Arts & Sciences people and programs are often featured in local, national, and campus media. Learn about groundbreaking research and other accomplishments, and hear from faculty with expertise on complex societal issues. Be sure to check our event listings for upcoming performances, lectures, and more.
Featured
The Quantum Quest
Quantum science is poised to tackle problems of mind-boggling complexity, with UW Arts & Sciences and Computer Science & Engineering faculty — and students — playing a key role in quantum research.
Artistic Partners Bring New Voices to Meany
Through its Artistic Partner program, Meany Center for the Performing Arts is introducing new voices and fresh perspectives to its programming.
Learning While Playing in the Great Outdoors
Combining classroom time and outdoor experiences, a Disability Studies course explores what it means to provide access and disability justice for community members in recreation spaces.
Most Recent
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The GPT era is already ending
This week, OpenAI launched what its chief executive, Sam Altman, called “the smartest model in the world”—a generative-AI program whose capabilities are supposedly far greater, and more closely approximate how humans think, than those of any such software preceding it. The start-up has been building toward this moment since September 12, a day that, in OpenAI’s telling, set the world on a new path toward superintelligence. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted. -
More than 10,000 supernovae counted in stellar census
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. As part of this mission, the ZTFâs Bright Transient Survey has been counting and cataloguing supernovae â flashes of light in the sky that are the telltale signs of stars dying in spectacular explosions. On Dec. 4, ZTF researchers â including astronomers at the University of Washington â announced that that they have identified more than 10,000 of these stellar events, the largest number ever identified by an astronomical survey. -
Thatâs no straw: Hummingbirds evolved surprisingly flexible bills to help them drink nectar
Hummingbird bills â their long, thin beaks â look a little like drinking straws. But new research shows just how little water, or nectar, that comparison holds. University of Washington scientists have discovered that the hummingbird bill is surprisingly flexible. While drinking, a hummingbird rapidly opens and shuts different parts of its bill simultaneously, engaging in an intricate and highly coordinated dance with its tongue to draw up nectar at lightning speeds.
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