News

Sometimes the only way forward is to look back. This week marks the 80th anniversary of the first removals of Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast. Starting with 227 residents of Bainbridge Island on March 30, 1942, women, men and children were forced to leave their jobs, schools, homes and the lives they knew…

A toxic chemical released from tyres as they wear down on roads and implicated in mass deaths of salmon in the United States has been found in an Australian waterway for the first time. Scientists detected the compound – known as 6PPD-quinone – among a cocktail of chemicals and hundreds of kilograms of tyre particles…

Andrew Himes’ 2021 TEDxSeattle talk is an impassioned plea for buildings that help solve climate change instead of contributing to it. With a sense of hope, Andrew asserts that working together to solve the climate crisis gives us the opportunity to “regain a sense of our shared humanity.” As Andrew explains, the materials used in…

Not all U.S. major cities are grappling with homelessness at the scale of say, Seattle or San Francisco. And it’s not because some cities have more people in poverty, or more people in crisis. Gregg Colburn, assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington, believes housing market conditions — specifically, high housing and…

Despite dramatic improvements in air quality over the past 50 years, people of color at every income level in the United States are exposed to higher-than-average levels of air pollution. While this disparity has been widely studied, the links between today’s air pollution disparities and historic patterns of racially segregated planning are still being uncovered. Now…

Humans re-shape the environments where they live, with cities being among the most profoundly transformed environments on Earth. New research now shows that these urban environments are altering the way life evolves. A study led by evolutionary biologists at the University of Toronto Mississauga and including the University of Washington Urban Ecology Research Lab examines whether parallel…

In many ways, it feels like pre-pandemic commutes are back. Though the peaks have pretty much returned to normal, the commutes don’t last as long in the Seattle metro area. But between commutes? There’s actually more traffic. Those were some of the findings in an ongoing study of commute patterns. It’s a study that began…

Inviting as visions of the metaverse can be—a 3D stroll through Barcelona, avatars kissing, selling your side-hustle NFTs for mad Bitcoin—the real-world price of virtuality is alarmingly high and climbing. Nothing “internet” happens without megatons of hardware, those hot racks of servers in highly secured data centers (DCs) that sprawl in the most unimaginative way…

As sea levels rose from climate change, a new study found, flooding in the underground garage at the beachside Champlain Towers South became more common. Much more common. Whether rising seas played a role in the collapse of the doomed Surfside condominium is unclear — and perhaps, unlikely — but the new research from Florida…

One of the biggest winter storms to strike the Northwest arrived 106 years ago this week. Though it wasn’t as intense as the Big Snow of 1880, the February 1916 storm nearly destroyed one of Seattle’s earliest landmarks. One of the places where that heavy wet snow really took a toll was at St. James…