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As many white-collar employers extend into next year the work-from-home policies they instituted in response to the coronavirus pandemic, a vast amount of vertical space in downtown Seattle is leased but empty. The vacant space amounts to more than 700 football fields, by one estimate — acres of desks, with knickknacks and mementos that few…

People in the Seattle area woke up Tuesday morning to hazy orange skies and the smell of smoke over the region as winds blew wildfire smoke from Eastern Washington into the Puget Sound. The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency rated the air quality in the region as “unhealthy for everyone” and advised people to take precautions to stay safe….

Stay-at-home orders issued in Seattle in response to COVID-19 led to a significant drop in some of the most harmful air pollutants to human health, according to a novel method used by the University of Washington School of Public Health. The researchers developed a new method to account for any differences in weather conditions –…

This year, two interdisciplinary teams at the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program tackled timely issues, conducting projects to identify disinformation articles about the coronavirus and detect minority vote dilution resulting from geographic boundary setting in state, city, county and school board districts. On August 19th, the DSSG student fellows presented the results of their projects, conducted with…

PEACE! ran across the top of the Sept. 2, 1945, edition of The Seattle Sunday Times.    Japan had surrendered. World War II was over. Peace, wrote a reporter from aboard a battleship, had formally come to the entire world after history’s most devastating war. “Today, the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great…

For the first time since government officials began collecting data on the thousands of people living homeless in King County, a new category on people’s tribal affiliations will soon be added to the system. The move comes after a years-long push from Native homeless service providers to collect better information on Native people in the county’s federally mandated homelessness database. In recent years, these providers have demanded…

UW researchers Marina Alberti, Urban Design & Planning; Simone Des Roches, Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences; and Christopher Schell, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Tacoma have published a new report titled “The Complexity of Urban Eco-evolutionary Dynamics”, examining how urbanization affects ecological and evolutionary processes over time, and how these changes affect nature’s contribution to people….

A new University of Washington study of thousands of local rental ads finds a pattern of “racialized language” that can perpetuate neighborhood segregation, using specific terms to describe apartments in different areas of town. Terms like “convenient” and “safe and secure” are more common in neighborhoods with a greater proportion of people of color, while…

Despite coronavirus, hundreds of thousands of people living in King County continue to rely on buses, light rail, ferries and other modes of public transportation to get around. “There’s still a whole lot of people who are counting on transit as a lifeline,” said Alex Hudson, executive director of the Transportation Choices Coalition. “People know transit…

In 1979, when Daudi Abe was 9, his father took him to Dirt Cheap Records and set him loose to explore. After a few minutes in the Central District store, Abe came up to the cashier carrying a 12-inch vinyl single with the words “Sugar Hill” across the top. “I just liked the sky-blue cover,”…