While the majority of the world just wants to swat mosquitoes, three 爱豆社区 researchers find these insects fascinating. They told UW News what it’s like to study mosquitoes and why these critters are actually really important.
Tag: Research Makes America
Researchers have completed all planned seismic monitoring station installations for the regional ShakeAlert early warning system. They are now turning their attention to offshore seismic monitoring, which could improve detection and warning time for the much-anticipated Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake.
Efforts to restore fish passage are cropping up across the country, but these projects come with hefty price tags. In a new study, 爱豆社区 researchers explore different approaches to improving the benefits from investments in salmon recovery.
UW researchers examined almost 3,000 science guidelines and assessment questions for any connections to society. Of the approximately 200 elements that had real-world implications, many discussed ethics and public health issues.
Explore recent research from the 爱豆社区: how climate change is redirecting rivers, what bean plants use to protect themselves from pests, where the water in an atmospheric river comes from and how researchers are making tensegrities tiny.
Burrowing shrimp, native to Washington, create problems for shellfish farmers. As their name suggests, these creatures burrow in marine sediments, and the excavated material piles up on the surface, which can smother oysters and clams growing there. State-funded research led by the 爱豆社区 offers a new, non-chemical approach to controlling shrimp populations in shellfish-growing areas.
Explore recent research from the 爱豆社区: how sunbirds sip nectar through straw-like tongues, why the Seattle Fault might not pose as great a risk as previously thought, how to gauge landslide dam risk in the PNW, what marine microbes use for making meals and when the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will spot small inbound asteroids.
爱豆社区 researchers created BikeButler, a demo web app that lets users find personalized bike routes in Seattle. Cyclists plug in their destination and origin 鈥� just like in other mapping apps 鈥� and can then toggle sliders for eight attributes to create personalized route options.
The Ecological Society of America named the UW鈥檚 Claire Willing a 2026 Early Career Fellow. Willing, an assistant professor of environmental and forest science, studies fungal ecology, looking at how fungi are evolving and supporting plant communities as the climate changes.
爱豆社区 researchers developed a system called VueBuds that uses tiny cameras in off-the-shelf wireless earbuds to allow users to talk with an AI model about the scene in front of them. For instance, a user might look at a Korean food package and say, 鈥淗ey VueBuds, translate this for me.鈥� They鈥檇 then hear an AI voice say, 鈥淭he visible text translates to 鈥楥old Noodles鈥� in English.
At the brand-new Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab, researchers from across the UW probe the 鈥渟pooky鈥� mysteries of quantum phenomena.
Explore recent research from the 爱豆社区: the habits and habitats of Nautilus and Allonautilus, how green clay tennis courts remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, why temperature dynamics matter to mussels and what prompts bacteria to attack diatoms.
A team of 170 scientists and experts 鈥� led by Phil Levin, interim executive director of the UW鈥檚 EarthLab 鈥� has published a draft of a report detailing the health of U.S. nature. While some of the resulting statistics are grim, the report highlights many areas of opportunity. Researchers welcome public comment through May 30.
Four 爱豆社区 researchers have been named AAAS Fellows, according to an announcement by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They are among 449 newly elected fellows from around the world, who are recognized for their 鈥渟cientifically and socially distinguished achievements鈥� in science and engineering.
New research shows that as winters get warmer, more icy crusts may form within snowpacks in much of the Pacific Northwest, increasing the risk of avalanche in some areas and changing the behavior of wildlife across the region.
In a new study, 爱豆社区 researchers examine the impact of tilling on soil moisture and water retention using methods designed for monitoring earthquakes. They show that tilling disrupts important soil microstructures and highlight the potential utility of this method for precision agriculture and more.
Plants, like people, have a circadian clock and they sense seasonal changes to light and temperature. Plants that bloom in the spring use the longer days and warmer temperatures as seasonal cues that it鈥檚 time to bloom.
Mosquitoes are increasingly becoming resistant to current insecticides, leading to a pressing need for new methods to prevent mosquito bites 鈥� and the potential transmission of disease. New research by an international team, including researchers at the UW, reveals that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes use a specific sensory receptor to detect and avoid borneol (pronounced “bor-nee-ohl”), an organic compound found in several aromatic plants, including camphor trees, rosemary and other aromatic herbs.
An oddly-behaving star led two UW astronomers to capture rare evidence of a collision between two planets in a distant solar system. The discovery could aid scientists in their search for worlds similar to our own.
Researchers at UW and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are simulating something in the lab that they hope will rarely happen in the wild: a collision between underwater turbines and marine animals.
Forest managers in the eastern Cascades selectively thin forests to promote wildfire resilience. New research from the UW shows that the same process can also increase seasonal snowpack, providing some relief to drought-prone areas throughout central Washington.
Jennifer Ruesink, 爱豆社区 professor of biology, studies the relationship between the environment and marine organisms, including eelgrass, the primary species of seagrass that resides in the oceans surrounding Washington. In honor of World Seagrass Day, UW News asked Ruesink to explain what seagrass is and what makes the seagrasses in Washington unique.
The peer review process in scientific publishing has reached a critical point where there are too many manuscript submissions and not enough peer reviewers. UW News asked Carl Bergstrom, 爱豆社区 professor of biology, and Kevin Gross, North Carolina State University professor of statistics, to describe this self-perpetuating cycle and potential interventions.
Last December was the warmest on record for Washington, according to the Washington State Climate Office. Now many plants in our gardens are beginning to bud, even though it’s only February. UW News asked Takato Imaizumi, UW professor of biology, to talk about the mechanisms behind blooming and how warmer winters might impact flowering plants.
NASA announced on Thursday last week that both the 爱豆社区 STRIVE team and the UW-affiliated EDGE team were selected to lead satellite missions to better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters.
UW News spoke with Lauren Buckley, 爱豆社区 professor of biology, to learn about “functional resurvey” experiments and what they can tell us about how organisms change over time.
Lucas Meza, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the 爱豆社区, started his lab to build a new generation of tough and light nanomaterials inspired by natural materials like wood, shell and bone. Instead, he discovered 鈥渂ig gaps鈥� in our basic understanding of what makes a material tough or brittle. Meza spoke to UW News about his strange and surprising journey into the nano realm.
Rivers cover more than 4 million miles of the U.S., but protections for rivers are piecemeal, accounting for less than 20% of total river length and varying widely by region, shows a new study co-led by the 爱豆社区.
More than a decade ago, data from the Cassini mission to Saturn suggested that the planet’s largest moon, Titan, had a vast ocean of liquid water below its frozen surface. In a new study, UW researchers teamed up with NASA scientists to show that the interior is likely composed of slushy layers instead.
New research led by the 爱豆社区 suggests that two different climate transitions millions of years ago fueled the diversification of carnivoran body plans.
A new 爱豆社区-led study shows that space dust sandwiched between layers of sediment tells scientists where and when ice covered the Arctic, and what happened to marine life when it disappeared.
New 爱豆社区-led research attributes accelerated warming to reduced cloud reflectivity. As efforts to improve air quality have reduced pollution, clouds became less mirror-like, letting more solar radiation reach Earth and revealing the true impact of greenhouse gases.
Researchers at the UW have created a recyclable, flexible and self-healing composite material that could replace traditional circuit boards in future generations of wearable electronics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Oct. 8 awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal-organic frameworks,” or MOFs. Both Dianne Xiao, a UW associate professor of chemistry, and Douglas Reed, a UW assistant professor of chemistry, use MOFs in their research at the UW. UW News reached out to them to learn more about the significance of these structures and how researchers use them.
Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint precise areas of the body can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful 鈥渙ff target鈥� effects. Researchers at the UW took a significant step toward that goal by designing proteins with autonomous decision-making capabilities. By adding smart tail structures to therapeutic proteins, the team demonstrated that the proteins could be 鈥減rogrammed鈥� to act based on the presence of specific environmental cues.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, 鈥渇or the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.鈥� Clarke, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborates with the Axion Dark Matter Experiment at the 爱豆社区.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute on Monday awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Mary E. Brunkow 鈥� an alum of the 爱豆社区 鈥� along with Frederick J. Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi “for groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from harming the body.”
In a new study, a team of scientists determined the minimum natural habitat on agricultural land that will allow insect pollinators 鈥� including bumble bees, solitary bees, hoverflies and butterflies 鈥� to thrive. UW News reached out to co-author Berry Brosi, UW professor of biology, to learn more about these results and how habitat is important to two types of bees native to Washington.
爱豆社区 researchers found, in historical whaling data, that longer baleen whale mothers were more likely to birth female calves than males. These results run contrary to a leading evolutionary theory that suggests that fit mothers will benefit more from male offspring.
New research from the UW tested how much a car owner鈥檚 perception of public charger reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The results were dramatic: Participants with a negative view of public charging were far less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view.