When Stardust's sample-return canister was opened, scientists were amazed by what they saw. Principal investigator Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington labeled the NASA mission "a phenomenal success."
Nearly seven years after setting off in pursuit of comet Wild 2, the Stardust return capsule streaked across the night sky of the Western United States early today, making a soft parachute landing in the Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City.
Profit-driven companies like the defunct Enron Corp. can cause executives to suffer from ethical insensitivities, says Scott Reynolds, an assistant professor of business ethics at the University of Washington.
The Stardust spacecraft on Jan. 15 is scheduled to return a capsule, with particles collected from comet Wild 2, by parachute to the Utah desert; the end of the seven-year space mission will be just the beginning of scientists' work to unlock secrets of the solar system's origins.
The tiny rabbit-like American pika, an animal species considered to be one of the best canaries in a coal mine for detecting global warming in the western United States, appears to be veering toward the brink of extinction in the Great Basin.
B-list celebrities whose voices are used in television commercials are more likely to positively influence consumers because they're less recognizable.
A derivative of the sweet wormwood plant used since ancient times to fight malaria and shown to precisely target and kill cancer cells may someday aid in stopping breast cancer before it gets a toehold, according to a study by two University of Washington bioengineers.
Watching a swarm of army ants attack a giant worm has led three scientists to offer a new theory on the origin of cooperative hunting behavior in the insects.
Doctors treating overweight or obese patients often prescribe exercise as part of a program to drop pounds. But a new study indicates that some people's ability to exercise may be hampered by gastrointestinal problems that often affect overweight people.
New University of Washington research suggests mercury can be carried long distances in the atmosphere, combining with other airborne chemicals to form compounds that are much more water-soluble and so more easily removed from the air in rainfall.
New research indicates that scientists studying the effects of carbon on climate warming are very likely underestimating, by a vast amount, how much soil carbon is available in the high Arctic to be released into the atmosphere.
The minimum price tag to run for most U.S. Senate seats has surpassed the $10 million mark, according to projections by a political research team.
A team of Spanish and American neuroscientists have discovered neurons in the mammalian brainstem that exclusively focus on new, novel sounds, helping humans and other animals ignore ongoing, predictable sounds.
A new study indicates that schools adopting programs that target antisocial behavior in elementary are also likely to boost their students' later academic performance.
America's charter schools serve a larger percentage of minority and low-income students than do the nation's traditional public schools, according to a comprehensive new study of the growing charter movement.
Two parallel, but largely separate migrations of more than 20 million black and white Americans in the 20th century transformed politics, culture and religion in the United States.
Infants begin pulling off an amazing feat sometime in the final three months of their first year of life. They learn an important social interaction by following the gaze of an adult, a step that gives babies a big boost in understanding language.
In a new book, a University of Washington paleontologist puts forth an expanded "tree of life," or biological classification system, to account for a variety of life forms, including 'alien' life, that would not fit in the current system.
University of Washington biologists studying the physiology of Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, have discovered an organ that assesses the size of the juvenile and signals when it has reached a critical weight to begin metamorphosis into an adult.
Immigrants are more dispersed and far more entwined with American-born people when measured by the households in which they live rather than counted individually on the traditional basis of census tracts.
Twelve-year-olds whose parents smoked were more than twice as likely to begin smoking cigarettes daily between the ages of 13 and 21 than were children whose parents didn't use tobacco, according to a new study that looked at family influences on smoking habits.
Physicists who work with a concept called string theory envision our universe as an eerie place with at least nine spatial dimensions, six of them hidden from us, perhaps curled up in some way so they are undetectable. The big question is why we experience the universe in only three spatial dimensions.
Newly hatched magellanic penguin chicks in breeding grounds with a large number of human visitors show a significant spike in levels of a stress-related hormone compared to chicks hatched in areas not visited by humans.
The first ever live video broadcasts from the Juan de Fuca Ridge on the seafloor 200 miles off the Washington and British Columbia coast are planned Sept. 28 and 29.
Researchers investigating how self-control develops in young children found that abstract symbols can lead the youngsters toward a more optimal decision than when they have to make a choice with tangible objects such as candy.
Can academics and corporations work together to identify important emerging technologies and shorten the time it takes for these technologies to develop into the Internet's next billion dollar market segments? Experts gathering in Seattle next week think so.
Using a water droplet 1 trillion times smaller than a liter of club soda, a University of Washington scientist is conducting chemical analysis and experimentation at unprecedented tiny scales.
The major funding arm of President Bush's No Child Left Behind program is hampered by serious loopholes that prevent the money from reaching schools with disadvantaged children.
Naysayers of advertisements are more accepting of aesthetically appealing commercials than ones that provide product information, according to a new study.
The impact of global warming has become obvious in areas such as Alaska, Siberia and the Arctic, but a University of Washington ecologist says the most serious impact in the next century likely will be in the tropics.
A new model offers plausible scenarios for how oxygen came to dominate Earth's atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, and why it took at least 300 million years after bacterial photosynthesis started producing oxygen in large quantities.
A collaborative research team next week is to begin one of the largest hurricane research projects ever undertaken to better understand dramatic, rapid changes in tropical storm intensity that have baffled forecasters for years.
The rivers of South America's Amazon basin are "breathing" far harder "“ cycling the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide more quickly "“ than anyone realized.
Training adults to have more effective parenting skills is the most potent tool available and should remain the standard of care in treating preadolescents with serious behavior problem. And the same treatment works as well for girls as it does for boys.
Stories of two-headed serpents and epic battles between Thunderbird and Whale, common among Northwest native peoples, are rooted in the region's seismic history. New research found stories that could relate to events hundreds of years ago.
A signaling pathway required for plants to grow to their normal size appears to have an unexpected dual purpose of keeping the plant from wallpapering itself with too many densely clustered stomata.
The alarm call of the black-capped chickadee carries a surprising amount of information about a predator's size and the threat it poses.
States that are strict in enforcing child support have up to 20 percent fewer unmarried births than states that are lax about getting unmarried dads to pay, researchers found.
Scholars are completing what is believed to be the first broadly international academic conference ever to be held on North Korean soil. The topic is the long-stalled Six-Party talks on nuclear arms.
Nitrogen oxides from huge fires and fossil fuel combustion are a major component of air pollution. But new research shows that, in some area, nitrogen oxides from the soil are far greater than expected and could play a much larger role in seasonal air pollution than previously believed.
Finalists for the Center for Technology Entrepreneurship's Business Plan Competition are some of the most eclectic and promising teams in its eight-year history.
Earth's climate is being changed substantially by greenhouse gases, but some leading climate scientists say data are too scarce on how much energy the planet reflects into space. They are calling for restoration of programs to study Earth's albedo.
The University of Washington Alaska Salmon Program, the world's longest-running effort to monitor salmon and their ecosystems, has received nearly $2.4 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to expand its sampling scope and sophistication.
The tsunami that devastated south Asia coastlines and killed more than 200,000 people last December is a powerful reminder of just how dangerous those waves can be to humans, and a University of Washington scientist says it should be used to help people prepare for the next one.
A group of University of Washington researchers has devised a method that combines DNA sampling and mathematical modeling to find out how accurately patterns of methylation, a process that can control how genes are expressed, are copied during DNA replication.
The ones that stay and the ones that stray are biological puzzles among Pacific salmon, of whom the vast majority -- but not all -- travel thousands of miles to sea and back to the streams where they hatched.
New University of Washington research suggests a sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen levels was likely a major reason for elevated extinction rates and a very slow species recovery, lasting millions of years, during the "Great Dying" some 251 million years ago.
Two ocean-diving gliders were retrieved late last month near Kauai after setting a world record by traveling a quarter of the way across the Pacific Ocean. Two other gliders have set another world endurance record with a deployment of 193 days as of early April.
Even though the American government and people have not always embraced immigrants, the image of the United States as a land of opportunity and refuge has become the focal point of the nation's identity at home and around the world.
Researchers trying to tease out the genetic bases of dyslexia have discovered a location on chromosome 2 that may contain one or more genes that contribute to the reading disorder and make it difficult for people to rapidly pronounce psuedowords.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right