Tag: University of Washington

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How the buzz over an ‘alien’ interstellar comet went viral

Photo of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS
An astrophotograph shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. (Copyright Victor Sabet and Julien De Winter, republished with permssion)

Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the University of Washington who analyzed the speculation over the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS.

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public, focused on 3I/ATLAS to track how social-media influencers use over-the-top speculation to fill in information gaps.

“I’ve written previously on how expert opinions can fuel conspiracy theorizing through elite-driven rumoring and amplification,” Bayar explained in an email. “My academic interest in philosophy, epistemology and the politics of conspiracy theories, plus a personal interest in space-related conspiracy theories, led me to look more closely at 3I/ATLAS.”

His analysis, published this week, is titled “Alien of the Gaps: How 3I/ATLAS Was Turned into a Spaceship Online.” The title takes inspiration from a concept known as “God of the Gaps,” which traces how thinkers through the ages explained phenomena they couldn’t fully understand by appealing to the influence of higher powers.

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Astronomers hail observatory’s debut — and look ahead

Zeljko Ivezic with picture of Rubin Observatory
University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic talks about the Rubin Observatory in front of a photo of Rubin. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

It’s been more than two decades since the University of Washington helped kick off the effort to get the Vera C. Rubin Observatory built in Chile — and now that it’s finished, UW astronomers are gearing up to get in on the first decade of discoveries.

The university’s role in the past, present and future of the Rubin Observatory and its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, literally took center stage in front of a packed house at UW’s Kane Hall on June 26.

UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, who served as director of Rubin construction and is shifting his focus to his role as head of science operations for LSST, recalled the night of April 15, when Rubin’s first test images came in for fine tuning.

“We were all so happy, and we are still happy,” he said. “We had been dreaming about this night for two decades, and it finally arrived. And not only that, we quickly obtained beautiful data, but also we continued to do so, and every new image was better and better. The observatory is performing beyond all our expectations.”

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Rubin Observatory throws a party to reveal first pictures

Long-exposure image of Rubin Observatory against night sky filled with star trails
A long-exposure image shows the Rubin Observatory beneath star trails. (Credit: Hernan Stockebrand via Rubin Observatory)

After more than 20 years of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready for its grand opening, and the world is invited.

The observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes features a monster of a telescope, with an 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror, coupled with what’s said to be the world’s largest digital camera.

It will survey the night sky every night for at least 10 years, producing about 20 trillion bytes of data every 24 hours. It would take you more than three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data, according to the Rubin team.

The first images and videos are due to be unveiled on June 23, during a “First Look” webcast that will be shared online and at more than 300 in-person watch parties across the globe.

What will the images look like? Mario Juric knows, but he isn’t telling.

“I cannot tell you what’s on them, but I can tell you we just finished them, and they look amazing,” Juric, a member of the Rubin team and the director of the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, says on the Fiction Science podcast. “I did not spend a day doing what I was supposed to be doing, because I just spent it browsing through the images. … I could teach an entire class by just zooming in on different parts of this image and explaining what this object is.”

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Stealthy startup builds ‘Antibody Cages’ to fight diseases

Archon co-founders James Lazarovits and George Ueda
Archon Biosciences’ co-founders, James Lazarovits and George Ueda, lead a tour through their Seattle lab. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Three weeks after University of Washington biochemist David Baker won a Nobel Prize, the latest venture to spin out from his lab — Archon Biosciences — has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in financing for a technology that uses computationally designed protein structures to treat cancer and other diseases.

The seed funding round was led by Madrona Ventures, with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital.

Archon’s proprietary protein structures, known as Antibody Cages or AbCs, have been years in the making. Archon’s CEO and co-founder, James Lazarovits, said the Nobel Prize that Baker won for his pioneering work in the field of protein design confirms his view that the newly unveiled startup is on the right track.

“It’s reaffirmed our conviction for why we’re in this place to begin with,” Lazarovits told me during a tour of Archon’s Seattle lab. “It’s doing things that were not possible before. … You could not do anything that we’re doing unless there was the convergence of all these different fields at this moment in time.”

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Rubin Observatory’s monster telescope takes shape

Rubin Observatory telescope mount assembly
The Simonyi Survey Telescope now has its mirrors and a camera in place. (Credit: Rubin Observatory)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile has now been equipped with all three of its mirrors, plus a camera for good measure.

Last week’s installation of the telescope’s combined primary/tertiary mirror represented a major milestone in the observatory’s 15-year-long design and construction effort.

“We have a telescope!” the observatory team declared in updates posted to Instagram, Threads, BlueSky and X / Twitter.

The wide-field survey telescope, which is named after Microsoft software pioneer Charles Simonyi, is expected to shed light on astronomical mysteries ranging from the nature of dark energy and dark matter to the potential existence of an as-yet-unseen “Planet X” in the far reaches of our solar system.

The telescope’s 8.4-meter-wide (27.5-foot-wide) primary/tertiary mirror makes use of a continuous surface with different curvatures that are designed to optimize image resolution inside a relatively compact support structure. The 3.4-meter-wide (11-foot-wide) secondary mirror was installed in July.

When it’s fully up and running, the Simonyi Survey Telescope is expected to generate 20 terabytes of data every night. But the current version of the telescope isn’t yet ready for prime time.

“This iteration has the commissioning camera — a smaller 144-megapixel version of Rubin’s huge, 3,200-megapixel camera — which is used for testing and troubleshooting,” the observatory team noted. “Rubin’s LSST Camera, the biggest digital camera in the world that will #CaptureTheCosmos in science operations, will be installed early next year after our summit staff complete the next round of tests.”

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Nobel Prize in chemistry puts protein design in spotlight

Biochemist David Baker at home
Biochemist David Baker chats with a journalist online about his Nobel Prize. (Photo by Ian C Haydon / UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design)

University of Washington biochemist David Baker has won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for more than two decades of discoveries about the molecular structure of proteins — discoveries that have led to new medical therapies, new materials and new startups.

“I’m very, very excited about the future,” Baker, who is the director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, said today during a Seattle news briefing. “I think protein design has huge potential to make the world a better place, and I really do think we’re just at the very, very beginning.”

Baker shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who have also pioneered computational techniques for predicting protein structure. They will be awarded their medals at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10.

In a news release, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Baker “has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

“His research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” the academy said.

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Elon Musk’s views on artificial vision get a reality check

Cat images simulating artificial vision
Side-by-side images show a 45,000-pixel rendering of a cat image at left, and a simulation representing an image rendered by 45,000 electrodes in a brain implant at right. (Credit: Ione Fine / University of Washington)

If Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain-implant venture succeeds in its effort to create next-generation brain implants for artificial vision, the devices could bring about a breakthrough for those with impaired sight — but probably wouldn’t match Musk’s claim that they could provide “better than normal vision,” University of Washington researchers report.

In a study published today by the open-access science journal Scientific Reports, UW psychologists Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton point out that the brain’s vision system relies on complex interactions between neurons that don’t directly translate into a pixel-by-pixel picture.

“Engineers often think of electrodes as producing pixels, but that is simply not how biology works,” Fine said in a news release. “We hope that our simulations based on a simple model of the visual system can give insight into how these implants are going to perform. These simulations are very different from the intuition an engineer might have if they are thinking in terms of a pixels on a computer screen.”

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Scientists harness generative AI for cancer diagnosis

Illustration: Visualization of microchip with the look of a whole-slide image
Prov-GigaPath harnesses AI for digital pathology. (Ella Maru Studio via Providence / Microsoft)

Researchers at Microsoft, Providence Health System and the University of Washington say they’ve developed a new artificial intelligence model for diagnosing cancer, based on an analysis of more than a billion images of tissue samples from more than 30,000 patients.

The open-access model, known as Prov-GigaPath, is described in research published today by the journal Nature and is already being used in clinical applications.

“The rich data in pathology slides can, through AI tools like Prov-GigaPath, uncover novel relationships and insights that go beyond what the human eye can discern,” study co-author Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics, said in a news release. “Recognizing the potential of this model to significantly advance cancer research and diagnostics, we felt strongly about making it widely available to benefit patients globally. It’s an honor to be part of this groundbreaking work.”

The effort to develop Prov-GigaPath used AI tools to identify patterns in 1.3 billion pathology image tiles obtained from 171,189 digital whole-slides provided by Providence. The researchers say this was the largest pre-training effort to date with whole-slide modeling — drawing upon a database five to 10 times larger than datasets such as the The Cancer Genome Atlas.

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NASA boosts four proposed climate science missions

Graphic charting extent of ozone hole on world map
A color-coded image based on satellite data shows the extent of the Antarctic ozone hole in September 2023. (ESA / DLR Graphic)

NASA has selected four proposals for climate science missions, including an effort led by a University of Washington researcher, to go forward for further study with millions of dollars in funding.

STRIVE, which has UW atmospheric scientist Lyatt Jaeglé as its principal investigator, would focus on interactions between the stratosphere and the troposphere.

“STRIVE would allow us to see the composition and temperature of the atmosphere with much finer detail than previously possible from space,” Jaeglé told me in an email. “It would enable us to observe how smoke from fires and volcanoes affect the ozone layer. It would give us needed information to understand how the troposphere and stratosphere interact, and how these interactions influence weather, climate and air quality.”

Jaeglé said “the entire STRIVE team is very excited at the prospect of moving forward in this next step to prepare the concept study.”

The three other studies winning support from NASA’s new Earth System Explorers Program are ODYSEA, EDGE and Carbon-I. Each of the science teams for the four selected proposals will receive $5 million to conduct a one-year concept study.

After the study period, NASA will choose two of the proposals to go forward to launch, with readiness dates expected in 2030 and 2032. For each chosen investigation, the mission cost will be capped at $310 million. That figure doesn’t include launch costs, which will be covered by NASA.

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Asteroid hunters make 27,500 new finds in old data

Asteroid orbital tracks
This visualization shows trajectories for scores of asteroids. (B612 Asteroid Institute / UW Dirac Institute / OpenSpace Project)

A team of asteroid hunters that includes researchers at the University of Washington says it has identified 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates — not by making fresh observations of the night sky, but by sifting through archives of astronomical data.

The weeks-long database search was conducted by the Asteroid Institute, a program of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, in partnership with UW’s DiRAC Institute and Google Cloud.

The two institutes developed a program called THOR, which stands for “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery.” THOR runs on a cloud-based, open-source platform known as ADAM (“Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping”). The program can analyze the positions of millions of moving points of light observed in the sky over a given period of time, and link those points together in ways that are consistent with orbital paths.

Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO collaborated with the Asteroid Institute to fine-tune its algorithms for Google Cloud. The project analyzed 5.4 billion observations drawn from the NOIRLab Source Catalog Data Release 2.

“What is exciting is that we are using electrons in data centers, in addition to the usual photons in telescopes, to make astronomical discoveries,” Ed Lu, executive director of the Asteroid Institute, said in a news release.

Most of the 27,500 asteroid discovery candidates are in the main belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But the candidates also include more than 100 apparent near-Earth asteroids.

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