Life on Kepler-62f? How a UW astronomer found a tantalizing new world

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They’re in the zone. The habitable zone, that is: In a paper published today in Science, a team of astronomers announced that they’ve identified two planets orbiting a star not too unlike our own in a system in the Lyra constellation, 1,200 light years away. What makes their discovery special is the size of the… Read More…

‘Hello, computer!’ UW prof and students search outside the box

Oren Etzioni

Like Scotty in Star Trek, the day is coming soon when we’ll talk with our computers instead of just typing at them, according to a prominent UW computer scientist and his team of researchers. Back in August, when it was still sunny in Seattle, and on the 20th anniversary of the alt.hypertext news group birthed… Read More…

Digitizing the night sky … inside the UW’s planetarium

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It’s a quiet, sunny summer afternoon at the University of Washington’s physics-astronomy complex. But inside the hushed, empty auditorium building, Jake VanderPlas has turned off the lights and shut us inside the recently renovated planetarium. Jake’s a friend and a fellow UW grad student (a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in astronomy) who studies, among other cool… Read More…

Scholars study global ‘digital activism’ with a new kind of online think tank

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Researchers such as the University of Washington’s Phil Howard study revolutions in places such as the Middle East, often by going there. Howard, profiled on GeekWire earlier this month, may be jetting over to Tunisia this fall to study how they put their constitution together. He’s in Turkey now. But scholars like Howard also do… Read More…

Finding the ‘recipe’ for digital democracy in the Middle East

Sign at a demonstration for Egypt in San Francisco in January. (Steve Rhodes photo, via Flickr)

As Americans celebrate their revolutionary anniversary today, other countries, especially in the Middle East, are still in the midst of the promising throes of their own revolutionary moments. The recent and much-discussed “Arab Spring” that unfolded dramatically across the region late last year and early this year — starting in Tunisia and Egypt before engulfing… Read More…

Getting games from good to great with Bungie’s Rick Lico

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It’s an overcast summer’s evening in Seattle’s University District, and in the warehouse-like space in the back of an arts supply store, game designer Richard Lico is stabbing the air with his hands. “Immersion is what games are all about,” he says, emphasizing how a character’s movements can tell stories on their own. But getting someone… Read More…

An e-mail exodus: How a frazzled UW grad student made the jump to Gmail

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Guest Commentary: On a rainy afternoon earlier this month, my stuffed-to-the-gills University of Washington e-mail storage finally burst. I had gone well over the 1,000 megabyte mark, mostly by e-mailing scans of PDF’d articles to myself. This prompted an automated message that warned me of the dangers of going over my data quota. “The sky… Read More…