54252777
submission
vinces99 writes:
Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA that contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. A research team led by Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington associate professor of genome sciences and of medicine, made the discovery. The findings, reported in the Dec. 13 issue of Science, are part of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute. Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.
“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.” The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made. The discovery of duons has major implications for how scientists and physicians interpret a patient’s genome and will open new doors to the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
54151613
submission
vinces99 writes:
An atmospheric peculiarity the Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, University of Washington scientists have found, and knowing that may help in the search for potentially habitable worlds. For more than a century it has been known that there is a point in Earth's atmosphere at about 40,000 to 50,000 feet, called the tropopause, where the air stops cooling and begins growing warmer, In the 1980s, NASA spacecraft discovered tropopauses in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as well as Saturn’s largest moon, Titan — and all occurring at about one-tenth of the air pressure at Earth’s surface.
A new paper by UW astronomer Tyler Robinson and planetary scientist David Catling, published online Dec. 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience, uses basic physics to show why this happens, and suggests that tropopauses are probably common to billions of thick-atmosphere planets and moons throughout the galaxy. “The explanation lies in the physics of infrared radiation,” said Robinson. Atmospheric gases gain energy by absorbing infrared light from the sunlit surface of a rocky planet or from the deeper parts of the atmosphere of a planet like Jupiter, which has no surface. The research shows that at high altitudes atmospheres become transparent to thermal radiation due to the low pressure. The findings could be used to extrapolate temperature and pressure conditions on the surface of planets and work out whether the worlds are potentially habitable — the key being whether pressure and temperature conditions allow liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.
53897825
submission
vinces99 writes:
Like humans, some song sparrows are more effusive than others, at least when it comes to defending their territories. New findings from the University of Washington show that consistent individual differences exist not only for how aggressive individual song sparrows are but also for how much they use their signals to communicate their aggressive intentions. The findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that while many birds signal their intentions clearly, other “strong silent types” go immediately to aggressive behavior and ultimately attack without first signaling their intentions. “The results are the first to explicitly link individual differences in a personality variable to communication in a wild animal,” said lead author Çalar Akçay, who did the study when he was a UW graduate student. He is now a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As any pet owner can attest, animals have consistent individual differences, or personalities. Some may be more aggressive or bold, shy or laid back. Such personality differences have been noted in a number of species ranging from insects to primates and, of course, humans. But the role of personality in animal communication has not been studied. “There is a growing realization in the field that factoring in personality variables will help solve many thorny problems in animal behavior, such as do animals signal honestly,” said Michael Beecher, co-author and a UW professor of psychology and biology. In other words, if a bird knew the personality of its opponent, it would have a better understanding of when to expect an attack. “The strong silent types are just as assertive as the signaling types, they just don’t advertise their aggressive intentions,” Beecher said. “You want to distinguish strong silent types from true wimps that don’t signal and won’t attack.”
53849545
submission
vinces99 writes:
Quantum entanglement, a perplexing phenomenon of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” could be even spookier than Einstein perceived. Now, some physicists believe the phenomenon might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that in popular science fiction can provide a much-faster-than-light shortcut from one part of the universe to another. But here’s the catch: One couldn’t actually travel, or even communicate, through these wormholes, said Andreas Karch, a University of Washington physics professor who is co-author of a paper on the research in Physical Review Letters. Quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or a group of particles interact in ways that dictate that each particle’s behavior is relative to the behavior of the others. In a pair of entangled particles, if one particle is observed to have a specific spin, for example, the other particle observed at the same time will have the opposite spin. The “spooky” part is that, as previous research has confirmed, the relationship holds true no matter how far apart the particles are – across the room or across several galaxies. If the behavior of one particle changes, the behavior of both entangled particles changes simultaneously, no matter how far away they are. Recent findings indicate that the characteristics of a wormhole are the same as if two black holes were entangled, then pulled apart. Even if the black holes were on opposite sides of the universe, the wormhole would connect them.
53213339
submission
vinces99 writes:
Researchers are working on predicting and controlling disease by looking at the interrelationships of people, other living creatures and their habitats. Human-animal medicine explores the unprecedented convergence of human, animal and environmental health in a world that is increasingly interdependent, said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz of the University of Washington School of Public Health. “Recent global pandemics such as SARS and influenza H1N1 require that we look at new paradigms for healthy coexistence,” he said. Rabinowitz recently arrived from Yale University to direct the UW Animal-Human Medicine Project. He and Dr. Ali Mokdad of the UW Department of Global Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation will lead separate studies in what is called One Health, which integrates veterinary, ecological and medical sciences. Rabinowitz’s team will investigate whether intestine-cohabitating microorganisms shared between livestock and children might be a key to correcting malnutrition in developing nations. Malnutrition causes nearly half of the deaths in children under 5 worldwide. The global burden of this disease is shouldered predominately in Africa and Southeast Asia and is difficult to alleviate. In Kenya, the researchers want to see whether children living in close proximity to domestic animals harbor gut microbes that can affect nutritional status. If so, it’s possible that resetting the gut microbiome — tiny organisms residing and interacting in the lower digestive tract — in livestock can be a sustainable intervention to improve children’s health and development, the researchers say.
53208697
submission
vinces99 writes:
Digital activism is usually nonviolent and tends to work best when social media tools are combined with street-level organization, according to new research from the University of Washington. The findings come from a report by the Digital Activism Research Project run by Philip Howard, a UW professor of communication, information and international studies. “This is the largest investigation of digital activism ever undertaken,” Howard said. “We looked at just under 2,000 cases over a 20-year period, with a very focused look at the last two years.” He and his coauthors oversaw 40 student analysts who reviewed news stories by citizen and professional journalists describing digital activism campaigns worldwide. A year of research and refining brought the total down to 400 to 500 well-verified cases representing about 150 countries. The research took a particularly focused look at the last two years. Howard said one of their main findings is that digital activism tends to be nonviolent, despite what many may think. “In the news we hear of online activism that involves anonymous or cyberterrorist hackers who cause trouble and break into systems. But that was 2 or 3 percent of all the cases — far and away, most of the cases are average folks with a modest policy agenda” that doesn’t involve hacking or covert crime.
53082109
submission
vinces99 writes:
He only came to get the iconic footage through a series of coincidences, and later regretted what he had done. It was the last film he would ever shoot. The 26.6 seconds of color film that Abraham Zapruder shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, became arguably the most widely known, discussed and analyzed bit of film in history — showing, as it did, the assassination of a president. The Zapruder film seems a natural entry into the Documents that Changed the World series of podcasts created by Joe Janes, professor in the University of Washington Information School, who uses the podcasts to explore the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known. Though the Zapruder film in itself did not alter history, it depicted a moment when the nation changed forever. “If it’s not the most scrutinized motion picture ever, it must have the greatest ratio of eyeballs to frames of all time,” Janes said. “We all know the film, at least hazily, but as is so often the case, the small details are less widely known — all the coincidences and chance happenings that led him to get the film at all, the angle he got, the view he got ... the saga of that day in getting the film developed and copied, and then the subsequent developments through publication, investigations, government seizure — and tons of controversy."
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.