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Public research university in Seattle known for strength in computer science, engineering, and medicine, with UW Medicine as its academic health system.
David Baker's University of Washington group tested 135 AI-designed zinc proteases, and 36% cut their target peptides. Cysteine designs fared worse, with 13 of 69 cutting theirs, and both rates come from a bacterial screen.
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University of Washington researchers' new software flagged a 2.53 km asteroid, 491384, that appears to rotate every 4.18 minutes in Rubin data. A spin that fast would demand internal strength well beyond a rubble pile's, but the paper is a preprint.
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University of Washington researchers found an extra joint facet on neck vertebrae two through six in gannets and boobies. The authors read it as a brace for dives at 70 mph, an interpretation drawn from bone geometry.
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Lancet Commission experts modeled 17 global health threats through 2100 and rated two, malicious AI and nuclear conflict, as carrying extinction potential. Obesity leads on avoidable burden at 23.1 billion disability-adjusted life-years, the gap between best and worst case by 2100.
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Meta, MIT and University of Washington researchers let models rewrite their own context, lifting a trained 9B model from 28.8% to 42.5% on BrowseComp-Plus. The gains come from specified benchmark tasks, and rewriting earlier context invalidates the model cache, so we would keep hand-built compaction pipelines as the production default.
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Teams led by HHMI's Jonathan Weissman and Jay Shendure reconstructed family trees spanning millions of cells in developing mice, reported in Science. Each lab had the cells record their own divisions in DNA, a first step toward mapping a mammal the way the roundworm was mapped.
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Flu cases in western US states have climbed since early September, weeks ahead of the usual October or November start. Nature reported that researchers are examining an H1N1 mutation, G155E, though the evidence so far is a small Seattle sample and an unreviewed preprint.
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Caltech and University of Washington physicists simulated a particle collision on a 104-qubit IBM chip using a more efficient way to prepare wavepackets. The test used a simplified one-dimensional theory, so it shows the preparation step that had blocked such runs now fits on current hardware for toy models.
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University of Washington researchers put the dust in Mars's north polar surface ice near 3% by mass, down from earlier estimates as high as 25%. Cleaner ice is brighter and should vaporize more slowly, so the figure bears on Mars climate models.
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UW and Meta researchers report 59.4% on BrowseComp-Plus for a model that edits its own context, against 53.4% for Codex-style summarisation. The edited file is thrown away when the task ends, so memory that lasts across tasks is still the builder's job.
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University of Washington researchers say NASA's SWOT satellite can measure water levels on more than 85% of 800,000 km of Asian irrigation canals. The mission was never designed for canals, so the map points to monitoring from hardware already in orbit, with its scores checked against US canal measurements.
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Qustodio says Australian teens were back online at pre-ban levels within months of the under-16 social media ban, largely via false ages and VPNs. Meta's teen limits, New York City's classroom AI ban and any workplace AI rule written for company devices face the same test.
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Georgetown and University of Washington researchers found misleading AI summaries cut recall of a crash video's key details from 83.6% to 44.8%. Knowing the text came from AI did not protect readers who had watched the event themselves.
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A University of Washington team ran roughly 15,000 streams through four clump-free Milky Way analogues for five billion years and got the gaps and kinks usually read as subhalo signals. The host galaxy is now a control.
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Pulsar Fusion plans a 2027 space demo of a fusion engine that has so far briefly held krypton plasma in place. Helicity Space's CEO says space travel will change within a decade, though the only engine test described so far made plasma and reported no fusion.
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A PLOS Climate study subtracts the top producers' emissions through 2024 from two runs of the FaIR model and finds their contribution to global temperature is about the same whether future emissions fall or keep climbing.
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A former Google XR researcher told Gizmodo the stigma on smart glasses traces back to the camera they were built around. Bars and courts are already acting on that, and Meta's answer so far is a small indicator light.
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Priscilla Martinez's team pulled the tooth from a marine deposit at El Morro in northern Chile. Freshwater fish, gavials and palm phytoliths from the same beds carry more of the argument than the tooth does.
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The Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson are building models and databases of designed proteins. David Baker told WIRED the field usually sees that something works before it knows why.
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In Stem Cell Reports, a team led by Benjamin Freedman reports that stem-cell-derived kidney organoids, which contain no immune cells and no blood vessels, shed podocytes in high-glucose media, and that blocking MIF or TNF-alpha protected them. The pattern resembles what patient biopsies show.
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Science · August 20, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers