Tag: University of Washington

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What’s cooking inside Nvidia’s robotics research lab

Nvidia robot open house
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Susan Gaither tickle a robotic hand at Nvidia’s robotics research lab in Seattle. (Nvidia Photo)

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang interacted with a sensitive robotic hand at today’s open house for his company’s robotics research lab in Seattle, it was love at first touch.

“It almost feels like a pet!” Huang said as he tickled the hand’s fingers, causing them to retreat gently.

“It’s surprisingly therapeutic,” he told the crowd around him. “Can I have one?”

The robotic hand, which is programmed to avoid poking humans when they come too close, was just one of the machines on display at the 13,000-square-foot lab in Seattle’s University District.

Nvidia is based in California’s Silicon Valley and has nearly 200 employees working at an engineering center in Redmond, Wash.

But when the chipmaker laid plans to open a lab focusing on research in robotics and artificial intelligence, it set up shop in the same building that houses the University of Washington’s CoMotion Lab. It also put Dieter Fox, a longtime computer science professor at UW, in charge of the operation as senior director of robotics research.

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Supernova leftovers point to a messy blowup

White dwarf and red giant
This artist’s view shows a white dwarf star accumulating material from a nearby red giant star. Ultimately, the white dwarf erupts into a supernova. (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canaria Illustration / Romano Corradi)

In what sounds like a cosmic episode of “CSI,” sleuthing astronomers have figured out what touched off a stellar explosion 545 million light-years away, based on evidence left behind at the scene of the crime.

An international team of astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories to sift through the chemical fingerprints left behind in the remnants of a Type Ia supernova known as SN 2015cp. The astronomers knew the type of star that blew up: It was a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. But they wanted to find out whether a different kind of star had a hand in the blast.

Today the astronomers reported the detection of hydrogen-rich debris in the vicinity of the supernova site — which cracks the case wide open.

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Scientists enlist AI to decipher what rodents say

Mouse cartoon
University of Washington researchers have developed an AI program that uses machine learning in an effort to decipher the ultrasonic vocalizations made by mice. (UW Medicine Illustration / Alice Gray)

Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine have developed a software program that enlists artificial intelligence to decipher the ultrasonic vocalizations made by mice and rats.

The “DeepSqueak” program, described today in a study published by the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, focuses on squeaks and whistles that are well above the range of human hearing.

Software converts the audio signals into visual graphs, or sonograms, and then puts those images through the kinds of machine-vision algorithms that are used for autonomous vehicles.

“DeepSqueak uses biomimetic algorithms that learn to isolate vocalizations by being given labeled examples of vocalizations and noise,” Russell Marx, one of the study’s authors, explained in a news release.

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Bees with backpacks can turn into sensor swarms

Bee with backpack
Bees with “backpacks” can still eat, control their flight and perform other normal behavior.
(University of Washington via YouTube)

Bees with tiny electronic devices on their backs could sound like a researcher’s dream come true, or like a science-fiction novelist’s nightmare come true.

Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, prefers the optimistic view. He and his colleagues at UW have found a way to pack environmental sensors into a backpack small enough for a bumblebee to carry.

The approach, which the UW team calls “Living IoT,” brings significant advantages over the human-made kind of drones.

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Climate change doom teaches lesson for today

Permian-Triassic extinction
An artist’s conception shows the desolation caused by the Permian-Triassic extinction more than 250 million years ago. (LPI / USRA Illustration)

Scientists say rapidly warming oceans played a key role in the world’s biggest mass extinction, 252 million years ago, and could point to the risks that lie ahead in an era of similarly rapid climate change.

The latest analysis, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, puts together computer modeling of ancient ocean conditions and a close look at species characteristics to fit new pieces into a longstanding puzzle: What were the factors behind the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, also known as the Great Dying?

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Fossil tells a whale of a tale about evolution

Carlos Peredo with fossils
Carlos Mauricio Peredo, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History, shows off a 33 million-year-old whale fossil that has been newly classified with the name Maiabalaena nesbittae. (Smithsonian Photo)

A whale that lived 33 million years ago when present-day Oregon was part of the ocean floor has been newly named after a curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

And Elizabeth Nesbitt’s whale isn’t your typical cetacean: An analysis of the fossil, published in the Nov. 29 issue of Current Biology, suggests that Maiabalaena nesbittae bridged a gap between species of whales that had teeth and species that have a different mouth-feeding mechanism known as baleen.

“For the first time, we can now pin down the origin of filter-feeding, which is one of the major innovations in whale history,” study co-author Nicholas Pyenson, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of fossil marine mammals and an affiliate curator at the Burke Museum, said in a news release.

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Climate analysis checks for most livable exoplanets

TRAPPIST-1 planets
This illustration shows the seven Earth-size planets of TRAPPIST-1, an exoplanet system about 39 light-years away. The image shows the relative sizes of planets b through h, from left to right, but does not represent their orbits to scale. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)

If you had to pick a place to set up shop amid the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 star system, 39 light-years from Earth, the fourth rock from that alien sun is the best place to start.

That Earth-sized world, known as TRAPPIST-1 e, came out on top in a recent round of exoplanetary climate modeling, detailed in a paper published Nov. 1 by the Astrophysical Journal.

Not that anyone’s planning on setting up shop there soon: Unless there’s a breakthrough that allows us to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to get to TRAPPIST-1. But the climate modeling methods developed for the TRAPPIST-1 system could help scientists decide which planets to target first with telescopes capable of analyzing alien atmospheres.

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Scientists design proteins that snap together

Protein assembly
This molecular visualization shows how proteins are assembled like building blocks. (UW Illustration)

Researchers have created molecular building blocks that can weave themselves into long threads of protein.

Well, maybe not all that long. Each protein-based building block measures only a nanometer in length, and the self-assembled filaments get about as long as 10,000 nanometers. It’d take more than 2,500 of those filaments, laid end to end, to amount to an inch in total length. Nevertheless, the feat described in this week’s issue of the journal Science demonstrates the power and beauty of protein design.

“Being able to create protein filaments from scratch — or de novo — will help us better understand the structure and mechanics of naturally occurring protein filaments and will also allow us to create entirely novel materials, unlike any found in nature,” senior study author David Baker of the University of Washington said today in a news release.

Baker is a biochemist at the UW School of Medicine and director of UW’s Institute for Protein Design, which has pioneered the protein-folding field for years.

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Gender expert thought ‘genius grant’ was a prank

Kristina Olson
University of Washington psychology professor Kristina Olson is among this year’s 25 winners of MacArthur “genius” grants. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)Ps

When University of Washington psychology professor Kristina Olson got the call telling her she’d be receiving one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants,” she had to ask if they had the right number.

“For a few days after, I continued to think it was an elaborate prank,” Olson said in a news release.

But there’s no denying it now: On Oct. 4, Olson was listed among this year’s MacArthur Fellows, which earns her a no-strings-attached $625,000 stipend that’s spread out over five years. Other fellows include writers, artists, musicians, activists, scholars and even an investigative journalist (Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia).

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Arch Mission gets set to send DNA library to moon

Peregrine lander
An artist’s conception shows Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander on the lunar surface. (Astrobotic Illustration)

DNA-based data storage systems have been proposed as a theoretical way to preserve information for millennia on the moon, but the idea isn’t so theoretical anymore.

The Arch Mission Foundation says it’s partnering with Microsoft, the University of Washington and Twist Bioscience to send an archive of 10,000 crowdsourced images, the full text of 20 books and other information on Astrobotic’s 2020 mission to the moon.

All of the data for those files will be encoded in strands of synthetic DNA that could easily fit within a tiny glass bead. The Microsoft-UW-Twist team has already demonstrated how the method can be used for efficient storage and retrieval of data files, including an OK Go music video.

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