science wire

As we burn fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is gradually rising, and with it, the planet's average temperature.

A couple of years ago, Robert Wolfe was experimenting with an artificial intelligence system. He wanted it to complete the sentence, "The teenager ____ at school." Wolfe, a University of Washington doctoral candidate in the Information School, had expected something mundane, something that most teenagers do regularly - perhaps "studied." But the model plugged in "died." This shocking response led Wolfe and a UW team to study how AI systems portray teens.

In the decades following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope , astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe.

Teeth are essential for helping people break down the food they eat, and are protected by enamel, which helps them withstand the large amount of stress they experience as people chew away.

Ask most major artificial intelligence chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, to say something cruel or inappropriate and the system will say it wants to keep things "respectful.

Murres, a common seabird, look a little like flying penguins. These stout, tuxedo-styled birds dive and swim in the ocean to eat small fish and then fly back to islands or coastal cliffs where they nest in large colonies.

Since 2018 the  Zwicky Transient Facility , an international astronomical collaboration based at the Palomar Observatory in California, has scanned the entire sky every two to three nights.

Amid all the changes in Earth's climate, sea ice in the stormy Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica was, for a long time, an odd exception.

As Baby Boomers hit retirement, about  1 in 6 Americans is now over the age of 65. The number of Americans living with dementia is projected to skyrocket - but the proportion of older Americans who develop dementia has actually decreased.

According to the fossil record, cetaceans - whales, dolphins and their relatives - evolved from four-legged land mammals that returned to the oceans beginning some 50 million years ago.

Recently, LinkedIn announced its Hiring Assistant , an artificial intelligence "agent" that performs the most repetitious parts of recruiters' jobs - including interacting with job candidates before and after interviews.

Artificial intelligence is making impressive strides in its ability to read medical images. In a recent test in Britain's National Health Service, an AI tool looked at the mammograms of over 10,000 women and correctly identified which patients were found to have cancer.

Https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/11/12100747/ShortRelease.mp4 Imagine this: You're at an office job, wearing noise-canceling headphones to dampen the ambient chatter. A co-worker arrives at your desk and asks a question, but rather than needing to remove the headphones and say, "What'", you hear the question clearly.

A team led by scientists at the University of Washington and the University of Aberdeen attached tiny "backpack" trackers to hummingbirds in the Colombian Andes to learn more about their movements.

As Earth faces unprecedented climate change, a look into the planet's deep past may provide vital insights into what may lie ahead. But knowledge of the natural world millions of years ago is fragmented. A 15-year study of a site in Bolivia by a joint U.S.-Bolivia team has provided a comprehensive view of an ancient ecosystem when Earth was much warmer than it is today.

The future of hiring, it seems, is automated. Applicants can now use artificial intelligence bots to apply to job listings by the thousands.

Today's 3D printers make it fairly easy to conjure, say, a chess set into existence. But these printers are largely fixed in place.

Polar bears in some parts of the high Arctic are developing ice buildup and related injuries to their feet, apparently due to changing sea ice conditions in a warming Arctic. While surveying the health of two polar bear populations, researchers found lacerations, hair loss, ice buildup and skin ulcerations primarily affecting the feet of adult bears as well as other parts of the body.

Scientists have yet to find evidence of life on Mars, but a new study from researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Washington and other universities suggests microbes could find a potential home beneath  layers of ice known to exist on Mars' surface.

Some of the most dramatic climatic events in our planet's history are "Snowball Earth" events that happened hundreds of millions of years ago, when almost the entire planet was encased in ice up to 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) thick.

On Sept. OpenAI announced a new ChatGPT model that the company says is substantially better at math and science than previous versions, which struggled with reasoning.

UW researchers develop a stretchable, wearable device that lights up an LED using only the warmth of your skin One of the drawbacks of fitness trackers and other wearable devices is that their batteries eventually run out of juice. But what if in the future, wearable technology could use body heat to power itself? UW researchers have developed a flexible, durable electronic prototype that can harvest energy from body heat and turn it into electricity that can be used to power small electronics, such as batteries, sensors or LEDs.

Content warning: This post contains details of sharing intimate imagery without consent that may be disturbing to some readers.

Researchers working on large artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT have vast swaths of internet text, photos and videos to train systems.

Instant buyers, also known as iBuyers , rapidly buy and sell homes using automated models to set prices.

We mostly take roads for granted until something bad happens - a heatwave leads to a street buckling or an atmospheric river makes a neighborhood creek spill over its banks and flood our route to work.

Concern that social media is driving the teen mental health crisis has risen to such a pitch that the majority of states in the country have filed lawsuits against Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook) and the U.S. surgeon general called last month for warning labels on platforms , similar to those on tobacco.

While seeking research internships last year, University of Washington graduate student Kate Glazko noticed recruiters posting online that they'd used OpenAI's ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to summarize resumes and rank candidates.

Corn is one of the planet's most important crops. It not only provides sweet kernels to flavor many dishes, but it's also used in oils, as a sweetener syrup, and as a feed crop for livestock. Corn has been bred to maximize its yield on farms around the world. But what will happen under climate change? Research led by the University of Washington combined climate projections with plant models to determine what combination of traits might be best adapted to future climates.

Shortly after artificial intelligence models including Midjourney and OpenAI's Dall-E went public, AI-generated art started winning competitions: one in digital art , another in photography. Concern rumbled that AI could replace artists - and even, by some metrics, be more creative than humans. But simultaneously, people were exploring these tools as ways to augment their creative processes, not replace them.

As the Earth warms due to climate change, soil that has been frozen for thousands of years is beginning to thaw.

Noise-canceling headphones have gotten very good at creating an auditory blank slate. But allowing certain sounds from a wearer's environment through the erasure still challenges researchers.

A project led by the University of Washington to better understand our atmosphere's complexity is a finalist for NASA's next generation of Earth-observing satellites.

Bob Wilbur thought he'd found a retirement home that would be a place of peace. Nestled against Admiralty Bay on the western edge of Whidbey Island, the three-story house is surrounded by trees and shoreline. It offers the kind of quiet that only an island can provide. Except when the Growlers fly. As often as four days a week, Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft based at the nearby Naval Air Station Whidbey Island fly loops overhead as pilots practice touch-and-go landings.

As computer programming becomes an increasingly valued skill in the workforce, there is a greater need to understand how people learn to code most effectively.

As carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, the Earth will get hotter. But exactly how much warming will result from a certain increase in CO2 is under study. The relationship between CO2 and warming, known as climate sensitivity, determines what future we should expect as CO2 levels continue to climb.