions about the relationship between history and language.
The upcoming season finale of TLC’s popular program “Who Do You Think You Are,” airing May 1, will feature 91探花professor Devin Naar helping television star Lea Michele learn about her Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
An interactive recycling and composting station installed this spring at PACCAR Hall is showing the 91探花 community exactly how much money can be saved by composting and recycling correctly. And it seems to be doing its job well.
As the U.S., China and other countries sign the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions and limit climate change, 91探花experts talk about the possibilities and risks in what could be a turning point for global economies.