Flipping a nano-scale molecular switch may regulate cell-binding in a protein involved in healing and other biological activities. Computer simulations show that, like untying a shoelace, tugging on a strand of the protein fibronectin unravels a loop critical to cell recognition but allows the protein to easily reassemble.
Joblessness, not race, is the key predictor of all forms of violent death -- homicide, accidental death and suicide -- according to a study by University of Washington demographers who looked at census data and vital records for Chicago. They also found the average life expectancy for poor black males dropped by 1 1/2 years between 1970 and 1990.
Being male doesn't generate a lot of respect or status in the insect world. At best males are merely tolerated and thoroughly dominated by females. But a University of Washington research has discovered the first species of social insect, a wasp, where males rule the nest.
Long-term climate phenomena have happened throughout history, but scientists increasingly are able to see how cycles such as El Nino might affect weather a year or even a decade from now. A University of Washington researcher says that information can give developed nations time to avoid a potential climate catastrophe.
A three-year spectroscopic survey shows a group of stars near our solar system have two to three times greater concentration of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium than other nearby stars that are like our sun, according to a University of Washington astronomer.
Two University of Washington astronomy professors and two UW graduate students were among dozens of scientists on two teams who this year showed that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, a discovery lauded by the journal "Science" in the Dec. 18 edition as the most important science advance of the year.
Paleontologists from the South African Museum and the University of Washington have discovered what appears to be the first complete fossil of a gorgonopsid, a ferocious predator with both reptilian and mammalian characteristics that became extinct 250 million years ago.
Atmospheric pollution from eastern Asia is beginning to have measurable, though still small, effects on air quality in western North America, according to a researcher from the University of Washington, Bothell.
A team American and British researchers studying more than 3,000 pairs of 2-year-old twins has found that genetics, not the environment, plays the major role in the delayed acquisition of language among children who are having the most difficulty learning to speak.
The University of Washington is poised to become the first institution anywhere to launch a doctoral program specifically geared to train scientists to search for life on celestial bodies such as Mars or Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter.
A powerful new psychological tool that shows a shocking number of people -- as many as 90 to 95 percent -- display the unconscious roots of prejudice will be demonstrated at a 10 a.m. PDT press conference Tuesday, Sept. 29 at the University of Washington by UW and Yale psychologists.
A half century-old hunt for the exact site of Lewis and Clark's winter camp at Fort Clatsop, Oregon, is being renewed by archaeologists this month. A number of projects are underway, including one novel effort to find the fort by searching for mercury, which was used as a treatment for syphilis, in the soil.
American society need to take a critical look at treatment programs for men who batter their wives or girlfriends and stringently test them to make sure that they actually work to end domestic violence, says one of the leading researchers of abusive relationships.
Although many Americans wish the entire public current debate about sexual behavior in high place would just go away, that's not necessarily a good thing, claims a sociologist who says "sexuality is a precious, positive part of life, not a prurient part."
A 29-pound robotic airplane Friday completed the first trans-Atlantic crossing by an autonomous aircraft. The 2,000 mile flight from Bell Island, Newfoundland, to the Hebrides Islands of Scotland was completed in 26 hours and demonstrated the Aerosonde plane's potential to gather remote weather data over the oceans to improve forecasting.
Competiton makes faith grow stronger and encourages chruch innovation, according to a study exploring the composition of all 171 Roman Catholic dioceses in the continguous 48 states.
People's preference for salt may have been imprinted while they were still in their mothers womb. University of Washington researchers have found a link between people's salt preference and the level of morning sickness experienced by their mothers when they were pregnant.
Aviation authorities from the United Kingdom have given final approval to The Insitu Group of Bingen, Wash., and the University of Washington to attempt the first transatlantic crossing by an autonomous aircraft. The flight attempts will be made at the first fair-weather day beginning Aug. 16 from St. John's, Newfoundland to the Outer Hebrides Islands of Scotland.
Assessing whether prostate cancer patients are eligible for radioactive seed implantation therapy, a preferred new treatment, can now be made in minutes rather than days, and at a fraction of the cost, using a new ultrasound imaging technology developed by researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Prostate Institute.
To help bridge the widening gap between industry's demand for a diverse, well-trained work force and the available labor supply, the University of Washington's nationally recognized Women in Science & Engineering Center has developed the first comprehensive curriculum for mentoring training in science and engineering.
Following Charles Lindbergh and the Concorde on the well-traveled path to aviation history, researchers from the University of Washington and The Insitu Group next month will attempt the first trans-Atlantic crossing by an autonomous aircraft.
The Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington has received the 1998 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation in the sight category. Developed in collaboration with the Seattle firm, Microvision, the virtual retinal display scans a low-power beam of light that "paints" an image directly onto a user's retina rather than a screen.
A University of Washington astronomy professor's nearly two-decade dream of launching an unmanned spacecraft to collect interstellar dust from a comet is close to coming true.
Researchers probing people's memories of sexual abuse report two ordinary mechanisms may be responsible for temporarily forgetting and later remembering genuine instances of childhood sexual abuse. The findings by University of Washington psychologists suggest that it is possible to explain such forgetting without repression.
The brightest object yet observed in the universe has been discovered by a University of Washington astronomer and his colleagues. The quasar is 4 million-billion to 5 million-billion times brighter than the Sun and outshines the brightest galaxy by more than 100 times
A Japan-U.S. physics collaboration that includes a team from the University of Washington has found evidence indicating that subatomic particles known as neutrinos have mass. The findings counter assumptions in the Standard Model of particle physics, which has held that the electrically neutral, weakly interacting particles have no mass.
Too much of a good thing, even exercise may be dangerous for some people. Young women who are compelled to exercise at excessive levels are at risk for developing eating disorders and general psychological unhappiness, according to the first study focusing on the role of exercise as a way bulimic women avoid gaining weight.
Physicists at the European Laboratory for Paticle Physics (CERN) in Geneva have created the highest-energy electrons and positrons ever produced in a man-made particle accelerator. A University of Washington team is participating in one of four experiments studying the collisions of these elementary particles.
El Nino has cut the Galapagos penguin population in half since 1970, says Dee Boersma, a University of Washington zoology professor whose latest study was published this month in the journal Condor. The penguins had shown recent signs of recovery, she says, but that was before the current El Nino.
Traffic TV, to be launched June 1 by the University of Washington, is the first traffic information system in the nation offering both live video footage of traffic choke points and estimated highway travel speeds. The broadcast is part of an $18 million public-private initiative using the information superhighway to ease congestion on old-fashioned asphalt highways.
Researchers have created transgenic mice with the widest known spectral range of vision of any mammal by introducing a gene that produces a human photopigment into mice embryos. The researchers plan to use the new mice as a tool for studying the evolution of sight and human vision problems.
Few people are cut out for pressure-cooker jobs such as being a 911 operator or an air traffic controller. University of Washington psychologist have determined that certain people seem to possess a common trait that enables them to handle these kinds of jobs, sometimes involving life and death, and have developed a new test that identifies these individuals.
The fog may be lifting for Northwest weather prognosticators who struggle to make forecasts without critical data on conditions over the Pacific Ocean. Aeronautical engineers at the University of Washington are launching high-tech unmanned airplanes to gather this missing weather data.
Few people are cut out for pressure-cooker jobs such as being a 911 operator or an air traffic controller. University of Washington psychologist have determined that certain people seem to possess a common trait that enables them to handle these kinds of jobs, sometimes involving life and death, and have developed a new test that identifies these individuals.
She wasn't faster than a speeding bullet, but new research seems to indicate that Lucy and other early human ancestors walked with greater ease and efficiency than previously believed, despite their short leg, says a University of Washington anthropologist.
A faint image of mysterious ancient Egyptian nomads living in the Sahara Desert has emerged from thousands of stone artifacts painstakingly collected and reassembled by a University of Washington archaeologist. The stone tools and fragments offer clues to a people who lived 5,500 to 8,000 years ago and harvested wild grass seed.
It's the scarring left by an emotional abuse not the pain and bruises left by a violent that is more likely to trigger a battered wife's decision to leave her spouse, according to University of Washington psychologists who studied marriage marked by domestic violence.
Active listening techniques tuaght by many marriage counselors do not work when couples are in conflict. Instead a new study shows that "olnly those newlywed men who are acceptingof influence from their wives are winding up in happy, stable marriages, says John Gottman, University of Washington psychology professor
A new technique for reducing waste from chemical processes involved in everything from petroleum refining to pharmaceutical manufacturing also may hold the key to cleaning up radioactive remains at eastern Washington's Hanford nuclear site, according to University of Washington researchers studying the new process.
Vast amounts of dissolved organic matter in the ocean, once thought to be inert, may play a surprising role in mitigating the greenhouse effect, according to bioengineering researchers at the University of Washington, reporting in this week's (Feb. 5) issue of Nature.
In the first long-term study of mathematically precocious young children, University of Washington researchers have found significantly more boys than girls with very high levels of math talents, and discovered that even when children are given an enrichment program math-talented girls don't catch up with boys in the first two years of school.
If Paul Simon had been a social scientist instead of a song writer he might have stopped counting those "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and focused on finding ways to keep his lover around. The result might have been like "The Love Test," a new book filled with 32 romance and relationship-oriented quizzes that has been compiled by two University of Washington sociologists.
Adults may have abandoned the pen for the keyboard, but until first-graders have laptops, it's crucial that children continue to be taught handwriting because of its link to composition. A University ofWashington study of children with writing problems shows that first-graders improved both their handwriting and their composition after being tutored.
Health related pledges are the most common form of New Year's resolutions and researchers have found that a person's confidence that he or she can make a behavior change and the commitment to making that change are the keys to achieving resolutions.
The flight of a balloon sent aloft by scientists over Kiruna, Sweden, seemed uneventful -- until researchers started examining the data. What was found by three graduate students has scientists scrambling for an explanation: an intense stream of X-rays, occurring in seven bursts, each separated by only a few minutes and lasting for a total of half an hour. The evidence is that the bursts came not from space, but from the Earth's upper atmosphere.
It seems that Americans are not entirely to blame for the chemical smog that hangs over cities along the U.S. West Coast. A new study indicates that about 10 percent of the ozone and other pollutants are arriving from the industrialized nations of East Asia. After measuring pollutants from a remote Olympic Peninsula research station, a researcher concludes that Asian pollution is affecting much of the U.S.West Coast, with Washington and Oregon affected slightly more because of wind patterns.
Last May University of Iowa space physicist Louis Frank claimed to have discovered 20- to 40-ton cosmic snowballs, the size of houses, pelting the Earth at the rate of 30,000 a day. Now University of Washington geophysicist George Parks has analyzed Frank's ultraviolet (UV) camera images and has concluded that the white snow in space is no more than black "snow" on the television screen. Parks and his collaborators are certain that Frank has been looking at "instrument noise."
As millions of students are about to rate the teaching abilities of their professor, researchers say such evaluations are flawed and often misused. Science, math and engineering instructors, who teach demanding classes, are often penalized with undeservedly low ratings, while teachers of easier courses are often rewarded with unfairly high ratings.
Individual brain cells continually perfrom complex computational tasks to help humans, bats, gerbil, birds and other creatures distinguish what a sound ;is and where it is coming from. To do this, individual neurons do not just relay information from one point to another. Instead each neuron could be compared to a tiny computer that compiles ;information from many sources and makes a decision based on that information, say a group of neuroscientists who are beginning to unravel how brain cells continually perform complex computations what a sound is and where it's coming from.
The picture of life on the streets for children in the late 20th century drawn from a University of Washington psychologist is a horrifying one. Violence in ;the form of physical and sexual abuse are rampant, as are suicide attempts, mental and emotional disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse. But those conditions may be an improvement over those found at home.
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