Tag: University of Washington

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Paul Allen sees a ‘golden age’ in tech

Paul Allen
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen speaks with GeekWire behind the scenes at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

By Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle

If Paul Allen were just starting out in computer science today, he might not know where to start. Robotics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, augmented reality, biological systems — the list of topics that fascinate him is practically endless.

“It’s amazing,” Allen said, marveling at the advances in technology and the potential to change the world. “Kids these days have so much more computer power, so much better tools at their disposal. It really is a golden age of what’s possible.”

The Microsoft co-founder sat down for a conversation with GeekWire after making a special appearance on March 9 at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The UW announced that Allen is donating $40 million to its computer science program, and Microsoft is adding $10 million in honor of Allen to bring the total contribution to $50 million — a game-changing endowment for an institution that helps to fuel the regional economy with technology talent.

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UW Hyperloop team unveils purple pod racer

Hyperloop pod racer
The UW Hyperloop team’s sleek pod racer is unveiled at an Eastlake lab building amid the glow of purple spotlights. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

The University of Washington’s Hyperloop team showed off its sleek pod racer and let fans take a peek under the carbon composite hood, one week before a national competition in California.

For the team’s roughly 35 students, the Jan. 19 unveiling at the GloCal Composites Lab in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood was an opportunity to celebrate the purple-tinted fruits of their labor.

“Everyone is committed to being a part of something bigger than themselves, grander than the team itself, and ultimately as a part of history as we think about the next mode of transportation,” UW engineering student David Coven, one of the team’s leaders, told the gathering of students and faculty, guests and journalists.

In its grandest form, the Hyperloop concept calls for shooting passenger pods through tubes at near-supersonic speeds. SpaceX founder Elon Musk came up with the idea in 2013 as a means of traveling between San Francisco and Los Angeles in about a half-hour.

Musk is leaving the commercialization of the concept to others, but in the meantime, SpaceX is sponsoring a college competition for scaled-down models of the pods. Coven said he and other students at UW jumped at the opportunity.

“We couldn’t help ourselves,” he said.

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Complex life may have gotten a false start

Stromatolite
This is a 1.9-billion-year-old stromatolite — or mound made by microbes that lived in shallow water — called the Gunflint Formation in northern Minnesota. Such formations provide evidence of oxygen-rich settings on ancient Earth.. (UW Photo / Eva Stüeken)

Researchers say multicellular life could have arisen in Earth’s oceans more than 2 billion years ago, only to fall victim to a drop in oxygen levels.

That scenario is based on a study of concentrations of the element selenium of sedimentary shale, led by researchers at the University of Washington. The findings – published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – shed light not only on the origins of life on Earth, but on the potential for detecting life on distant planets.

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Scientists find ways to pick a protein’s pockets

Folded protein
This graphic shows the structure of a computationally designed protein that incorporates sheet-like structures with pockets, known as beta sheets. The beta sheets are the wavy “noodles” in the diagram. The structure also incorporates curled-up molecular spirals. (UW Institute for Protein Design / AAAS)

Researchers at the University of Washington have cracked the code for producing molecular structures with tiny pockets – structures that are likely to expand the repertoire for custom-designed proteins.

The structures, technically known as beta sheets, are thought to have an effect on metabolic pathways and cell signaling. Knowing how to produce them synthetically in precise configurations could lead to new treatments for maladies such as AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

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Toothy tumor found in 255 million-year-old fossil

Gorgonopsid
Sketch of a gorgonopsian head, in side view. (CCA 3.0 / Dmitry Bogdanov via UW)

A weird type of benign tumor has been discovered in an unlikely place: the fossilized jaw of a distant ancestor of present-day mammals that lived 255 million years ago.

The tumor, known as a compound odontoma, is made up of miniature toothlike structures. It’s not unusual to find such tumors in mammals, including us humans. But it’s unprecedented to find them in the kind of orgonopsid studied by researchers from the University of Washington.

“We think this is by far the oldest known instance of a compound odontoma,” Christian Sidor, a UW professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, said today in a news release.

Sidor is the senior author of a report on the find, published in today’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology. The research could have implications for cancer research as well as for paleontology.

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How to get water on Mars? Cook it out of the soil

Utopia Planitia on Mars
This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar. They found about as much frozen water as the volume of Lake Superior. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona Photo)

Scientists say there’s enough water in just one region of Mars to fill up Lake Superior – if only it could be extracted from subsurface ice.

So how can future Red Planet settlers take advantage of those deposits to produce the drinkable water, breathable oxygen and hydrogen-based rocket fuel they’ll need? Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a way.

Their research builds upon a technology that was pioneered almost two decades ago, known as the water vapor adsorption reactor, or WAVAR. Adam Bruckner, a professor in UW’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, worked with students to develop a device that could extract tiny amounts of water vapor from the Martian atmosphere.

The WAVAR device was successfully tested in Mars-type conditions, but there wasn’t any funding to move the technology beyond proof of concept.

“NASA has not really funded in-situ resource utilization for research work on that at all,” Bruckner told GeekWire. WAVAR does make a cameo, however, in the fictional tale of Red Planet settlement depicted in “Mars,” a miniseries airing on National Geographic Channel.

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UW’s David Thouless wins Nobel physics prize

David Thouless
UW Professor Emeritus David Thouless is one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics. (Credit: Kiloran Howard / Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge)

David Thouless, a British-born professor emeritus at the University of Washington, has been awarded half of this year’s Nobel physics prize for untangling the topological mysteries of superconductors, superfluids and other weird materials.

“Over the last decade, this area has boosted front-line research in condensed matter physics, not least because of the hope that topological materials could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in today’s announcement of the award.

The other physicists named as Nobel laureates are Princeton’s Duncan Haldane and Brown University’s Michael Kosterlitz. The Nobel Prize committee allocated half of the $930,000 (8 million Swedish kronor) award to Thouless, with the other half to be shared by Haldane and Kosterlitz.

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Arctic sea-ice study is bad news for polar bears

Image: Polar bear
A polar bear tests the strength of thin Arctic sea ice. (Credit: Mario Hoppmann via Imaggeo.EGU.eu)

Scientists have long known that Arctic climate change is bad news for bears, but University of Washington researchers quantify just how bad it is in a study published today.

The study in The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union, is said to be the first to assess the impact of sea ice changes for 19 different populations of polar bears across the entire Arctic region, using the metrics that are most relevant to polar bear biology.

“This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears,” Harry Stern, a researcher with UW’s Polar Science Center, said in an EGU news release.

The analysis draws upon 35 years’ worth of satellite data showing daily sea-ice concentration in the Arctic. There’s a consistent trend toward earlier thawing in the spring, and later freezing in the winter. Between 1979 and 2014, the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of 7 to 19 days per decade. Over the course of 35 years, seven weeks of good sea-ice habitat were lost.

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‘Interscatter’ tech opens new data frontiers

Image: 'Interscatter' contact lens
University of Washington researcher Vikram Iyer holds up a contact lens that’s been fitted with interscatter electronics. (Credit: Mark Stone / University of Washington)

Contact lenses and brain implants that can transmit data may sound like science-fiction gizmos  but researchers at the University of Washington are turning them into science fact, thanks to a technological trick they call interscatter communication.

The technology relies on super-low-power devices that can reflect wireless transmissions such as Bluetooth signals, transforming them into data-carrying Wi-Fi signals in the process.

Such devices require mere millionths of a watt to work, and can be shrunk down to the size of a computer chip. The technique is described in a paper to be presented next week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM 2016 conference in Brazil.

The researchers developed interscatterers shaped like contact lenses and brain implants as test cases.

“Wireless connectivity for implanted devices can transform how we manage chronic diseases,” Vikram Iyer, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student, said today in a news release. “For example, a contact lens could monitor a diabetics blood sugar level in tears and send notifications to the phone when the blood sugar level goes down.”

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Microsoft, UW raise the bar on DNA data storage

Image: DNA in test tube
The pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube can store incredible amounts of encoded digital data. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / University of Washington)

Computer scientists from Microsoft and the University of Washington say they’ve set a new standard for DNA storage of digital data – but they acknowledge that the standard won’t last long.

For now, the bar is set at 200 megabytes. That’s how much data the researchers were able to encode in synthetic DNA pairings, and then correctly read out again. The encoded files included a high-definition music video by the band OK Go, titled “This Too Shall Pass”… the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages … the top 100 books from Project Gutenberg … and the Crop Trust’s global seed database.

But Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project, acknowledges that so much more is theoretically possible.

“You could pack an exabyte of data in an inch cubed,” she told GeekWire. An exabyte is equal to 8 quintillion bits of information, which is much more information than is contained in the Library of Congress. (Exactly how much more? That’s a matter of debate.)

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