Focus: Hidden - Washington D.C.

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A new model explains the fundamental features of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, which some scientists predict will be the “next El Nino.”

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University of Washington mechanical engineers and collaborators have developed a handheld microscope to help doctors and dentists distinguish between healthy and cancerous cells in an office setting or operating room.

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PNNL is helping to create open-access power grid datasets for use in testing new grid technologies.

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Scientists have made a “vitamin mimic” – a molecule that looks and acts just like a natural vitamin to bacteria – that offers a new window into the inner workings of living microbes.

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Virginia Mason Medical Center has received the Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence™ for the sixth consecutive year from Healthgrades, a leading online resource for information about physicians and hospitals in the United States.

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Gonzaga Exceptional Hockey, launched by Gonzaga University special education Professor Mark Derby in 2008 to help youth overcome learning and communications difficulties, has caught the attention of the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League.

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Transportation engineers from the University of Washington developed an inexpensive system to sense Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals from bus passengers' mobile devices and collect data to build better transit systems.

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers get new opportunities to shape the country's power grid for the future.

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The University of Washington, the MIT Press, Duke University Press, the University of Georgia Press and the Association of American University Presses join forces to create the new University Press Diversity Fellowship program.

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A new University of Washington study finds that urban crops in Seattle could only feed between 1 and 4 percent of the city's population, even if all viable backyard and public green spaces were converted to growing produce.

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With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, University of Washington computer scientists are launching a new research group to develop technological solutions that will make financial products more available to the lowest-income people around the world.

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Astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) announced that a distant quasar ran out of gas. Their conclusions, reported Jan. 8 at the American Astronomical Society meeting, clarify why quasar SDSS J1011+5442 changed so dramatically in the handful of years between observations.

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Three scientists at the University of Washington have proposed a way to speed up common bioassays. Their solution, reminiscent of the magic behind washing machines, could reduce wait times to a fraction of what they once were. Biological assays that once took hours could instead take minutes.

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Seashells and lobster claws are hard to break, but chalk is soft enough to draw on sidewalks. Though all three are made of calcium carbonate crystals, the hard materials include clumps of soft biological matter that make them much stronger. A study today in Nature Communications reveals how soft clumps get into crystals and endow them with remarkable strength.

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OLYMPIA, Wash. – Tod Marshall, an award-winning poet and English professor at Gonzaga University, has been appointed the fourth Washington State Poet Laureate by Gov. Jay Inslee, the Washington State Arts Commission and Humanities Washington announced today. His term begins Feb. 1 and runs through Jan. 31, 2018.

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Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI), a world renowned nonprofit medical institute in autoimmune and immune system diseases, has appointed Jane Buckner, MD, as president, effective Jan. 1. Dr. Buckner, an internationally known researcher in autoimmune diseases, who brings an interdisciplinary approach – genetics, immunology and clinical medicine – to understanding the causes and potential cures of autoimmune diseases.

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Built environment factors that motivate people to walk and bike vary by income, University of Washington researchers have found. Neighborhood density, accessible destinations and fewer vehicles were associated with more walking and biking in lower-income groups, while neighborhood attractiveness mattered for higher-income groups.

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $2 million to Seattle Children’s Research Institute to study a method that targets obesity using long-term interventions that provide children and parents with focused guidance and education to help them reach and sustain weight loss goals.

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The University of Washington-led Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering has won a $16M NSF grant to develop the first implantable device to reanimate paralyzed limbs and restore motor function in stroke or spinal cord injury patients.

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The large, fast-moving mudslide that buried much of Oso, Washington in March 2014 was the deadliest landslide in U.S. history. University of Washington geologists analyzed woody debris buried in earlier slides and used radiocarbon dating to map the history of activity at the site.

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Oceans cover almost three-quarters of the planet and are major contributors to atmospheric aerosols in the form of sea spray particles. These sea spray aerosols are rich in organic materials that impact cloud formation and the world’s climate. Despite their abundance and significance, sea spray aerosols are not well understood. Researchers in collaboration with EMSL scientists are learning more about the chemistry of sea spray aerosols and their role in cloud formation to better account for them in climate models.

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The Fred Hutch Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) has earned recognition by the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research for outperforming its expected one-year survival rates for allogeneic transplant patients – those who receive donated adult blood-forming stem cells. This recognition is held by only 17 of 173 stem cell transplant programs nationwide.

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Renewable energy can be stored for less with PNNL’s new organic aqueous flow battery, which uses inexpensive and readily available materials. The new battery is expected to cost about 60 percent less than today’s standard flow batteries.

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Six scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are included in a new analysis of scientists whose work is cited most often by their peers. Their research is in disciplines where PNNL is highly regarded internationally – climate science, energy storage, materials science, and chemistry.

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Evolutionary biologists at Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, University of Washington and the University of Utah may have solved a century-old evolutionary riddle: How did two related fruit fly species arise from one?

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A new University of Washington study confirms that composting food scraps is better than throwing them away, and also calculates the environmental benefits associated with keeping these organic materials out of landfills.

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On Dec. 3, the legislature for Argentina's Chubut province established a new marine protected area off Punta Tombo, which would help preserve the feeding grounds for about 500,000 Magellanic penguins that make their home along this rocky stretch of Argentine coast.

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and its partners are developing a unique way to balance the increasingly complex power grid: an incentive-based coordination and control system for distributed energy devices such as rooftop solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.

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To hold up its end of the landmark climate deal signed in Paris last week, the U.S. will need to make cars and trucks of the future far more fuel efficient. New research from the University of Washington and MIT shows that automakers won’t meet fuel efficiency mandates if they continue on the path they have followed for the last two decades. But they have done it before - just not recently.

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It's one thing to read that the NAACP grew from three branches nationwide in 1912 to 894 branches in 1945, but it's more interesting and revealing to watch that expansion — from Tacoma to Bangor, Maine, and beyond — on an interactive map, as the decades slide by. That sort of data visualization lies at the heart of University of Washington historian James Gregory's new collaborative digital project, "Mapping American Social Movements through the 20th Century."

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SPOKANE, Wash. – A $294,415 grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. will establish the Gonzaga University Theology Institute for High School Youth. The grant is part of Lilly Endowment’s High School Youth Theology Institutes initiative, which seeks to encourage young people to explore theological traditions, ask questions about the moral dimensions of contemporary issues and examine how their faith calls them to lives of service.

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Two University of Washington researchers have uncovered details of the radically divergent strategies that two common tree species employ to cope with drought in southwestern Colorado. As they report in a new paper in the journal Global Change Biology, one tree species shuts down production and conserves water, while the other alters its physiology to continue growing and using water.

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The all-female Holy Names Academy in Seattle is well represented in Gonzaga University’s Class of 2019 with 18 women, including three sets of identical twins – two of which are members of Gonzaga’s crew team.

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University of Washington researchers have reconstructed 3-D models of celebrities such as Tom Hanks from large Internet photo collections. The models can deliver speeches that the real actor never performed - one step toward developing fully interactive digital models of people from family or historic photo collections.

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Old Weather is a citizen-science project that is mining historic ship logs to get a unique peek at the history of Arctic climate. Now volunteers will transcribe logbooks from hundreds of whaling ships that recorded Arctic conditions in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

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Court-imposed fines and fees can tie offenders to the criminal justice system for life and impact their ability to move on with their lives. A new University of Washington research project will investigate how those fees are implemented in eight U.S. states and their impact on individuals.

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Scientists at Seattle Children’s Research Institute have found a way to rapidly suppress epilepsy in mouse models by manipulating a known genetic pathway using a cancer drug currently in human clinical trials for the treatment of brain and breast cancer.

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For the 10th consecutive year, The Leapfrog Group today named Virginia Mason Medical Center one of the Top Hospitals in the United States.

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A collaboration between University of Washington developmental psychologists and computer scientists has demonstrated that robots can "learn" much like babies - by experiencing the world and eventually imitating humans.

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Seattle Children's researchers discover method to prevent graft-versus-host disease, a dangerous and common complication of bone marrow transplants.

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In a study published in Science today, PNNL scientists and their colleagues show that nations’ pledges to reduce greenhouse gases have the potential to reduce the probability of the highest levels of warming, and increase the probability of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

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PNNL and its partners are developing three new technologies to improve the power grid, make biofuel from seaweed and produce hydrogen with grants from DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

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The creation of a new kind of rice which gives off nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions during its growth has earned kudos for a team of scientists from three continents. The new kind of rice grows in a manner that nearly eliminates the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

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“The breadth of research from the laboratory, translated into clinical treatment and back to the laboratory is really all under ‘one roof’ here,” says Jerry Nepom, MD, PhD, “forming a dynamic collaboration to find the best treatments for people with allergic disease.”