Coral reefs provide shelter and protection , including crabs, moray eels, octopus and fish. But these cozy homes are currently under threat for many reasons, such as rising sea temperatures and ocean acidification.

Researchers are trying to understand how groups of fish communicate with each other within a coral reef, and how the health of the reef affects that communication.

This fall , a ������˾�� doctoral student in the biology department, and UW research scientist are traveling to the on Magoodhoo, Maldives, to gather live footage of interactions. This fish is a common schooling species on Maldivian reefs. UW News asked Milan a few questions about the trip for the occasional series “In the Field,” which highlights UW field research efforts.��

Tell us about your project.

Jj Milan: I’m studying how fish in schools can accurately communicate the difference between a real threat and a harmless false alarm. And then, once a threat is gone, I want to understand how they coordinate the return to normal behavior.

What will you be doing on this trip?

JM: I’ll be using synchronized cameras and automated tracking to record how threat responses spread through a school. We will be scuba diving to place GoPro cameras and tablets around specific coral heads. We won’t be diving very deep because we need sufficient natural lighting for our video recordings. Our local contacts at the MaRHE Center have confirmed that the surrounding reef is shallow with abundant marine life.

I’m also hoping to collaborate with locals to get more insights into typical fish behavior and predator activity in this area.

What do you hope to learn?

JM: I hope to be able to reconstruct how threat responses move through a school of fish in real time, from the first fish that reacts to how the group settles back into normal behavior. I’ll also reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of the coral to understand if the complexity of the structure changes how quick and how coordinated that response is.

What’s something you really enjoy about doing this field work — especially something that might not occur to most people?

JM: I enjoy how this work brings together my love of ocean life, my diving hobby and my passion for research all in one. I have been diving since 2019 and I am excited because this will be my first time diving in warm water conditions.

More generally, is there anything you find surprising or enlightening about doing field work?

JM: I’m surprised at how many possibilities and opportunities for collaboration arise just during the planning process through connecting with other researchers and resources. I hope to build on these connections in the future.��

For more information, contact Milan at jdmilan@uw.edu.

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Birds evolved from dinosaurs. They share a common ancestor and physical traits — some dinosaurs even had feathers. But while these dinosaurs are thought to have had “fuzzy” or “downy” feathers, ancient birds were more likely to have had feathers that look similar to the birds of today.

A ������˾��-led research team has discovered the best-preserved fossil feathers from the — in a fossilized dinosaur poop, also known as a “coprolite.” Some of these feathers have features that look like modern birds’ feathers. In in Current Biology, the team describes this finding and how it can help researchers better understand why and how some birds survived the that killed 75% of life on the planet.

The team discovered the feathers in 2016 at a research site in eastern Montana in the badland exposures of the geological formation called the .

“I was crawling up a rocky outcrop collecting fish fossils when I came across a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball,” said co-author , a UW research scientist in the biology department and the Hell Creek Project collections manager at the Burke Museum. “I picked it up and scanned its surface through my hand lens, and that’s when I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: a tiny fossil feather. I was cautiously optimistic about its discovery, because feathers had not yet been found in the Hell Creek Formation, even after more than 100 years of prospecting.”

Back in the lab, the researchers examined the specimen’s mineral composition and took CT scans of it — essentially, thousands of X-rays that are digitally stacked to reveal the contents of an object.

“Every hour processing the data revealed another feather, another scale, another bone — in stunning 3D,” said co-author , a paleontologist at the Carter County Museum.

The coprolite contained multiple feathers, tiny fish scales from a gar and leg bones from a , an extinct group of birds that are ecologically similar to loons. The researchers reasoned that the feathers must have also come from this same bird. These are the first hesperornithiform feathers ever found.

The hesperornithiforms are close cousins of the birds that survived the mass extinction and still live today. Some scientists have hypothesized that the birds that survived did so because they lived near water, and something about this habitat helped buffer them from the effects of the mass extinction. But the hesperornithiforms also lived by water, and they went extinct.

“We think the types of feathers that these birds had, and/or the way they molted those feathers, may have been one of the underlying causes of the selectivity of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction — essentially, why some birds died out and why others survived,” said lead author , associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum. “Some of these diving birds’ feathers seem to have been modern-looking and waterproof, but they also had some smaller fuzzy, primitive body feathers that we associate with dinosaurs.”

If the feathers on hesperornithiforms and other extinct bird species weren’t as good at keeping their bodies warm, the researchers hypothesize, maybe that’s why they weren’t able to survive the extinction event.

“It’s such a beautiful, well-preserved feather, from such an unexpected source, and it’s exciting that it could help us answer this huge question in paleontology,” O’Connor said. “I usually work with fossils that are preserved in big stone slabs, and the entire skeleton and even the soft tissue is preserved — they make it easy for me. But with this project, we just had this coprolite — and its contents — to go off of, and it made me feel like a detective, piecing together all these little clues. And since no one has studied feathers in coprolites before, this opens up a whole new avenue for investigation. We only knew to look at this one because of how it happened to be split open, with the feather exposed — it was literally a lucky break. I hope more scientists start CT scanning coprolites and taking a closer look at them to see what might be inside.”

, UW doctoral student in biology; , the Hell Creek Project Fossil Preparator at the Burke Museum of Natural History; at the University of Colorado, Boulder; at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago; Christian Cooper at the Field Museum; at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; at the University of Alabama; at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; at the University of Southern California; and at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County are also co-authors on this paper. This research was funded by donations to the Hell Creek Project.

For more information, contact Wilson Mantilla at gpwilson@uw.edu and DeMar at ddemar@uw.edu.

Adapted from .

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������˾�� researchers are leading and collaborating on four research projects as part of Phase 1 in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) , a national initiative to build an AI-for-science ecosystem which accelerates breakthroughs in energy, discovery science and national security.��

The DOE awarded a total of 278 Genesis Mission awards for projects that involve more than 300 participating institutions, including DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration national laboratories, universities and companies. As part of the Genesis Mission, awardees will have access to the Genesis Mission Platform, which includes AI frameworks, advanced AI models from industry partners, and high-performance computing resources across DOE’s National Laboratories and partner facilities.��

“The Genesis Mission represents the kind of bold, collaborative approach needed to accelerate the complex scientific and technological breakthroughs required in our rapidly changing world,” said UW Vice Provost for Research . “Its emphasis on bringing together diverse expertise and cutting-edge technology with strategic partnerships highlights the important role universities play in driving innovation for the nation.”��

The UW-supported Genesis projects span disciplines including advanced sensing technologies, protein design for microelectronic applications, and astronomy data infrastructure, demonstrating the broad potential of AI to accelerate scientific discovery.��

, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a Genesis award to develop neuromorphic terahertz imaging technology for next-generation augmented reality systems. ��

“Neuromorphic terahertz imagers, or brain-inspired imaging in the terahertz band, give us superhuman vision to see through optically obscured media in real time by combining sensing and computation in a single piece of hardware. The Genesis Mission award supports our research in developing the hardware for the neuromorphic terahertz imager, as well as creating a digital twin of the entire system to train imaging models before implementing them on the actual hardware. This is an important step for future terahertz imaging systems on augmented reality hardware,” Naghavi said. ��

Building on research conducted in UW’s , the project brings together collaborators at Texas A&M University, the University of Utah, ChipNexus and NVIDIA to integrate sensing and computation directly within imaging hardware. By reducing the amount of data that must be transferred between sensors and processors, the technology could enable lightweight, low-cost augmented reality headsets capable of seeing through visually obscured materials in real time while operating with far lower power consumption than conventional systems.����

, director of the , and his colleagues are contributing to two Phase I Genesis Mission projects that apply advances in protein design and artificial intelligence to challenges beyond traditional biomedical applications.��

One project, BIND (Biophysics-Informed Learning of Coordination for Metalloprotein Design), led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, seeks to develop an AI framework for designing selective metal-binding proteins. The project leverages quantum chemistry, structural biology, machine learning and high-throughput experimentation to advance the computational design strategies of next-generation rare earth element binders. ��These advancements will catalyze change in critical mineral recovery, radionuclide management and environmental monitoring, while advancing DOE priorities in predictive biosystems design. ��

The second project, led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, will develop an AI-guided loop for the design, fabrication and evaluation of microelectronic devices. The team will leverage proteins designed to assemble on van der Waals substrates to modulate their properties and organize charge carriers within the synthesized hybrid materials, integrating deep-learning protein models with AI-guided material synthesis and characterization, device fabrication and measurements, and circuit-level performance evaluation to create an iterative design process that improves molecules, materials, and device design. ��

Both IPD projects demonstrate how UW-developed protein design technologies are expanding into new areas of chemistry, materials science, and advanced manufacturing. “The Genesis Mission award provides necessary support to develop data that will vastly improve our models, an essential next step in delivering advances for key global challenges,” Baker said.����

, director of the and founding director of the and , a researcher at DiRAC, are partnering with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to help develop infrastructure that will make it easier for astronomers to combine and analyze data from a wide range of observatories and scientific instruments. ��

Their project will expand data formats and analysis platforms to support images, spectra, data cubes and other forms of astronomical data while enabling seamless access to information distributed across cloud and high-performance computing systems. The goal is to remove technical barriers that often slow scientific discovery and make large, multimodal datasets more accessible for AI research. ��

“We want the plumbing to be boring so the astronomy can be spectacular,” Caplar said.��

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Motion-triggered cameras showcase the prevalence of ‘nectar robbing’ in Hawaiian flowers

Some long curved bills are the perfect implement for drawing sweet nectar from deep within a lobelioid flower. As birds reach into flowers to access the nectar stored near the base, their bills can brush against the ‘ pollen-bearing structures, making hungry honeycreepers important pollinators. But some of these specialized honeycreepers have gone extinct. Shorter-billed species can now “rob” nectar — without contacting the flower’s pollen-bearing structures — from the endangered flowers. A UW-led team used motion cameras to gauge how often nectar robbing occurs. The results, in Ecology and Evolution, reveal both nectar robbing and pollination visits, showcasing a broader pattern that the team previously identified . Nectar robbing can damage flowers and leave less nectar for other potential pollinators. The researchers 3D printed a bird bill to simulate nectar robbing and track changes in nectar availability and the plants’ ability to reproduce. Damaged flowers often struggled to replenish their nectar stores, but were still able to produce fruit and viable seeds. These studies are part of a that aims to catalog Hawaiian bird-plant interactions through time, specifically tracking how these interactions are reshaped by extinction.

For more information, contact lead author , a UW research scientist in the biology department, at sam.case24@gmail.com.

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

People with anxious attachment styles are more likely get emotionally involved with ChatGPT

rose to popularity in the late 20th Century as a way to categorize how people bond with others. Someone with an anxious attachment style, for instance, fears abandonment and rejection, whereas someone with an avoidant attachment style is independent at the cost of personal closeness. In , UW researchers explored how peoples’ attachment styles affect their interactions with ChatGPT. The team analyzed the chat histories of 105 young adults, each of whom completed an attachment-style survey. Researchers found that they could automatically detect peoples’ attachment styles based on their interactions with the chatbot. People with an anxious attachment style were more likely to be emotionally involved with the AI system, writing things like “Can you please love me?” and “I miss my ex and I can’t sleep because of it.” Anxious users were also more prone to trust ChatGPT and to follow its recommendations. The team argues that this highlights the need for policies that prohibit companies from psychologically profiling users without their consent, since it leaves them vulnerable to manipulation.

For more information, contact senior author , a UW associate professor in the Information School, at alexisr@uw.edu or lead author , a doctoral student in the Information School, at marxwang@uw.edu.

The other UW co-authors are , , and .

Nursing is a major energy suck, but it’s difficult to estimate the toll for many marine mammals

Marine mammals lactate like any other mammal, but the energetic demands are difficult to measure in wild animals and thus not well understood.�� Researchers are concerned that some marine mammals may not be getting enough food, which can lead to failure to reproduce and . To understand the link between nutritional status and reproduction, researchers need to know what marine mammals require to rear offspring. A published in PLOS One modeled the daily costs of lactation using data from semi-aquatic and terrestrial mammals to explore whether results could be generalized to other species, like whales and dolphins. Modeling could approximate lactation costs of certain understudied marine mammals, including seals and sea lions, but appeared unable to produce accurate estimates for whales and dolphins. Lactation costs increase over time for most animals, but seem to be higher early in lactation for marine mammals, possibly due to their fully aquatic lifestyle. The study highlights a need for other methods to fill the remaining data gap to better understand the impacts of environmental change on marine mammals.

For more information, contact lead author , a research scientist in the UW Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies, at emchuron@uw.edu. Funding information is .

Simulations suggest that lasers could ‘calm’ persnickety plasma

could supply humanity with — provided that scientists and engineers can work out how to create sustained fusion reactions safely, efficiently and affordably. The trick is in the taming of , a superhot state of matter made of free-floating electrons and atomic nuclei. When compressed to outlandish pressures and temperatures in a reactor, the nuclei fuse with one another, releasing energy. In that extreme environment, plasma forms instabilities that can derail a fusion reaction; much fusion research is focused on “calming” volatile plasma. published in Physics of Plasmas, UW researchers and other collaborators simulated a novel strategy to control instabilities using two opposing laser beams. By tuning the lasers’ properties — such as their frequency and polarity — the researchers prevented instabilities from growing and cascading. Surprisingly, the lasers also delayed other instabilities within the plasma, even though they were not directly targeted by the laser fields. By taking advantage of interactions within the plasma, the researchers found a way to calm instabilities indirectly. The results could help experts develop algorithms that stabilize plasma in real time, sustaining fusion conditions long enough to produce useful energy.

For more information, contact , UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics at shumlak@uw.edu.

A full list of co-authors and funding is .

When exposed to air, new nanomaterial becomes magnetic at high temperatures

While fridge magnets are great for saving favorite recipes, modern magnetic materials are useful for improving fiber optics or quantum information sciences technology. If you zoomed in on most fridge magnets, you’d see the atoms arranged in a repeated lattice structure called a “spinel.” These structures are made up of three types of atoms, generically referred to as atoms “A,” “B” and “X.” In a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, UW researchers describe two new spinels made of silver, chromium and selenium ions. These are among the first spinels to include a silver ion in the “A” slot, the slot that determines the “vibe” of the spinel, or how it will react to various stimuli, such as light, heat or air. When exposed to air, the original spinel loses silver ions and transforms into the second spinel. The second spinel maintains its magnetic properties up to 400 Kelvin, or 260 degrees Fahrenheit; the original loses its magnetism at 152 K, or -185 F. This is the largest change ever documented in what is known as the Curie temperature, or the highest temperature at which a material is still magnetic. The researchers plan to continue to explore these two materials and what they can teach us about the fundamentals of magnetism.

For more information, contact lead author , UW doctoral student in chemistry, at ekbacong@uw.edu.����������

The other UW co-authors are Charlize Agag, , , , Yinuo Xu, , , and . A full list of co-authors and funding is .

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Most of the stars in sit neatly on a flat plane. But the space around our galaxy is much more chaotic. Rogue bands of stars called “” orbit the Milky Way much like planets in our solar system orbit the sun.

Astronomers have long been fascinated by the possibility that stellar streams could indirectly reveal the presence of , that mysterious theorized substance that doesn’t interact with light or normal matter — except via gravity. However, a new ������˾�� study casts doubt on a leading theory linking dark matter and stellar streams, and raises new questions about both galactic phenomena.

“Dark matter makes up most of the mass in the universe and forms the scaffolding that galaxies grow on, but we still don’t know what it is,” said co-author , a UW assistant professor of astronomy. “The Milky Way is one of the best laboratories we have for figuring that out, and stellar streams are one of the sharpest tools inside it.”

in The Astrophysical Journal.

A stellar stream forms when a group of stars crashes into a galaxy and becomes ensnared by its gravity. As the stars orbit the galaxy, its gravity stretches the cluster into a . Most galaxies host stellar streams, though the Milky Way’s are the most visible to astronomers. 

In our galaxy, most stellar streams we can see are irregular — gaps and kinks interrupt an otherwise uniform smear of stars. Many astronomers believe that those irregularities could signal the gravitational tug from small clumps of dark matter, called subhalos. If there are indeed subhalos sprinkled throughout the galaxy, studying the aberrations in stellar streams could teach us about the composition of dark matter.

The new study was an effort to understand the role that the host galaxy — rather than the dark matter clumps within it — plays in shaping stellar streams. Astronomers simulated four Milky Way-sized galaxies without any dark matter clumps, then peppered them with roughly 15,000 stellar streams. After five billion simulated years, the team observed irregularities in nearly every stellar stream.

“In our simulations, the host galaxies alone caused the same kinds of irregularities that we observe in real stellar streams,” said lead author , a UW postdoctoral scholar in astronomy. “Now that we can predict what the host galaxy does on its own, we can start isolating the part that dark matter is responsible for.”

The cause of the irregularities was the structure of the galaxies themselves. In each simulated galaxy, stars were spread somewhat unevenly across the disc, creating areas of greater and lesser density to mimic the composition of a real galaxy like ours. As the simulated streams of stars passed through denser regions of space, they were bent and torn by the irregular gravitational landscape.

Arora expected the host galaxies to impart some irregularities on the streams, but the sheer number caught him off guard.

“We found that almost all of the streams had some sort of structural variation,” Arora said. “So this idea that streams are naturally thin and smooth wasn’t really necessarily true.”

The simulation generated wiggles, kinks, spurs, branches, gaps and clumps; some streams were totally torn apart by the gravitational froth of their host galaxies. Streams orbiting closer to the galactic core were thrown into dense clumpy regions of space more often, where they acquired more irregularities. Out of the 15,000 streams spread across the four host galaxies, only 70 remained perfectly smooth after five billion years. 

The results might seem disheartening, but the UW team believes they chart a clear and exciting course for the future of dark matter research. Arora wants to include dark matter clumps in the next simulation to see whether they produce stellar stream irregularities that are distinct from those caused by the host galaxy alone. 

There may also be opportunities to check simulations against new observations: the is , which will help astronomers build a taxonomy of stream features and — hopefully — discover fingerprints of dark matter.

“Sadly there’s no magic wand to reveal the structure of dark matter,” said , a research assistant professor of astronomy at the UW. “Streams are complex systems, but they’re still the most interesting way to study the dark matter close to home.” 

Co-authors from the UW astronomy department include , a postdoctoral fellow; , an undergraduate student; and and , graduate students.

A complete list of co-authors is .

This research was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

For more information, contact Arora at arora125@uw.edu.

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Frequent news headlines and rising gas prices are constant reminders of the fuel shortage linked to the war in Iran. But energy crises are about more than oil and geopolitics, say and , who co-teach “Communication, Design and the Environment” in the ������˾��’s Communication Leadership program.

Muren, a teaching professor of design, and Russell, a professor of communication, examine environmental problems from a perspective beyond the hard sciences. They are currently working on a book that explores how the systems we design and the stories we tell shape the relationship between society and the living world.

UW News spoke to Muren and Russell about what today’s energy crises reveal about contemporary societies’ dependence on fossil fuels and how we can create a “solar-powered system.”��

The war in Iran has put energy back at the center of public debate. What stands out to you about the conversation we’re having?

Adrienne Russell: To me, it’s impressive how quickly the conversation — in the news media mostly — narrowed to . Where will the oil come from? How quickly can markets stabilize? What will happen to prices? Those are important questions, but they’re also very familiar. Every energy crisis seems to produce the same script. We talk about rather than asking why our societies are organized in ways that make them so vulnerable to disruptions in the first place.

Dominic Muren: Exactly. We tend to treat these moments as temporary interruptions to an otherwise normal system. But they’re also reminders that the system itself depends on finite resources and exceptional geopolitical stability. The crisis isn’t just exposing a shortage of oil; it’s exposing assumptions about how much energy we expect to have available and how our economies are built around that expectation.

What assumptions are built into this way of thinking?

DM: The biggest assumption is that energy should always be available in whatever quantity society demands. When supply falls short, we assume the problem is getting more energy, not reconsidering the expectations that created that demand. That assumption feels natural today, but of the fossil-fuel era.

AR: Those assumptions become embedded in everyday life. We stop noticing that overnight shipping, long commutes, streaming entertainment or all depend on enormous amounts of energy. They begin to feel like ordinary features of modern life instead of choices made possible by a particular energy system.

What are the material consequences of thinking about energy this way?

DM: We respond to crises by reinforcing the very system that created them. The was widely expected to trigger a dramatic spike in global oil prices. Instead, the shock was muted, in part because China rapidly shifted away from imported oil and relied more heavily on domestically produced coal. Economically, that reduced dependence on imported oil. Environmentally, however, it came at a significant cost: than oil per unit of energy, so avoiding one crisis just increased another.��

Even China’s massive electric vehicle fleet — normally a climate advantage — became more carbon-intensive because the electricity charging those vehicles increasingly came from coal rather than lower-carbon sources. From a climate perspective, that represents a significant step backward.

AR: We’re seeing similar patterns elsewhere. In the United States, the war in Iran has been in California and in the name of energy security. Each crisis becomes a justification for extracting more rather than asking why our societies remain so dependent on these fuels in the first place.��

In other words, the immediate response is often to stabilize today’s energy system, even if doing so locks in higher emissions tomorrow. We end up reversing much of the progress we’ve made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions because we’re treating the symptoms instead of addressing the underlying design of the system.

How have fossil fuels shaped contemporary society and our expectations?

DM: Fossil fuels gave us access to enormous stores of concentrated energy accumulated over millions of years. That allowed societies to expand production, transportation and consumption at unprecedented scales. Over time, we built our cities, economies and institutions around the expectation that this on-demand abundance could continue indefinitely. But this ��

AR: Fossil fuels and their infrastructures are one of the most powerful sense-making systems ever built. They have trained societies to expect continuous expansion. Because that expectation feels natural, it rarely appears as a choice; it appears as reality. That’s why energy shocks are so often misread. When supply is disrupted, the instinct is to restore the flow and return to “normal.” But that normal isn’t neutral. It’s a high-energy system organized around the assumption that growth has no meaningful limits. Energy crises aren’t interruptions to that system — they’re the moments when those assumptions collide with physical reality.��

DM: And because those systems become invisible, so do the assumptions they create. Continuous access to energy begins to feel like a law of nature rather than the outcome of a vast physical and political system. So when disruptions occur, we focus on repairing the flow instead of questioning the system that made uninterrupted flow seem inevitable.��

We could counter this tendency by recognizing that the only long-term source of energy available to life on Earth is the continuous flow of . Every fossil fuel we burn is nothing more than stored sunlight from the distant past. And like any finite reserve, it will eventually run out. What is guaranteed is the steady income of energy from the sun we receive each day, nearly unchanged from one sunrise to the next. Long before humans, life on Earth already adapted to this reality. Plants learned to capture sunlight directly, while animals survived by consuming those that did. Growth has always depended on access to this continuous energy flow. The point is not that we need more solar panels. It is that we need to think like a solar-powered system.

What does it mean to think like a solar-powered system? What would have to change, politically and culturally?

DM: A solar-powered system is one that aligns its activity with incoming energy rather than assuming limitless withdrawals from stored capital. Instead of designing around unlimited energy and perpetual expansion, we’d design around timing, sufficiency, resilience and adaptation. It’s not simply a technological shift; it’s a different way of imagining how society should function with whatever technologies — past, current�� or yet-to-be-invented — make that possible.

The transition isn’t simply replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies. It’s replacing the mindset fossil fuels made possible. If we continue expecting unlimited growth while changing only the energy source, we’ll recreate many of the same problems in a different form. supports this.�� A durable transition means learning to organize society around the energy that is actually available, rather than around the illusion of limitless reserves.��

AR: We would have to rethink many of the assumptions we’ve inherited about progress and abundance. Much of contemporary culture treats continual expansion as both natural and desirable. Changing energy systems requires changing those stories as well.

For more information, contact Russell at adruss@uw.edu and Muren at dmuren@uw.edu.

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A new study using data from NASA’s found that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has undergone a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper drop in the last 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the unaided eye from areas with dark skies. Located about 2.5 million light-years from Earth, practically our cosmic backyard, Andromeda is close enough for astronomers to examine its stellar populations in detail and learn about the past of galaxies like our own.

July 27 in .

To reach this conclusion, the researchers combined data from two Hubble surveys: the and the . Together, these two surveys mapped two-thirds of the disk of Andromeda in ultra-sharp detail. In total, the team measured about 200 million individual stars across the galaxy, giving them a detailed picture of Andromeda’s past activity.

“We need to measure the individual stars because they are the fossil record of the galaxy’s formation,” said , a research professor of astronomy at the ������˾�� and a co-author on the study. “Hubble is the only telescope that can give you high enough spatial resolution in the blue part of the spectrum over a large enough area to be able to do that in Andromeda.”

Massive stars are bluer and short-lived, while less massive stars are redder and longer-lived. As a result, areas that have experienced recent star formation tend to have a larger fraction of blue stars, while areas with less recent star formation typically have a redder population. The team divided the Andromeda images into thousands of squares, spanning 300 light-years on each side, and determined the history of star formation within each parcel to gain a comprehensive view of the galaxy’s past.

Previous research showed the Andromeda galaxy experienced a dramatic burst of star formation about 2 billion years ago, likely due to a past interaction or merger with another galaxy. Since that time, star formation has been steadily declining.

This movie, created from an analysis of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, demonstrates how the rate of star formation in the Andromeda galaxy has declined over the past 500 million years. Brighter colors indicate where star formation was highest during a given time. Credit: Visualization: Tobin Wainer (UW); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI); Video: NASA, ESA, STScI, Gregory Bacon (STScI)

Astronomers measure the rate of star formation in terms of the mass, or amount of gas and dust, converted into stars per year. The researchers calculated that, 500 million years ago, Andromeda formed stars at a rate of about one solar mass per year. However, the formation rate dropped to about half that by 40 million years ago. The current rate has plummeted even farther, to about one-fifth the mass of our Sun per year.

The team also examined whether that decline was consistent across the galaxy or concentrated in certain areas. They found that much of the recent star formation has occurred in a star-forming ring located about 32,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center. As a result, much of the decline they measure is driven by decreasing activity within that ring.

The decline is likely to be a natural winding down from its previous, more active state.

“It’s just like after running a marathon, sometimes you’ve got to take a bit of a breather,” said lead author , a UW graduate student in astronomy.��

The team also investigated whether there was any connection between the decrease of activity in Andromeda and its proximity to the satellite galaxy Messier 32, or M32. The M32 galaxy is separated from Andromeda by about 16,000 light-years in the plane of the sky; however, its 3D location in space is uncertain. As a result, astronomers are unsure if or when it might have interacted with Andromeda in the past.

“One of the major motivations for this program was to probe potential interactions between M32 and Andromeda’s disk,” said co-author , a UW postdoctoral scholar in astronomy.

Survey data from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury allowed the team to study the history of star formation in Andromeda near M32. They found that this area showed signs of decreased star formation compared with other regions. The timing of this decrease, which this study finds began roughly 60 million years ago, could help constrain when the M32 galaxy interacted with Andromeda’s disk.

“We can’t explicitly say that we are seeing a decrease in star formation because of M32. But it’s right there, and it’s definitely the most likely suspect,” Wainer said.

The team plans to continue analyzing the Hubble data and combine it with data from ground-based observatories to gain additional insights into the history of Andromeda.

“There’s a strong scientific value to this archival data,” said co-author , a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz. “Andromeda is important because it’s a neighbor that is close enough that we can see it in great detail while also getting a global perspective.”��

An even greater global perspective is likely to come from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope after it launches as early as Sunday, Aug. 30. Roman’s gigantic field of view can cover at least 100 times as much area as Hubble at near-infrared wavelengths in a single observation. A newly approved will image the entirety of Andromeda’s disk and areas of its surrounding halo, allowing astronomers to measure hundreds of millions of stars and enabling groundbreaking new science.

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency.��

UW co-authors include , professor emerita of astronomy and , and , former UW graduate students in astronomy.

A complete list of co-authors is .

This research was funded by NASA.

For more information, contact Wainer at tobinw@uw.edu.

This story was adapted from a press release by .

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affects approximately 23 million people worldwide, with onset usually occurring during a person’s late adolescence to their 20s. Impairments associated with schizophrenia include hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thinking and behavior.

Now, researchers at the ������˾�� are investigating how genetic changes impact the severity of schizophrenia symptoms. A new study, , supports the idea that deletions in genes that regulate early brain and neuron development are associated with more severe features of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, particularly lower cognitive abilities.

How schizophrenia manifests — and how severely — differs between patients. Poorer cognitive functioning in schizophrenia is associated with more treatment-resistant forms of the disease. , co-author and assistant professor of psychology at the UW, said understanding early developmental genetic factors could help identify people who could benefit from earlier, targeted inventions.

“For a subset of individuals, we may need to be thinking about how we can create treatments earlier in brain development that will help compensate for the fact that certain genes are being deleted,” Forsyth said. “Is there some kind of medication that can help with that? Down the road, could there be gene therapies for some of these individuals? I do think this research is going to be important for changing treatment direction.”

The researchers studied the DNA of more than 600 people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The team compared these results to data from patients’ relatives, people without schizophrenia and nearly 10,000 children participating in the .��

People with schizophrenia who carried the deletions tended to perform worse on cognitive tests — showing poorer memory, thinking and attention skills than people with schizophrenia who didn’t carry the deletions. Similar, weaker associations were also seen in the general population, which suggests these variants may influence brain development more broadly, even in individuals without schizophrenia.

The study also showed these specific genetic deletions were associated with differences in brain structure, including higher gray matter volume and cortical thickness. This is the opposite pattern researchers typically see on average in schizophrenia, Forsyth said, which again suggests variability between patients.

“This study helps us understand the specific way somebody manifests a disorder,” Forsyth said. “It’s sort of a cumulative effect of different risk profiles. We all carry tons of genetic variants, and the specific types of variants we have and how they combine is very complicated. These things aren’t totally deterministic, but I do think understanding which specific aspects of brain development are affected by the genetic variants a person carries, and how this shapes how the disorder manifests, can start to inform how we think about different treatment approaches.”

Other UW co-authors were graduate students Jinhan Zhu, Zachary Trevorrow and Mahnoor Hyat, undergraduate research assistant Ariana Chavannes, research coordinator Sam Sievertsen and research technologist Sophie Ferreira-Ianone. , a UW senior research scientist in biostatistics, was also a co-author.

A is included with the study.

This study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the UCLA Brain Research Institute and the Shear Family Foundation.

For more information, contact Forsyth at jenforsy@uw.edu.

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Eight ������˾�� researchers have been selected as Fulbright Scholars for 2026-2027 and will pursue studies around the world.��

Fulbright Scholars are college and university faculty, administrators and researchers, as well as artists and professionals, who build their skills and connections, gain valuable international insights and return home to share their experiences with their students and colleagues.

This year’s UW cohort represents a variety of disciplines, including sciences, engineering, business, environmental sciences, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. The scholars will conduct research across the globe, including in Australia, India, Indonesia, Western Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia.

Two-thirds of this year’s UW applicants were selected as Fulbright Scholars — an astonishing acceptance rate in the prestigious and highly selective program.

“We are incredibly proud of these outstanding ������˾�� faculty and staff whose selection as Fulbright Scholars reflects the excellence, innovation and global impact of their work,” said UW Vice Provost for Global Affairs Ahmad M. Ezzeddine. “The knowledge, partnerships and cultural understanding they gain through these experiences will enrich the UW and strengthen our shared commitment to addressing global challenges through collaboration and discovery. As the Fulbright Program celebrates its 80th anniversary, we are grateful for the U.S. Department of State’s continued investment in this transformative program.”��

The Fulbright Scholar Program for academics and professionals supports more than 800 people to teach and conduct research abroad.��

This year’s UW Fulbright Scholars are:

is a professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences. His research focuses on how mutually beneficial interactions between species — such as how insects pollinating plants is beneficial to both — scale into networks involving multiple species, and how the structure of those networks affects ecosystems. For example, some ecological network structures, or how connections between species are arranged, make these networks more resilient to perturbations, such as droughts or climate change.

Brosi’s Fulbright Scholar award will be through Spain’s flagship public research institution, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville. His work there will involve synthesizing and analyzing two comprehensive long-term datasets — one from his lab and one from his Spanish host lab — to better understand global patterns in pollination networks. In particular, scientists have recorded species that appear to be “specialists” — such as a bee species that has only been recorded visiting one plant species�� — in many ecological networks, but, without long-term data, it’s difficult to disentangle whether they are really specialists or just rare. Brosi will tackle this problem in collaboration with his Fulbright host, Ignasi Bartomeus, at Doñana.����

is the director of academic services in the Department of Bioengineering in the College of Engineering and UW Medicine. She supports the department’s doctoral students with a focus on improving the research experience, expanding opportunities and advancing access and collaboration.��

While a Fulbright Scholar, she will develop a framework for a new doctoral biomedical research exchange between the UW and Tampere University in Finland. Combs will work with faculty, students and staff at both universities to lead the development of a preliminary structure of a doctoral research exchange, including eligibility criteria, mentorship plans and evaluation metrics. She will also explore funding sources for the program’s ongoing sustainability and draft a memorandum of understanding for the institutions to consider.

, an assistant professor of management and organization and the Helen Moore Gerhardt Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship in the Foster School of Business. Her areas of expertise include entrepreneurship, organizational growth and scaling, technology and innovation strategy, and venture capital. DeSantola teaches entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial strategy to undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students. She was named a Poets & Quants top 50 undergraduate business professor in 2021.��

DeSantola will use her Fulbright award, during which she will be a visiting U.S. Scholar to University College Cork in Ireland, to study factors influencing innovation and entrepreneurship in novel food technologies. The project connects to a broader stream of DeSantola’s research exploring the emergence and evolution of new technology-based industries.

is�� an interdisciplinary scientist in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in the College of the Environment. Her work focuses on how coastal communities adapt to climate change and other environmental and socioeconomic stressors, particularly within fisheries and aquaculture systems. During the past 15 years, she has worked with coastal populations, including Indigenous harvesters, to support food sovereignty and long-term approaches to adaptation and resilience.

Green’s Fulbright award is to advance the inclusion of�� fish and other aquatic foods —�� “Blue Foods” — into Indonesia’s National School Lunch Program. The goal of this project is to improve nutritional outcomes for school-aged children while strengthening local food systems. Through working directly with fishers and fish suppliers, Green will work with the project team to identify the conditions necessary to provide Blue Foods that promote positive nutritional outcomes for children, support local fishers and sustain local ecosystems. This project is a pilot program for the initiative that will hopefully be expanded nationally.

is an associate professor in the Information School and also is part of the Responsibility in AI Systems and Experiences (RAISE) Center. An interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in human-centered AI, Mitra’s work draws on human-computer interaction, machine learning, natural language processing and social science to understand how people and AI interact in large-scale online systems. Her research examines the societal impacts of generative AI and develops methods to make AI systems more trustworthy, culturally aware and beneficial for diverse communities.

She will use her Fulbright award in India, where she will collaborate with researchers at the Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (C-MInDS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay) — the nation’s topmost and most selective public research institution. She will investigate the risks and capabilities of generative AI systems across socio-cultural contexts most relevant to the Global South. The work aims to advance more culturally aware and responsible AI while strengthening research partnerships between the United States and India.

is an associate professor in the School of Oceanography in the College of the Environment. Morris’ research uses cultivation and whole-genome DNA sequencing to identify the roles of bacteria in global nutrient cycles. With a focus on carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, he has conducted studies that show the effects of low dissolved oxygen on the nutrient cycling activities of the ocean’s most abundant organisms.��

During his time at in South Korea, Morris will pursue a project entitled, “High-throughput cultivation-based genomics of freshwater Chloroflexota.” A key goal is to advance understanding of the evolution of this important group of bacteria and its potential to mediate key nutrient transformations.

is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Bioengineering in the College of Engineering. She leads a neural engineering lab focused on motor brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. Her work combines experiments with computational methods to develop new ways to build BCIs that interact with plasticity in the brain.

During her stay at the Champalimaud Institute Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology in Portugal, she will collaborate with two researchers, Dr. Juan Álvaro Gallego and Dr. John Krakauer. The new projects aim to improve our understanding of how plasticity shapes brain dynamics and apply new BCI algorithms for stroke rehabilitation.����

is a professor in the Information School and an adjunct professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering in the College of Engineering. He is the founding director of the InfoSeeking Lab and founding co-director of RAISE, the Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences. His research focuses on agentic AI, human-centered information seeking and responsible AI, examining how intelligent systems can act on people’s behalf while remaining transparent, trustworthy and accountable. He is also the founder and CEO of VersarAI, a startup translating his research on AI agents into enterprise applications. His book, “Agent Nation,” was published this year.��

Shah will use his Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, to study how agentic AI can responsibly power entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems. Working with RMIT researchers and Australia’s startup community, he will investigate what he calls the Delegation Paradox: the tension between the efficiency gained by delegating tasks to AI agents and the oversight, trust and accountability that delegation demands. The work aims to produce frameworks that help founders, enterprises and policymakers adopt AI agents in ways that drive innovation without sacrificing human agency.

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Researchers at the ������˾�� and partners at Carnegie Mellon University are collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy’s on a new project to help scientists use artificial intelligence to better understand the universe.

Modern astronomy is producing more data than ever before. Powerful telescopes — like the — and other instruments around the world are collecting detailed information about billions of stars, galaxies and other cosmic objects. These observations help researchers investigate some of the biggest mysteries in science, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, how the universe evolved over time and what it is made of.

But there is a challenge: Much of the data from those projects is stored in different formats, housed at different institutions and difficult to combine. As a result, scientists often spend significant time preparing data before they can begin analyzing it.

“The scientific opportunities and the data analysis challenges are incredible,” said , head of physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

The new effort, led by Mandelbaum and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s , will create a shared data service to allow researchers to seamlessly access and combine information from multiple astronomy experiments. Rather than moving massive datasets from one location to another, the system will allow the data to remain where it is stored while making it available through a central platform.

“A new generation of telescopes and surveys will each change the way we understand our universe,” said co-investigator , a UW professor of astronomy and director of the eScience Institute. “But it is when we bring these data together to look at the universe from a unified perspective that these discoveries will be truly transformative.”

The data infrastructure developed as part of this project will be available to the astronomical community at the SLAC-hosted Rubin Observatory’s U.S. Data Facility and via the American Science Cloud, which integrates the nation’s most advanced high-performance computing systems, scientific facilities, data resources and production capabilities into a single, coordinated AI-driven system. The project extends the UW’s investments in Rubin Observatory and the UW , which are supported by Charles and Lisa Simonyi and led by and .��

The infrastructure also will support a growing area of AI known as foundation models. These AI systems are trained on large and diverse datasets, enabling them to recognize patterns and connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.

In astronomy, foundation models could help researchers analyze many different types of observations at once, including images, measurements of light from distant objects and records of how those objects change over time. By bringing these data sources together, scientists hope to uncover new insights about the universe more quickly and efficiently.

Ultimately, the team hopes to transform the vast collections of astronomical data being gathered today into a long-lasting scientific resource, helping researchers answer some of humanity’s most fundamental questions about the origin, evolution and makeup of the universe.

Other UW co-investigators include , a research scientist and engineer in astronomy. Other co-investigators include , director of engineering for the LINCC project and , senior staff scientist at SLAC and at Stanford’s/SLAC’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

Additional modeling will be provided by Francois Lanusse of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Their work is an extension of the Schmidt Sciences-supported LINCC Frameworks program, a partnership led jointly by CMU and the UW.

This story was adapted from a press release by .

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