Discovery Days returns!

On April 30 and May 1, thousands of elementary and middle school students from across Washington state will arrive on the ÁńÁ«ÊÓƔ’s Seattle campus to explore more than . Hosted by the UW College of Engineering, Discovery Days gives students a chance to experience science and engineering concepts for themselves by building batteries, designing videogames, firing air vortex cannons and controlling plasma with their fingertips.Ìę

This year, more than 9,000 students from 109 schools registered to attend.

For more information, contact William Poor at wpoor@uw.edu.

Sunbirds may look similar to hummingbirds — small, iridescent birds with thin bills — but it turns out the two are only distantly related. Sunbirds live primarily in Africa, Asia and Australia, and have a unique way to slurp up nectar. Unlike hummingbirds, which use minute movements in their bills to sip nectar, sunbirds use their tongues as a straw. published in Current Biology, a team led by researchers at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” showed that these long-billed birds can change the pressure at the base of their tongues to create suction that moves nectar through their tongues and into their mouths, a novel mechanism never before seen in vertebrates. The researchers used multiple techniques — including high-speed video of sunbirds drinking red-dyed nectar from transparent artificial flowers — to demonstrate this phenomenon across multiple sunbird species as well as build a mathematical model that describes how it works. Sunbirds pollinate the flowers they drink from, and researchers are interested in understanding how different sunbird species’ plant preferences affect the plant-pollinator networks across continents.

For more information, contact lead author , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in biology, at david_cuban@brown.edu.ÌęÌę

The other UW co-author is . A full list of co-authors and funding is included . Related stories in and .Ìę

Seattle Fault gets 5,000 more years of sleep 

Just over 1,100 years ago an on the Seattle fault rocked — and reshaped — the Puget Sound region. It lifted the sea floor and sent a powerful tsunami through the sound. Researchers have estimated that this fault, which runs east to west beneath the middle of the city, will produce a large earthquake every 5,000 years or so. However, , recently published in Geology, pushes that estimate back to 11,000 years. The researchers extended this window by scouring submerged shorelines for evidence of significant elevation changes. The geological record at these sites dates back 11,000 years, but they only found evidence of one major earthquake. This information could be useful to those making seismic hazard maps, which help people understand the risks associated with different regions. Although other regional faults and the imposing pose more imminent risks to residents, the main Seattle fault doesn’t appear to be ready for rupture anytime soon.

For more information, contact lead author , UW research scientist of Earth and space sciences, at edav@uw.edu.

The other UW co-author is . A full list of co-authors and funding is included in the paper. Related story in .

The PNW has many rivers, but no system for gauging landslide dam risk

Scientists have a new tool for estimating lesser known hazards in the Pacific Northwest: and outburst floods. Landslides along rivers can block the flow of water downstream, creating a lake just above the slide area. Most landslide dams fail within 10 days, releasing trapped water in an outburst flood, which can be devastating. Last fall, 20 people died after in Taiwan. published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, UW researchers debut a mathematical approach to mapping landslide dam hazards based on valley width and projected slide size. When they applied the tool to a mountain range in Oregon, they found that roughly one-third of rivers in the study area were susceptible to landslide dams, with risk increasing in mountainous areas. If a landslide dam does form, alleviating pressure by for water to escape can help prevent flooding. Identifying high risk areas can help guide emergency response efforts following storms, earthquakes and other events that increase landslide risk.

For more information, contact lead author , UW doctoral student of Earth and space sciences, at pmmorgan@uw.edu.

The other UW co-author is . A full list of co-authors and funding is .

Rubin observatory expected to spot many ‘imminent impactor’ asteroids

Small asteroids — those 1 to 20 meters in diameter —  hit the Earth 35-40 times per year, though they’re very rarely spotted by telescopes before impact. That could soon change: published in The Astrophysical Journal, UW astronomers calculate that the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory could discover one to two Earth-impacting asteroids annually , roughly doubling the number currently logged. The researchers expect Rubin to discover these asteroids an average of 1.5 days before impact, which is more warning time than ever before. Advance notice is extremely valuable in the case of larger asteroids that could be a threat to people or infrastructure. Because the Rubin Observatory is located in the Southern Hemisphere, it will likely discover many Earth impactors that existing asteroid surveys — concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere — miss.

For more information, contact lead author Ian Chow, a UW graduate student of astronomy, at chowian@uw.edu.

Other UW co-authors are Mario Jurić, Joachim Moeyens, Aren N. Heinze and Jacob A. Kurlander. A full list of co-authors is included .

Many marine microbes share a genetic toolbox for fixing supper at sea

Researchers have now identified a set of genes that allow some bacteria to process a compound, called homarine, that is abundant in the ocean and appears to play a key role in nutrient cycling. Phytoplankton produce loads of homarine, but scientists weren’t sure what became of it until now. In a recent study published in Nature Microbiology, researchers found a set of genes present in common and far-flung bacteria that convert homarine into glutamic acid, an essential building block for life. This suggests that homarine may be a vital and overlooked resource and highlights the importance of bacteria in stabilizing marine ecosystems. Previous studies also found that homarine serves as and helps small crabs . The UW team will continue studying homarine to better understand how it fits into the broader ecological landscape.

For more information, contact senior author , a UW professor of oceanography, at aingalls@uw.edu.Ìę

The other UW co-authors are , , , , , and   A full list of co-authors and funding is

As far as research subjects go, it’s not always easy to find common ground with a single-celled bacterium. Yet the more studies his model bacteria, , the more he sees surprising commonalities between their behavior and our own as humans.

“It was mortifying to be stumped for so long by what appeared to be completely counterintuitive behavior only to realize that I engage in exactly the same behavior everyday,” said Wiggins, an associate professor of both physics and bioengineering at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ”.Ìę

Scientists in use experiments and modeling to understand the global principles that govern gene expression, and protein abundance in particular. In in Science Advances, Wiggins’ team discovered that A. baylyi cells amass huge surpluses of essential proteins, rather than taking the seemingly more efficient approach of making just enough to survive. UW News chatted with Wiggins to learn about the remarkably relatable reason for this puzzling behavior.

This work grew out of a mystery you and your team uncovered. Tell us about that mystery.

Paul Wiggins: Genes are the blueprints for proteins — we say they “code for proteins.” A. baylyi has a number of genes that code for proteins that we know are essential for cell growth. But we didn’t know exactly what each of these proteins do. In 2016, we were attempting to uncover these proteins’ specific functions in collaboration with the . To do this we disrupted each gene so that the cells couldn’t make any more protein — they were left with a now dwindling supply of whatever they’d previously made. Then we would watch the cells under a microscope to determine when and how cellular processes would fail.Ìę

As an example, we knocked out a gene that coded for a protein that we found was responsible for cell wall synthesis — it makes the protein-sugar chainmail that prevents the cells from rupturing, or lysing. And you can watch the video we recorded to see what happened: The cells grew and divided for a while, but then all of a sudden they inflated and just popped.

In that example, something strange happened. We would expect the cell walls to start to fail almost immediately after the disruption happened because every time the cells divide, the remaining protein is divided among the offspring cells, so pretty quickly there wouldn’t be enough to sustain the new cell walls. However, growth continued, one generation after another, before the cells finally failed after four rounds of division!

Why did it take so long? Gene after gene showed the same pattern. We realized that each cell must have made a ton of extra proteins — far more than it needed. So after we knocked out that essential gene, the cell was able to run on fumes for a while — and was even able to pass stores of that protein on to its offspring. That finding was initially a huge surprise. We all expected, naively, that if a cell only needed a few copies of a protein to function, it would only make a few — anything more would be a waste of resources and energy. It’d be like taking a seven-day trip and packing 30 pairs of socks. And yet, this behavior seemed to be common for lots of essential genes.Ìę

What do you think is the cause of this protein overabundance?

PW: Baking is a good analogy. If you want to make an apple pie, you probably only buy as many apples as you need for that recipe. But you keep a large quantity of salt in your pantry. You might only need a teaspoon of salt to make any given meal, but none of us go to the store and buy salt a teaspoon at a time. Salt is so cheap and easy to store that, relative to the cost of other ingredients in your meal, it’s basically free to keep in large quantities. And critically, you don’t want to run out of salt when you’re cooking.Ìę

We demonstrated that something analogous is happening in A. baylyi cells for most of the essential genes. Only about 30% of a cell’s essential genes code for proteins that are “expensive” in that the cells need these proteins in large numbers. It would be very costly to, say, double an already large number. These are the apples in our apple pie analogy — the cell makes just enough of those proteins to get by.Ìę

The remaining 70% of essential genes, however, code for proteins that the cell does not need in large numbers. In fact, relative to that other 30%, the cell needs so few of these proteins that it’s basically free to produce a bunch of extras. Doubling the production of those proteins, say from 30 to 60 copies, is a drop in the bucket if the cell’s overall budget is three million proteins. So the cell says, “Screw it, it’s virtually free. Let’s make extra so we don’t run out.” In some cases a cell might make 10 times more protein than it will ever need.

Why is this strategy useful for the cells?

PW: This overabundance strategy is important because otherwise a cell might fail to produce enough of something critical. Protein synthesis is an imprecise process — cells sometimes make a little more or a little less of things than they’re programmed to make. Some essential proteins are made at such low numbers that any deviation from the plan could leave a cell with zero copies of that protein. This is less of a problem for essential proteins that are made in much higher numbers.Ìę

How do these findings support or challenge previous ideas about how cells function?

PW: Depending on who you talk to, this is either definitely wrong or completely obvious. On the one hand, it’s a really ingrained idea that organisms are always optimizing everything, which would naively suggest that cells should make exactly what they need — no more, no less. However, this is clearly not the case. Other studies have observed these kinds of protein surpluses in cells before, but it wasn’t appreciated quite how wide-spread this phenomenon was. Previously researchers proposed that overabundance might be a hedge against changing conditions — maybe cells are stockpiling proteins in case times get tough. We’re suggesting that it’s a hedge against the cells failing to make the right number of essential proteins.

Co-authors include , a UW postdoctoral researcher of physics; Teresa W. Lo and , former UW doctoral students of physics; , a UW graduate student of physics; and , a UW postdoctoral researcher of laboratory medicine and pathology.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact Wiggins at pwiggins@uw.edu.Ìę

ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” professor of physics and UW research professor emeritus are part of an international team that won the 2026 . The $3 million award is shared among roughly 400 scientists, including 18 other researchers from the UW team. It celebrates decades of work to better understand the muon — a subatomic particle with anomalous properties. This collaborative effort could ultimately lead to the discovery of entirely new particles.

“A remarkable aspect of these experiments is that it took the collective talents and experience of scientists and engineers from particle, nuclear, atomic, optical, accelerator and theoretical physics communities to work coherently toward one single goal,” Hertzog said. “Together, we measured a property of the muon that encapsulates almost everything we know about modern physics from relativity to quantum mechanics to the zoo of particles that govern the fundamental forces that shape our world.”

The were established in 2012 to recognize research achievements in life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.Ìę

Muons, short-lived subatomic particles, are created for experiments by particle accelerators. They exist for a fraction of a second before decaying into electrons and even tinier particles called neutrinos. During their short life, muons exhibit magnetic properties that deviate slightly from the – the leading theory that describes the particles and forces that make up the universe, along with anything that exists that has not yet been discovered.

The experiments recognized by the Breakthrough Prize represent 60-plus years of work to find out exactly how far the muon’s magnetism strays from Standard Model predictions. The first experiments began in 1959 at the, also called CERN.Ìę

Hertzog’s group at the University of Illinois was involved in a later experiment at the in the mid-1990s. He joined the faculty at UW in 2010 and helped develop a new experiment at (Fermilab) that in 2025 with record-setting precision.Ìę

While Hertzog and others have now completed their experimental measurements, theorists  continue to refine the predictions of the Standard Model. In time, the gap between theory and experiment — where the muon currently hovers — may vanish or persist. If the muon’s properties never fit the Standard Model, physicists may need to explore entirely new theories.Ìę

“No matter where the final theory settles, the comparison with our experiment will have important consequences and give us deep insight into the heart of matter,” Hertzog said.

Many UW physicists have been recognized by Breakthrough Prizes since the prizes’ inception, including a banner year in 2021 that also featured a win in the life sciences category by Nobel Prize laureate , a UW professor of biochemistry.

“The Breakthrough Prize has previously recognized UW physicists for work that deepened our understanding of gravity, dark energy and dark matter,” said , UW divisional dean of natural sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. “This latest recognition is a testament to the value of large-scale collaborative physics research and we are very proud of the accomplishments of all of the UW faculty, postdocs and students who contributed to this effort.”

A full list of current UW researchers recognized by the 2026 prize . Learn about other UW wins at the Breakthrough Prize here.Ìę

For more information, contact Victor Balta at balta@uw.edu.

Even on a campus like the ÁńÁ«ÊÓƔ’s — home to particle accelerators, wave tanks and countless other bespoke pieces of equipment — the machinery in the stands out. Take the dilution fridge, a large, white, cylindrical device that can cool a small chamber to one hundredth of a kelvin above absolute zero — the coldest possible temperature in the universe.Ìę

“This is the coldest fridge money can buy,” said , a UW assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the former director of the lab, which goes by the nickname QT3. “When it’s running, the chamber inside this device is about 100 times colder than outer space. At that temperature, it’s much easier to study and manipulate a material’s quantum properties.”

The lab also houses a photon qubit tabletop lab: a nondescript set of boxes, lasers and lenses that can demonstrate the “spooky” — a term scientists actually use — phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, where two particles appear to communicate instantaneously with each other despite being physically apart.

Or there’s the lab’s latest acquisition, the scanning tunneling microscope, which can image individual atoms within a solid material, allowing researchers to study the structure of materials at the smallest scales.

An interdisciplinary group of researchers has been marshalling resources and expertise to create QT3 for three years, and now, the lab is opening its doors as a unique one-stop shop resource for quantum researchers and educators at the UW.

“The idea of this lab is to improve access to quantum hardware,” Parsons said. “It’s rather hard to acquire equipment like this. And there are a lot of researchers that may have good ideas that they want to test, but don’t have the resources yet for their own equipment. So we’re inviting researchers, initially from across campus, but also from other universities and from industry, to come in and test their ideas. This can be a hub for quantum experts to share their ideas and collaborate.”

The lab also boasts hardware that can demonstrate known quantum principles and techniques, making it useful for students in quantum fields. In addition to the entanglement device, Parsons’ students developed a machine that can suspend charged particles — in this case, tiny grains of pollen — in midair using electric fields. Researchers use the same technique to trap single atoms and manipulate their quantum properties, making the lab’s ion-trapping machine good practice for more complex work.

Some students even work at the lab through an undergraduate staffing program, and have helped install instrumentation, write code to power equipment and build parts for custom microscopes. The program provides yet another avenue for students to get hands-on experience with unusual machinery and techniques.Ìę

“Quantum mechanics is inherently counterintuitive, and that makes it a powerful teaching tool,” Parsons said. “In the QT3 lab, students will encounter systems where their everyday intuition breaks down, and they must rely on careful reasoning and experimentation instead. They learn how to debug when results don’t match expectations, how to test simple cases and how to build understanding about hardware step by step.”

The cosmically cold dilution fridge remains something of a centerpiece, even as the lab fills up with specialized equipment. The extreme environment within the device strips heat, light and other stray energy away from materials, allowing researchers to observe the peculiar quantum properties that remain. One such property is superposition, or the ability of a particle like an electron to maintain multiple mutually exclusive properties at the same time. Scientists use superposition to create a powerful, tiny piece of technology: a quantum bit, or qubit.Ìę

“Traditional computers use bits, which can only be one or zero. A qubit, on the other hand, we can make one plus zero,” Parsons said. “It’s both at the same time, and only when we measure it do we find out which one it is. We can use this unusual property to build a new class of computers that excel at tasks like communications and encryption.”

QT3 is part of a collaborative effort to solidify UW as a leader in quantum research and applications. Most of the lab hardware was funded by a congressional earmark championed by Senator Maria Cantwell’s office. Departmental funding from across the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences helped rehab the lab space. The National Science Foundation provided seed funding for the instructional lab equipment.

The UW has also spent the past decade investing heavily in faculty with quantum expertise.

“Very few places have expertise across the full quantum stack, from materials up to algorithms,” said , a UW professor of physics and founder of QT3. “The UW has quantum faculty in electrical and mechanical engineering, physics, computer science, materials science and chemistry. Our faculty work on superconducting qubits, spin defects, photons, trapped ions, neutral atoms and topological qubits. Our advantage is the breadth of our investment.”

The lab is now available to researchers and students across the UW, and private companies are encouraged to reach out about partnering. Parsons has already used the lab to teach a graduate-level class in electrical and computer engineering for students who included employees from Boeing, Microsoft and quantum computing company IonQ. The lab is hiring for a full-time manager to maintain the equipment and help users make the most of the facility.Ìę

“Here in academia, we can improve the building blocks for applied technologies like quantum computing, and then transfer those learnings to industry for further scaling,” Parsons said.

For more information, contact Parsons at mfpars@uw.edu.

This winter was ; as a result, many snowy, alpine areas have seen bouts of winter rainfall where there would ordinarily only be snow. These unusual weather patterns have contributed to an abysmal ski season, but they can also set the stage for dangerous avalanches. At temperatures close to freezing, precipitation can fall as rain but freeze when it hits the snow, forming an icy crust. Snow that accumulates on top of that crust is unstable and prone to abrupt slides, causing an avalanche that can close down a major highway in moments, endanger backcountry skiers and more.

Avalanche experts in Western Washington know how to manage the risks associated with rain-on-snow events, but many of their counterparts in colder regions like Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana are less familiar with these dynamics. New research from the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” shows that as winters in these regions warm, their snowpacks may come to resemble those of maritime areas, with more rain-on-snow events, icy crusts and complex avalanche forecasting.Ìę

The findings in ARC Geophysical Research.

“This winter’s warmth is a harbinger,” said lead author , a UW graduate student of civil and environmental engineering. “We know that temperatures will keep rising, and our work is a red flag for cooler regions of the greater Pacific Northwest, such as Idaho and Western Montana, that aren’t used to dealing with ice crusts and their resulting avalanche problems.”

The study is part of a larger effort to understand the structure of snow as it accumulates, which has implications for weather and avalanche forecasting, wildlife dynamics and more.Ìę

“Snow scientists are pretty good at measuring snow depth and volume,” said senior author , a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “We’re also pretty good at figuring out how much water you get if all that snow melts. But our models aren’t as good at representing snow structure, such as layers of different densities and crystal types that increase avalanche risks. And we really want to know how the structure of snow changes as the climate changes. That’s a tricky question that no one has tackled, particularly for rain-on-snow conditions.”

To dig into that question, the researchers studied how warming influences ice layer formation in seasonal snowpacks. First, they collected temperature and precipitation data captured by 53 monitoring stations across the Pacific Northwest for the past 25 years. They used a computer model to identify days when ice layers likely formed at each location. They then checked the model against real-world measurements at one of the locations — a station at Snoqualmie Pass — and found that the model matched the measurements with 74% accuracy.

Finally, they used the same model to simulate those same 25 winters at 2 C and 4 C warmer than they were, and looked for changes to the number of ice crusts across the region. , the Pacific Northwest is expected to warm by 2 C to 5 C by 2050 as compared to pre-2000 temperatures.

The results were split regionally by the Cascade mountains. In colder, inland parts of the Pacific Northwest — places like Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana — higher temperatures created more rain-on-snow days and more avalanche-prone ice layers. Locations in the warmer, maritime Cascades saw the opposite effect: Higher temperatures created slush instead of ice, potentially reducing the avalanche risk associated with ice crusts.Ìę

The predicted snowpack changes may also impact wildlife behavior. Some foraging mammals, such as reindeer, dig down into the snow in search of food and may have a hard time breaking through an icy crust. Conversely, firm ice might provide a better running surface for animals fleeing predators. Specific regional effects will require additional study.

What’s clear now is that those who work or play in avalanche terrain in broad swaths of the Pacific Northwest — and even beyond — may need to adjust to a new set of risk factors.

“I’d love to see this shared with avalanche forecasters widely, both as a call to action and as a way to help them understand what their snowpack might look like in the future,” Alden said.

, the director of geospatial science at Audubon Alaska and former doctoral student of environmental and forest sciences at the UW, is a co-author.

This research was funded by the NASA Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science program and the UW Program on Climate Change’s Graubard Fellowship.

For more information, contact Alden at cdalden@uw.edu.

was combing through old telescope data from 2020 when he found an otherwise boring star acting very strangely. The star, named Gaia20ehk, was about 11,000 light-years from Earth near . It was a stable “main sequence” star, much like our sun, which meant that it should emit steady, predictable light. Yet this star began to flicker wildly.

“The star’s light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016 it had these three dips in brightness. And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” said Tzanidakis, a doctoral candidate in astronomy at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ”. “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’”

The cause of the flickering had nothing to do with the star itself: Huge quantities of rocks and dust — seemingly from out of nowhere — were passing in front of the distant star as the material orbited the system, patchily dimming the light that reached Earth. The likely source of all that debris was even more remarkable: a catastrophic collision between two planets.

“It’s incredible that various telescopes caught this impact in real time,” Tzanidakis said. “There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and moon. If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world.”

in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Planets form when gravity forces together matter — dust, gas, ice or rocky debris, for example — orbiting a new star. Early solar systems are chaotic — planets routinely collide and explode or go flying off into outer space. Through this process, and over perhaps 100 million years, solar systems like ours winnow their planets down and settle into an equilibrium.Ìę

As common as these collisions probably are, observing one in a distant solar system requires patience and luck. The orbits of the planets must take them directly between us and their star, so that the resulting debris obscures some of the star’s light. The telltale flicker then takes years to play out.Ìę

“Andy’s unique work leverages decades of data to find things that are happening slowly — astronomy stories that play out over the course of a decade,” said senior author , a UW assistant research professor of astronomy. “Not many researchers are looking for phenomena in this way, which means that all kinds of discoveries are potentially up for grabs.”

Tzanidakis, the study’s lead author, studies extreme variability in stars over time. His previous work at the UW identified a system with a binary star and a large dust cloud that caused a seven-year eclipse.

The behavior of Gaia20ehk, however, posed a new mystery. The star’s particular fluctuation — short dips in brightness and then chaos — had never before been observed. The team was stumped, until Davenport suggested that they use data from a different telescope to look for infrared light rather than visible light.Ìę

“The infrared light curve was the complete opposite of the visible light,” Tzanidakis said. “As the visible light began to flicker and dim, the infrared light spiked. Which could mean that the material blocking the star is hot — so hot that it’s glowing in the infrared.”

A cataclysmic collision between planets would certainly produce enough heat to explain the infrared energy. What’s more, the right kind of collision could also explain those initial dips in light.

“That could be caused by the two planets spiraling closer and closer to each other,” Tzanidakis said. “At first, they had a series of grazing impacts, which wouldn’t produce a lot of infrared energy. Then, they had their big catastrophic collision, and the infrared really ramped up.” 

There are also clues that the collision resembles the one that created the Earth and moon . The dust cloud is orbiting Gaia20ehk at roughly one astronomical unit, the same distance from the sun to the Earth. At that distance, the material could eventually cool down enough to solidify into something similar to our Earth-moon system. Scientists like Tzanidakis and Davenport can’t know for sure until the dust settles — literally — in the system. That could take a few years, or a few million.Ìę

In the meantime, their discovery is a call to action to find more collisions. The powerful Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be well suited to the task when it begins its later this year; some back-of-the-napkin math by Davenport suggests that Rubin could find 100 new impacts over the next 10 years. That could ultimately help narrow the search for habitable worlds outside our solar system.

“How rare is the event that created the Earth and moon? That question is fundamental to astrobiology,” Davenport said. “It seems like the moon is one of the magical ingredients that makes the Earth a good place for life. It can help shield Earth from some asteroids, it produces ocean tides and weather that allow chemistry and biology to mix globally, and it may even play a role in driving tectonic plate activity. Right now, we don’t know how common these dynamics are. But if we catch more of these collisions, we’ll start to figure it out.”

For more information, contact Tzanidakis at atzanida@uw.edu and Davenport at jrad@uw.edu.

This research was funded by Breakthrough Initiatives.

At the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” Harris Hydraulics Lab, an odd scene plays out. Over and over again, researchers from the UW and the (PNNL) pass a small rubber model of a marine animal through a large tank filled with flowing water and fitted with a spinning turbine. On some runs, the model bonks against the turbine blades; on others, it receives a glancing blow or sails past undisturbed. When bonks or knicks occur, a small collision sensor on one of the turbine’s blades detects the impacts and plots the interactions in a computer program.

The researchers are repeatedly simulating something that they hope will rarely happen in the wild: a collision between marine wildlife like a seabird, seal, fish or whale — or submerged debris like logs — and an underwater turbine.Ìę

“We want to make sure we’re minimizing the chances of a collision in the first place,” said Aidan Hunt, a senior research engineer in mechanical engineering at the UW and member of the (PMEC). “But if a collision were to occur, we want to be able to detect it, and potentially avoid it, in real time. The available evidence suggests that collisions are rare, but we’re taking a ‘trust-but-verify’ approach.”

Marine energy — power harvested from tides, waves and currents — has enormous potential as a clean, renewable resource. But more information is needed about how large, commercial installations of underwater turbines or power-generating buoys could affect marine wildlife, whether through increased noise in the environment, habitat change or direct interactions with equipment.Ìę

The marine collision experiments are part of the , a collection of projects led by PNNL to study the environmental impact of marine energy.Ìę

The work at Harris Hydraulics follows a by PNNL and the UW Applied Physics Lab using a four-foot-tall prototype turbine installed at the entrance to Sequim Bay. In that study, researchers trained an underwater camera on the turbine for 109 days and then catalogued every instance of an animal approaching or interacting with the turbine. The camera captured more than 1,000 instances of fish, birds and seals approaching the turbine blades. There were only four collisions, and all were small fish.Ìę

“This study was a first step, but a promising one,” said co-author , a research scientist at the UW Applied Physics Lab. “We didn’t see any endangered species in our study, and the risk of collision for seals and sea birds seemed to be quite low. We’re excited to get back out there with the camera and learn even more.”

The Sequim Bay experiment generated hours of valuable data, but that degree of intense monitoring may not be practical in large commercial installations in the future. Cheaper impact sensors, like the ones logging bath toy impacts at Harris Hydraulics, could be a solution, researchers say.ÌęÌę

The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydropower & Hydrokinetics Office, through the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Triton Initiative and the TEAMER program.

For more information, contact Hunt at ahunt94@uw.edu or Emma Cotter at emma.cotter@pnnl.gov.

As climate change nudges weather in the eastern Cascades in extreme and volatile directions, forest managers in the region have a lot to juggle. Hotter, drier summers are contributing to bigger and more frequent wildfires. Meanwhile, warmer winters may cause the Cascades to lose 50% of its annual snowpack over the next 70 years. Mountain snow supplies the Yakima River Basin with 75% of its water supply, making it a crucial reservoir for both nature and agriculture . Less winter snow also leads to drier and more fire-prone forests in the summer.

To encourage fire resilience, forest managers use tried-and-true tools like controlled burning and the selective felling of trees to thin out the forest. Both methods remove fuel and help return forests to historical conditions — but less is known about their impact on snowpack.

To address this knowledge gap, a team of researchers at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) embarked on an ambitious, multiyear study of snowpack along Cle Elum Ridge, an area of the eastern Cascades in the headwaters of the Yakima River Basin. The group experimentally thinned the forest to varying degrees in a roughly 150-acre area. Then, they measured the amount and duration of snowpack during the winter of 2023 and compared it to a previous winter before the forest treatment.Ìę

The results were encouraging: Forest thinning efforts increased snowpack by 30% on north-facing slopes and by 16% on south-facing slopes. Thinning aided snowpack the most where it created a patchwork of gaps in the forest rather than a more even density; gaps of 4-16 meters in diameter seemed to be the “sweet spot” for snow.Ìę

The research points toward more refined forest management practices that can optimize for both wildfire resilience and snowpack.

in Frontiers in Forest and Global Change.

“At its core, this research shows that reducing wildfire risk and protecting water resources don’t have to be competing goals,” said lead author , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alaska who completed this work as a UW doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering. “That’s genuinely good news for a place facing both growing wildfire threats and increasing water vulnerability. So much of the climate conversation focuses on loss, which makes findings like this especially meaningful.”

Predicting snowpack in forested areas, especially those at higher altitudes, hinges on understanding how much snow reaches the ground and how much lands in the forest canopy. Snow on the ground is more likely to stick around through the season, whereas snow in the trees may either melt or sublimate back into water vapor. In either case, it wouldn’t add to the reservoir of water that melts in the spring and summer.ÌęÌę

“Trees intercept snow and so can reduce snowpack, but trees also shade snow and so can retain snowpack,” said senior author , a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “The dominant effect depends on winter temperatures, and the Cascade crest near Cle Elum is right on the border where the effect flips from trees decreasing snow to trees saving snow.” 

found that natural gaps in the forests of the eastern Cascades accumulated more snow. This, combined with other research, gave the team reason to hope for a positive connection between forest thinning and snowpack, though it wasn’t a sure thing. have found that open areas elsewhere in the Western U.S. saw reduced snowpack.

Thus, it was time for a direct — and complex — study of managed forests.

Researchers picked Cle Elum Ridge for the work, where TNC’s forest managers were planning thinning treatments to improve forest health and wildfire resiliency. The orientation of the ridge allowed them to compare north- and south-facing slopes — southern slopes in the region see more sunshine and less snow retention on average. From October 2021 to September 2022, the researchers worked with TNC’s forest managers and local contract loggers to remove trees on both slopes in a gradient, from no thinning to extensive. The team also set up time-lapse cameras at several strategic points to measure snow depth over time.

Then, they waited for snow to fall.

By March 2023, the area was close to its peak snowpack, and the team returned with staff and equipment from the UW (RAPID). The RAPID crew flew a specialized drone that generated a detailed 3D map of the study area using a laser-mapping technology called lidar.Ìę

By comparing the new 3D map and timelapse imagery to lidar data captured before the forest treatment, the team was finally ready to calculate two things: the change to the forest structure, and its effect on the snowpack.

Across the whole study area, the team found that thinning helped the forest recover 12.3 acre-feet (or about four million gallons) of water in the form of snow per 100 acres on north-facing slopes, and 5.1 acre-feet (or about 1.5 million gallons) per 100 acres on south-facing slopes.Ìę

As expected, areas where the thinning opened gaps in the canopy were most effective at restoring snow storage that had been previously lost to environmental degradation and climate change. Gaps of 4-16 meters in diameter seemed to retain the most snow, though there were few gaps larger than 16 meters to evaluate.

One surprising result: The way forest managers thin forests doesn’t reliably create gaps. Forest managers map out their reductions using the density of trunks in an area, not canopies, as their primary measurement.

“Imagine a group of 100 people all holding umbrellas in the rain,” said co-author , director of the UW Climate Impacts Group. “They’re standing close enough together that their umbrellas overlap, so none of the rain hits the ground. If you remove 10 of the umbrellas randomly, you’d still have plenty of coverage overall. But, if you remove 10 umbrellas that are right next to one another, you create a gap in the umbrella ‘canopy,’ and you get a 10% increase in the amount of rain that hits the ground.”

That realization adds a nuance to the findings. It’s likely that forest thinning can benefit both wildfire and snowpack resilience at the same time, but only if managers keep canopy gaps in mind.Ìę

“One thing we all learned was that snow people and tree people speak different languages,” Lumbrazo said. “Different experts look at totally different variables to help them decide whether or not to cut down a single tree. So an important goal is to get everyone speaking the same language. And I think this paper is one step towards better communication.”

Overall, the results suggest practical changes to forest management practices in the eastern Cascades. For example, managers might consider more tree-thinning on north-facing slopes, since snowpack gains may be greater there. With further research, these learnings may also extend to other regions in the Pacific Northwest.Ìę

The work could also aid collaboration between forest managers and hydrologists at a time when the region needs all the water it can get.

“As we lose snowpack, everything becomes really squeezed,” said co-author , a senior aquatic ecologist at TNC who earned her doctorate in aquatic and fishery sciences at the UW. “We are currently in our third consecutive year of water restrictions in the Yakima River Basin, and are staring down one of the lowest snow years on record. However, our research shows that the treatments currently used for restoring fire resilient forests are compatible with the forest structure needed for supporting water security. And in a world where climate change is reducing water supplies and increasing wildfire severity, we are pleased to report that the same forest treatments can support both goals.”

Co-authors include , a former UW graduate student of civil and environmental engineering; , a former UW undergraduate student of atmospheric and climate science; , a data processing specialist at the UW RAPID facility; and , director of Forest Conservation and Management at The Nature Conservancy.

This research was funded by The Washington Department of Natural Resources, The Nature Conservancy and the National Science Foundation.Ìę

For more information, contact Lundquist at jdlund@uw.edu, Dickerson-Lange at dickers@uw.edu or Howe at emily.howe@tnc.org.Ìę

Yiyue Luo’s at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” is full of machinery that’s oddly cozy. Here, soft and pliable sensors are sewn, knit and glued directly into clothing to give everyday garments new capabilities.Ìę

One of the lab’s newest curiosities is a nondescript gray work glove embedded with sensors that enable it to “feel” on its own. An array of small wires hidden inside the glove report the location and degree of pressure anywhere along its surface. When in use, the signals from the glove inform a realtime “heat map” of pressure that could one day help physical therapy patients track their progress, teach robots to grasp objects, and more.

The project, as it’s officially known, is led by UW electrical and computer engineering doctoral student as part of a collaboration with the and at MIT. UW News caught up with Murphy to learn more about the glove and its potential uses.

What inspired you to create this glove?

Devin Murphy: Our hands are arguably our greatest tools as humans. We interact with the world through our hands in so many different ways. But the nature of how we grasp and manipulate things in our environment is super nuanced and complex, and it’s hard to capture. We have very mature electronics that record sight and sound — think of the cameras and microphones in your smartphone. But there aren’t many electronic devices that record our other senses — like touch. That’s what I’ve been working to remedy with the OpenTouch Glove.

How does the glove work? What are its capabilities?

DM: There are two flexible circuit boards inside each glove that form a grid of wires across the gripping surface of the glove. We can measure pressure at any point in that mesh where two wires meet. The circuit boards connect to a little box of electronics at the user’s wrist, which processes the signals and sends them wirelessly to a laptop.

We can then generate a “heat map” image showing where force is being applied on the hand, where the hand is applying force to different objects and how much force the hand is applying.Ìę

This kind of data gives us extra nuance that a camera can’t capture. For example, if your hand is in a bag or behind an object while it’s grasping things, a camera wouldn’t be able to tell what your hand is doing, whereas this glove can follow along.

What are some potential applications for the glove?

DM: I’m particularly excited about how this technology might help patients recovering from an injury. Physical therapists have patients perform a variety of tasks to regain mobility in their hands — if we can measure how much force people apply during this process, we can provide them with concrete feedback. The patient and therapist can both track progress by monitoring grip strength of the patient over time.Ìę

We’re also seeing lots of new companies invest in physical intelligence for robotics — basically recording how robots interact with the physical world. If we can record human hand grip signals, we might be able to teach robotic hands how to mimic human behavior.Ìę

One other interesting application is in augmented reality or virtual reality. If we replaced traditional controllers with these gloves, it could give users a more natural way to interact with virtual objects and scenery — though we’d need some additional technology for users to feel pressure when gripping virtual things.

How can other researchers access this technology?

DM: It’s really important to us that the glove is accessible to other researchers and anyone else who might want to use it for their own applications. You can order all of the components of the glove directly from commercial manufacturers, and we have released all of the manufacturing files and instructions for putting the glove together yourself.Ìę

We’ve also shown some demos of the glove “in the wild” to showcase the different kinds of data it can collect, and we’re planning to release an open source data set collected with the glove in partnership with researchers at MIT.Ìę

I’m really excited about developing new wearable technologies that allow people to record less popular sensing modalities like touch. I want to figure out how we can capture the nuances of touch-based interactions, so that ultimately we can get better insights into our daily lives.

For more information, contact Murphy at devinmur@uw.edu.