Cosmic Log
NASA says it’ll provide resources for a University of Washington research team that’s working on a concept to put small satellites in orbit around other worlds using magnetic interactions.
The concept, known as magnetoshell aerocapture, is one of nine university-led technology development projects winning NASA’s backing under the Smallsat Technology Partnerships initiative. The nationwide program is managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
It turns out that even galaxies can be photobombed.
Imagery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes reveal what researchers say could be the closest-orbiting pair of supermassive black holes ever seen.
Wave Broadband is coming out in the open about its partnership with the University of Washington to provide broadband connectivity for the Regional Cabled Array, an undersea observatory that’s part of the federally backed Ocean Observatories Initiative.
UW operates and maintains the Regional Cabled Array, which collects a torrent of scientific data from the floor of the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast. More than 150 scientific instruments measure seismic activity, fluid flow, chemical composition and other phenomena in areas such as the Southern Hydrate ridge and the Axial Seamount volcano, lying as much as a mile beneath the ocean surface..
Electrical power and data flow 24/7 via a 323-mile-long cable that runs between the instrument array and a shore station in Pacific City, Ore. Keeping up with the real-time data stream requires a network that can handle transport speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second.
That part of the job gets handled by Wave, which is headquartered in Kirkland, Wash.
They look like ghosts of the abyss, but the wispy, pinkish-white, smooth-skinned creatures at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench have a distinction of substance: They’re the deepest fish ever brought up from the deep sea.
Now the species known as the Mariana snailfish has its official scientific name: Pseudoliparis swirei, a Latin-inspired designation paying tribute to Herbert Swire, a navigator on the 19th-century expedition that discovered the Mariana Trench.
A researcher at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories played a key role in Pseudoliparis swirei’s discovery. UW’s Mackenzie Gerringer is the lead author of a paper on the species’ discovery, published today in the open-access journal Zootaxa.
A sky survey that draws upon the data-crunching skills of researchers at the University of Washington has reached a milestone known as “first light” — and the view is awesome.
The Zwicky Transient Facility takes super-wide-angle pictures of the night sky, using a robotic camera hooked up to the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in the mountains near San Diego.
“First light” occurs when astronomers capture their first image with a new observing instrument. ZTF’s first-light image, taken on Nov. 1, shows a wide swath of the sky that includes the Orion Nebula.
Each ZTF exposure covers a sky area equal to 247 full moons, or 47 square degrees, resulting in an image that’s bigger than 24,000 by 24,000 pixels at full resolution. The camera can cover the entire northern sky in the course of three nights, and scan the visible plane of the Milky Way twice each night.
Researchers from the University of Washington and Columbia University are getting ready for an unprecedented months-long campaign to study Antarctica’s ice shelves from the ocean below, with backing from billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen.
The results are expected to lead to a better understanding of how ice retreats, and how climate change could affect the loss of polar ice sheets and the resulting rise in sea levels.
It’s a high-risk mission — but in this case, robots, not humans, are taking the risk.
“All of these instruments could be lost underneath the ice shelf,” said Spencer Reeder, director of climate and energy for Paul G. Allen Philanthropies.
Reeder said that’s a big reason why Allen, one of Microsoft’s co-founders, is funding the expedition to the tune of just under $2 million. The risks are too high for the traditional funders of polar research, but Allen’s backing could help UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory prove that its devices can do the job.
Want to wear your password on your sleeve? Computer scientists from the University of Washington can make it so.
A research team led by UW’s Shyam Gollakota has demonstrated a method for encoding digital data, including ID tags and security keys, into electrically conductive threads that can be woven invisibly into items of clothing.
The digital code is activated by magnetizing the threads, and then can be read out using magnetometers. A report on the data-weaving experiment was presented last week in Quebec City at the Association for Computing Machinery’s User Interface Software and Technology Symposium.
“This is a completely electronic-free design, which means you can iron the smart fabric or put it in the washer and dryer,” Gollakota, an associate professor at UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, said today in a news release. “You can think of the fabric as a hard disk — you’re actually doing this data storage on the clothes you’re wearing.”
Elevation readings captured by satellites confirm that glaciers in the western United States are fading away at a worrisome rate.
The fade-out isn’t a surprise, considering the rise in global mean temperatures that’s ascribed to climate change. The new twist has to do with how the measurements were made.
University of Washington researcher David Shean looked back at satellite readings that have been amassed in databases, plus fresh readings that are being taken by DigitalGlobe’s constellation of GeoEye and WorldView satellites.
An analysis of the data, facilitated with NASA’s Ames Stereo Pipeline software, produces a 3-D elevation model of mountainous terrain. The method supplements other techniques to estimate glacier size, including area measurements based on aerial imagery and depth measurements made using stakes in the snow.
The result is a year-by-year record tracing the ups and downs of a glacier.
The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine was awarded today for research into biological clocks that was conducted by three American researchers — including Jeffrey Hall, who received his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Washington back in 1971.
Hall will share the $1.1 million prize with Michael Rosbash, a collaborator of his at Brandeis University; and Rockefeller University’s Michael Young.
The three biologists studied fruit flies to trace the genetic “inner workings” of circadian rhythm, the mechanism that regulates sleep, metabolism and other bodily functions in the course of a day, the Swedish-based Nobel committee said.
“Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions,” the committee said.
The University of Washington has received a $15.6 million, six-year grant from the National Science Foundation to fund its Molecular Engineering Materials Center and take on “moonshots” that could lead to cleaner energy, advanced light-based electronics and quantum computing.
The grant was awarded as part of the NSF’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program, or MRSEC. Funding was provided to continue work at six MRSEC centers and start up three more centers, including UW’s.
UW’s center brings together an initial team of 15 faculty members, including researchers who work at the university’s Clean Energy Institute and Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute.
The first targets for research are nanocrystals, quantum dots and thin films. Those technologies could produce solar-concentrating window coverings to boost photovoltaic cells for energy conversion, as well as ultra-thin semiconductors for energy generation, optoelectronics and exotic computing applications.