52925313
submission
vinces99 writes:
Recent research shows that tree cover actually causes snow to melt more quickly on the western slopes of the the Pacific Northwest's Cascade Mountains and in other warm, Mediterranean-type climates around the world. At the same time, open, clear gaps in the forests tend to keep snow on the ground longer into the spring and summer. Common sense would seem to indicate the shade of a tree would help retain snow, and snow exposed to sunlight in open areas will melt, as is typical in regions such as the Northeast, Midwest and much of Canada, where winter temperatures are below freezing. But Jessica Lundquist, a University of Washington associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, found that in Mediterranean climates – where the average winter temperatures usually are above 30 degrees Fahrenheit – snow tends to melt under the tree canopy and stay more intact in open meadows or gaps in a forest. This happens in part because trees in warmer, maritime forests radiate heat in the form of long-wave radiation, contributing to snow melting under the canopy first. The finding has implications for regions such as the Pacific Northwest that, despite plentiful annual rainfall, depend heavily on melting snowpack for drinking water and healthy river flows during dry summer months.
52693683
submission
vinces99 writes:
Leslie Rosenberg and his colleagues are about to go hunting. Their quarry: A theorized-but-never-seen elementary particle called an axion. The search will be conducted with a recently retooled, extremely sensitive detector that is currently in a testing and shakeout phase at the University of Washington’s Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. The axion was first conjectured by physicists in the late 1970s as a solution to a problem in a theory called quantum chromodynamics. Little is known for sure about the axion. It appears to react gravitationally to matter, but otherwise it seems to have no other interaction. Since the 1930s, scientists have believed there must be some unseen but massive substance, a sort of gravitational glue, that prevents rotating galaxies from spinning apart. Axions, if they in fact do exist, are candidates for the makeup of cold dark matter that would act as that gravitational glue. Dark matter is believed to account for about one-quarter of all the mass in the universe. However, because axions react so little – and the reactions they are likely to produce are so faint – finding them is tricky. Rosenberg said the detector "looks for the incredibly feeble interaction between the axion and electromagnetic radiation.”
52547441
submission
vinces99 writes:
"In the spring of 2012, a director from the movie “Ender’s Game” contacted the University of Washington BioRobotics Laboratory to see about using the lab’s Raven II surgical robot on the movie set. That quickly got the attention of doctoral student Hawkeye King and his adviser, Blake Hannaford, a UW professor of electrical engineering. “‘Ender’s Game’ is one of those iconic sci-fi books,” King explained. “When we got back to the lab and told people, everyone’s jaw collectively dropped.” The movie “Ender’s Game,” which opened Nov. 1, stars Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield and directed by Gavin Hood, and is based on the 1980s military science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. Within a month of getting the call, King and then-UW bioengineering doctoral student Lee White packed up their lab’s surgical robot and flew to New Orleans. The students would be the sole operators of the robot during filming, and they also needed time to prepare its exterior to look less like a lab machine. Less than a week later, they were filming on the movie set, a New Orleans NASA facility that builds rockets."
52461731
submission
vinces99 writes:
Many people use tree ring records to see into the past. But redwoods – the iconic trees that are the world’s tallest living things – have so far proven too erratic in their growth patterns to help with reconstructing historic climate. A University of Washington researcher has developed a way to use the trees as a window into coastal conditions, using oxygen and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons. "This is really the first time that climate reconstruction has ever been done with redwoods,” said Jim Johnstone, who recently completed a postdoctoral position at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and the Ocean. He is corresponding author of a study published online Oct. 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences. The new study used cores from Northern California coastal redwoods to trace climate back 50 years. Weather records from that period prove the method is accurate, suggesting it could be used to track conditions through the thousand or more years of the redwoods’ lifetime.
52460221
submission
vinces99 writes:
During spring break the last five years, a University of Washington class has headed to the Nevada desert to launch rockets and learn more about the science and engineering involved. Sometimes, the launch would fail and a rocket smacked hard into the ground. This year, the session included launches from a balloon that were deliberately directed into a dry lakebed. Far from being failures, these were early tests of a concept that in the future could be used to collect and return samples from forbidding environments – an erupting volcano, a melting nuclear reactor or even an asteroid in space. “We’re trying to figure out what the maximum speed is that a rocket can survive a hard impact,” said Robert Winglee, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, who heads that department and leads the annual trek to the desert. The idea for a project called “Sample Return Systems for Extreme Environments” is that the rocket will hit the surface and, as it burrows in a short distance, ports on either side of the nose will collect a sample and funnel it to an interior capsule. That capsule will be attached by tether to a balloon or a spacecraft, which would immediately reel in the capsule to recover the sample. “The novel thing about this is that it developed out of our student rocket class. It’s been a successful class, but there were a significant number of rockets that went ballistically into the ground. We learned a lot of physics from those crashes,” Winglee said. The technology, which recently received $500,000 over two years from NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, could have a number of applications. It would allow scientists a relatively safe way of recovering samples in areas of high contamination, such as Japan’s Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant, or from an erupting volcano, or even from an asteroid in space, in advance of a possible mining project.
52168783
submission
vinces99 writes:
Researchers at the University of Washington have studied and named a trend lots of people can identify with: the desire to resist constant connectivity and step back from the online world. “We call this ‘pushback,’” said Ricardo Gomez, assistant professor in the UW Information School and co-author of a paper to be presented at the iConference in Berlin in early 2014. The researchers looked closely at instances of pushback against technology, reviewing 73 sources divided equally among three areas of online expression: personal blogs and websites, popular media sources and academic conferences and journals. Gomez said they thought they’d find frustration with devices, costs or learning new technologies as key pushback motivations. Instead, the reasons were more emotionally based, with “dissatisfaction” — the thought that users’ needs are not really being met by technology — most often expressed, followed by political, religious or moral concerns. Other motivations were the wish to regain control of time and energy and fear of addiction to the technology. Among the least-often reported objections were worries about loss of privacy.
52136617
submission
vinces99 writes:
A quick glance at a world precipitation map shows that most tropical rain falls in the Northern Hemisphere. The Palmyra Atoll, at 6 degrees north, gets 175 inches of rain a year, while an equal distance on the opposite side of the equator gets only 45 inches. Scientists long believed that this was a quirk of the Earth’s geometry – that the ocean basins tilting diagonally while the planet spins pushed tropical rain bands north of the equator. But a new University of Washington study shows that the pattern arises from ocean currents originating from the poles, thousands of miles away. The findings, published Oct. 20 in Nature Geoscience, explain a fundamental feature of the planet’s climate, and show that icy waters affect seasonal rains that are crucial for growing crops in such places as Africa’s Sahel region and southern India.
52045111
submission
vinces99 writes:
In a yoga class, students typically watch an instructor to learn how to properly hold a position. But for people who are blind or can’t see well, it can be frustrating to participate in these types of exercises. A team of University of Washington computer scientists has created a software program that watches a user’s movements and gives spoken feedback on what to change to accurately complete a yoga pose. The program, called Eyes-Free Yoga, uses Microsoft Kinect software to track body movements and offer auditory feedback in real time for six yoga poses, including Warrior I and II, Tree and Chair poses. “My hope for this technology is for people who are blind or low-vision to be able to try it out, and help give a basic understanding of yoga in a more comfortable setting,” said project lead Kyle Rector, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering.
51973913
submission
vinces99 writes:
New research estimates that nearly a half-million people died from causes attributable to the war in Iraq from 2003 through 2011. The results – from the first population-based survey since 2006 to estimate war-related deaths in Iraq and the first covering the conflict's full timespan – are published in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. The researchers found, with 95 percent certainty, that there were some 461,000 more deaths during the study period than would have occurred naturally, but the actual number could be as low as 48,000 or as high as 751,000. The researchers found that for every three people killed by violence during the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, two more died as a result of the collapse of the infrastructure that supports health care, clean water, nutrition and transportation. To conduct this study, researchers went to 2,000 randomly selected households in Iraq in 100 clusters throughout the country to ensure the sample of households was nationally representative. They asked every household head about births and deaths since 2001, and all household adults about mortality among their siblings.
51533269
submission
cartechboy writes:
A Tesla Model S was involved in an accident in Washington state on Tuesday, and the car's battery pack caught fire (with some of it caught on video). The cause of the accident is pretty clear, and Tesla issued a statement that the vehicle hit "a large metallic object in the middle of the road". Whether that collision immediately set off a fire in the Model S' battery pack isn't known, but a report from the Regional Fire Authority of Kent, Washington went into detail on the battery pack fire saying the car's lithium-ion battery was on fire when firefighters arrived, and spraying water on it had little effect. Firefighters switched to a dry chemical extinguisher and had to puncture numerous holes into the battery pack to extinguish it completely. Aside from the details of how the battery fire happened and was handled, the big question is what effect it will have on how people view Teslas in the near and middle-term. Is this Tesla's version of 2010's high profile Prius recall issue where pundits and critics took the opportunity to stir fears of the cars new technology?
51530827
submission
vinces99 writes:
Oxford researchers recently pulled neural stem cells out of the brains of living rats. Edman Tang and his team first coated magnetic nanoparticles with antibodies that have a tendency to bond with a type of protein found on neural stem cells. After six hours or so, the scientist used a magnet to pull the nanoparticles together, then extracted them from the brain using a syringe, apparently with no damage to the rat's brain. The neural stem cells grew freely in a petri dish once extracted.
51481563
submission
vinces99 writes:
The type of estrogen taken as a pill to treat menopause symptoms could make a difference in the risk of blood clot formation, according to a new study that compared the safety of estradiol and conjugated equine estrogen. Estradiol was associated with a lower risk of leg vein and lung clots. Researchers found that women patients at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle who were prescribed estradiol had fewer of these blood vessel clots than did those prescribed Premarin. Estradiol is a generic, bio-equivalent estrogen. Premarin, a patented drug, is a conjugated equine estrogen. The study, conducted by the University of Washington and Group Health Research Institute, is being published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
51392397
submission
vinces99 writes:
Similar to using Python or Java to write code for a computer, chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to “program” how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell. A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
50932045
submission
vinces99 writes:
Since dried filters from the mouths of filter-feeding rays hit apothecary shop menus in Asia – the thought being that eating ground-up filters will cleanse one’s liver – there’s been no way to know which of these gentle-natured rays was being slaughtered. Unlike predatory rays that attack and crush prey with their mouths, the filter-feeder rays are generally considered harmless, even though one group is named "devil rays" and other other group includes the huge manta that measures up to 23 feet across and weighs 2½ tons. Now, scientists with the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories have discovered enough differences in the filters to be able to identify the giant manta and eight of the devil rays using the part from inside their mouth that has been dried and is being sold. “There is no historical or traditional medical use of these filters and there’s no scientific evidence they will help your liver filter out toxins. Still there are thousands of these ray filters in the markets, especially in Indonesia,” said Misty Paig-Tran, who studied the filters in detail while earning her UW doctorate in biology. One surprising feature the rays share is that they are all capable of cross-flow filtering, Paig-Tran said. So apart from conservation implications, the new findings might be one step toward developing better industrial filters.
50874101
submission
vinces99 writes:
It’s becoming more common to have robots sub for humans to do dirty or sometimes dangerous work. But researchers are finding that, in some cases, people have started to treat robots like pets, friends or even as an extension of themselves. That raises a question: If a soldier attaches human or animal-like characteristics to a field robot, can it affect how they use the robot? What if they “care” too much about the robot to send it into a dangerous situation?
Julie Carpenter, who just received a doctorate in education from the University of Washington, wanted to find out. She interviewed Explosive Ordnance Disposal military personnel – highly trained soldiers who use robots to disarm explosives – about how they feel about the robots they work with every day. What she found is that troops’ relationships with robots continue to evolve as the technology changes. Soldiers told her that attachment to their robots didn’t affect their performance, yet acknowledged they felt a range of emotions such as frustration, anger and even sadness when their field robot was destroyed. That makes Carpenter wonder whether outcomes on the battlefield could potentially be compromised by human-robot attachment, or the feeling of self-extension into the robot described by some operators.
