Burrowing shrimp are small marine excavators native to Washington. They make their homes deep in the sediment by digging, turning the ground to Swiss cheese. This presents a problem for shellfish farmers, whose clams and oysters are often smothered under layers of displaced sediment.

Burrowing shrimp have been a nuisance for at least a century. In 1929, : “Oyster growers have tried various means of defense against these persistent burrowers. But there seems to be as yet no really adequate and at the same time practical method of coping with the marine ‘crayfish.'”

Shellfish farmers used to use pesticides to kill the shrimp, but the chemicals also posed risks to other organisms, such as salmon and crabs, and could be transported in water outside the shellfish growing area. The Department of Ecology in 2018. Since then, family-owned shellfish farms have been losing large portions of their growing grounds to burrowing shrimp.

Research led by the UW, and funded by the state, has yielded a non-chemical, proof-of-principle method for killing shrimp in targeted areas. The method, borrowing from the construction industry, uses a custom-built platform to apply vibration and pressure to a 50-square-foot region of sediment. This compacts the sediment and effectively traps shrimp in their burrows. Starved of oxygen, the shrimp die after a few days.

The researchers tested this method at four sites around Willapa Bay, Washington. It worked just as well as pesticides, reducing the number of live shrimp by between 72% and 98%.

“The challenge of managing burrowing shrimp on private tide lands has many dimensions. There still need to be enough shrimp to serve as food for gray whales and sturgeon, and the whole shrimp population is connected by a long larval phase in the ocean,” said senior author , UW professor of biology. “Once back in the estuary though, these shrimp can live for up to 10 years. Even a moderately sized shrimp, about four inches long, can bring a handful of sediment to the surface every day, dropping that on top of everything. We’re trying to find the balance — how to keep them out of shellfish beds, but let them grow elsewhere.”

The team May 12 in the Journal of Shellfish Research.

“Burrowing shrimp have decimated our farm,” said Ken Wiegardt, a fifth-generation oyster farmer and head of Jolly Roger Oysters in Willapa Bay. “We’ve lost 75% of our nursery ground and, as a result, the farm’s carrying capacity has fallen from 265,000 bushels of market-ready oysters to 75,000 bushels. Last month I had to lay off three oyster shuckers, each of whom had been with me for many years, because I just don’t have the oysters to process. The health of the Willapa Estuary as well as my business and all of my employees depend on finding an effective tool.”

Over the years farmers and researchers have toyed with the idea of trying to “mechanically” control shrimp populations.

“The idea was, ‘Let’s crush them underground, or crush them when they come to the surface,'” Ruesink said. “There are old photographs that show people using vehicles, such as repurposed tanks and snow crawlers, to try to target the shrimp.”

This idea resurfaced at a recent conference. Over lunch, Ruesink and shellfish growers decided . After careful analysis, the method proved ineffective.

Ruesink’s co-author, Alan Trimble, who was previously a research scientist at UW and is now volunteering on this project, had an idea for why the “crushing” experiment had failed.

“He told me, ‘You’re thinking like a dirt farmer and you need to start thinking like a concrete engineer instead,'” Ruesink said. “That’s when he mentioned these concrete vibrators in construction. When you pour concrete, if you don’t get all the bubbles out of it, it won’t be as strong. This is a consolidation technique for a wet slurry of particulates, which is exactly what a mud flat is.”

Ruesink and Trimble ran three experiments to test whether a concrete vibrator, a hand-held metal tube with a motor powered by a generator, could kill the shrimp. For each experiment the team compared sediment cores from treated plots to cores from untreated plots. The researchers took core samples on multiple days after treatment and counted live versus dead shrimp.

In an earlier experiment, the team tried using the vibrator while standing in the water. This method was successful in killing shrimp, but also not practical for scaling up. Jennifer Ruesink/��������

The best option was a custom-built floating platform with six vibrators mounted through a hollow part in the middle. Ruesink and Trimble added weights near each vibrator head to provide pressure in addition to vibration, a winning combination that compressed the sediment and killed the shrimp. The specific cause of death was asphyxiation, not the vibration.

While this proof-of-principle experiment seems promising, there’s more work to do before shellfish farmers can implement it. Right now it’s a time-consuming and labor-intensive process because everything is manually operated. Also, more studies need to be done to determine the long-term impacts to the ecosystem, from the shrimp in neighboring non-shellfish farm mudflats to other creatures living in the area.

“What we’ve done so far is introduce a novel control mechanism. No one had thought that you could trap the shrimp underground,” Ruesink said. “But this research wouldn’t have happened without the investment from the state and the private landowners and growers. I have such a deep appreciation for the opportunity to work with folks on something that is clearly affecting their lives.”

The researchers performed field trials on the private tidelands of Pacific Shellfish, Bay Center Farms and John Heckes. This research was funded by the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

For more information, contact Ruesink at ruesink@uw.edu. For more information about Jolly Roger Oysters, contact Wiegardt at oysterman73@hotmail.com.

���������첹’s was home to beluga whales in the late 1970s, but today the population hovers around 300. Despite almost two decades of recovery work, the whales aren’t bouncing back. The Cook Inlet belugas are likely struggling under multiple pressures, including increasing human noise. Researchers are working on deciphering whale-whale communication to better account for the impact of noise on this vulnerable population.

In a new study, �������� scientists eavesdropped on Cook Inlet belugas, recording more than 1,700 calls representing 21 different behavioral encounters. This work builds on a 2023 study showing that noise from commercial shipping, the primary industry in the region, masks common beluga calls. Although many marine mammals rely more on sound than sight, our understanding of acoustic communication among these animals is limited.

Beluga whales use vocalizations to socialize, stick together and avoid danger. The new study, , investigated the behavioral, social and environmental contexts in which the whales produce various calls.

“We knew that human-generated noise was masking their calls, but we didn’t know what those calls were used for,” said, a UW doctoral student in aquatic and fishery sciences. “This study gave us important insights into the world of beluga communication and how it is disrupted by industry and development.”

They found that Cook Inlet belugas use a specific type of call — a combined call — when calves are present. Combined calls were one of the call types that got drowned out by shipping noise in the 2023 study, suggesting that shipping noise could be disrupting communication with calves. If mothers and calves can’t remain in contact, it could spell trouble for the young whales.

“We don’t have the data to directly connect noise and calf separation,” Brewer said, “but if a mother whale can’t acoustically keep in contact with her calf, that could be a huge problem.”.

Researchers also found that calling between whales increased right before a behavioral change in the group, such as a transition from socializing to traveling, and when the tide was coming in. The call rate for individual whales decreased as group size increased, suggesting that individuals call less in a big group, perhaps to avoid talking over each other.

In Cook Inlet, where the whales live year round, silty glacial water gets churned up by powerful currents and dramatic tides. Beluga whales likely moved in after the last ice age, roughly 10,000 years ago. Vocal communication and echolocation, a navigational strategy used by bats and some whales, have allowed them to survive in this extreme environment, but human noise presents a newer challenge.

“Their main foraging hot spots for salmon are in the northern part of the inlet, near Anchorage, and in close proximity to the airport, the Port of Alaska, and the military base. I think there are ways to adapt but it’s tricky for them and noise pollution is far from the only threat,” Brewer said.

Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary in Eastern Canada — also very noisy — have evolved to , perhaps in response to lower frequency anthropogenic noise. They also make their when it’s noisy, just like two people conversing at a party would.

In the Puget Sound region, where the endangered Southern Resident killer whales live, when whales are reported in the area. Smaller ships are legally required to keep their distance and slow down within half a mile of the whales. This program was introduced after researchers demonstrated that .

“The Port of Alaska could explore similar strategies to mitigate the impact of industry,” Brewer said. “We can’t halt shipping, but we’re trying to understand what we can do to manage these critical habitats, especially when the animals are nearby.”

Co-authors include , a UW assistant professor of aquatic and fishery sciences;�� , a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences; , a UW assistant professor of aquatic and fishery sciences; , a research scientist in the UW Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies; of NOAA; Christopher Garner and Andrea Gilstad of the Air Force Conservation Department.

This study was funded by UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies under a NOAA Cooperative Agreement, and the H. Mason Keeler Endowed Professorship in Sports Fisheries Management.

For more information, contact Brewer at arialb@uw.edu.�� ��

In early April, a powerful typhoon formed over the northwestern Pacific Ocean, as it swirled toward the Mariana Islands, a 15-island archipelago east of the Philippines. By the time it on April 14, the wind was gusting 130 miles per hour, rain fell in sheets and huge waves pounded the shores.

This super typhoon, called Typhoon Sinlaku, was among the strongest early-season storms recorded in the past 75 years. It caused widespread damage on the islands — home to approximately 50,000 people — leaving most without power, tearing roofs off homes and destroying vital infrastructure.

The U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI, includes 14 of the islands in the archipelago and the remaining island, Guam, is a U.S. territory. The residents, a mix of Indigenous Chamorro people and settlers, are American citizens and U.S. institutions and agencies are well represented on the islands.

On Rota, �������� researchers have been working to stabilize the population of the endangered Mariana crow for decades after research signaled rapid decline. , a UW professor of environmental and forest sciences, and , a UW professor of environmental and forest sciences, oversee several projects on Tinian, a small forested island roughly 12 miles long and 6 miles wide.

The first project, launched in 2021, focused on a small, formerly endangered songbird called the . It has since expanded into broader study of native birds and plant restoration.

UW News spoke with Gardner, , a research scientist in Gardner’s lab, and , a graduate student in Bakker’s lab, about the impacts of the typhoon and how they plan to resume their work on the islands.

What first brought you to Tinian? What makes the island unique?

Beth Gardner: We were initially approached by a consulting firm with a contract to study the Tinian monarch, which led us to form a relationship with the U.S. Navy based on the island. They were impressed by our work and efforts to integrate into the community and funded our group to continue developing research on Tinian.

Kaeli Swift: Tinian’s unique ecological character reflects its complicated history. The island is about 60% forested but the forests are primarily composed of a mix of introduced species. Centuries of colonization — by the Spanish, Germans, Japanese and now U.S. — has resulted in immense habitat destruction. Tinian was heavily bombed during World War II and then became the U.S. point for the atomic bomb.

Fletcher Moore: By the end of the war, over 95% of the forest had been cleared, obviously to the extreme detriment of all the native plants and animals. Now, over two-thirds of the island is controlled in a lease agreement by the U.S. military. That land is largely undeveloped, but the U.S. military plans to invest in major new projects on Tinian in the next decade.

What does your work involve?

KS: We have been doing on Tinian for five years. We’re trying to understand threats to native birds by studying offspring survival and predator populations — primarily rats and cats. Our recent work involves acoustic monitoring, specifically looking at how birds are impacted by human-related noise associated with development on the island.

FM: We are working on a long-term native forest restoration project based on the observation that the lack of native plants was limiting wildlife populations on Tinian. We are supporting development of a native plant nursery by partnering with local entities to enhance the space, hire full time staff, and collect and propagate plants. We had about 2,000 native trees representing 20 different species in the nursery, and planted about 300 of those trees in the past six months.

How will it be impacted by Typhoon Sinlaku?

FM: The site where we planted the young trees is on an isolated corner of the island that is difficult to get to in the best of times. Right now, the road is totally inaccessible. We’re not sure when we will be able to get out there to assess the damage and resume regular restoration work, like controlling invasive species and planting other species. The nursery also suffered a lot of damage; almost half of its plants were destroyed. So it’s going to require a pretty big reset.

KS: Our work involves venturing into the jungle to set up cameras and acoustic recording devices for monitoring birds. Our access to those sites will be limited until the roads are cleared and even then, the nature of the vegetative landscape will have changed. We can’t really compare data on birds from one year to the next when there have been major changes to vegetation on the island.

BG: That little songbird we study has probably gone quiet for now. As we’ve seen in the past, their populations will likely suffer from this type of devastation. The typhoon sat on top of Tinian and Saipan for somewhere around 50 hours. We don’t know the full extent of the damage yet, but I think things will be completely different when we get back out there.

What happens now?

FM: It is difficult to access resources on the Marianas and especially hard on Tinian. We had to transport everything we needed for these projects from elsewhere. Shipping can take weeks or months and building materials are often twice as expensive as they would be on the mainland U.S.

When it comes to our work, it’s really difficult to see the nursery destroyed and to see the materials we spent months and a lot of money gathering torn apart. But, it’s going to be especially hard for the people who live on the island and don’t have grants funding their rebuilding efforts. So there are just a lot of practical challenges to recovery out there that even folks affected by disasters in the mainland U.S. might not face to the same degree.

Micropantries — commonly called “little free pantries”�� — and community fridges are a frequent sight throughout Seattle and the greater Puget Sound region. One estimate suggests that they supply around 4 million pounds of food per year to neighbors in need in the Seattle area, more than the state’s largest food bank. The curbside cupboards are a decentralized, community-driven effort to fight food insecurity and reduce food waste at the neighborhood level, but their ad hoc nature limits their dependability — users don’t know when food is available without repeatedly checking, and donors don’t know what foods are needed most.

Now, anyone who interacts with micropantries or community fridges in the Seattle area can try out an experimental app, made by �������� researchers, that brings a suite of new features to the micropantry network. , maps many local pantries across the region. The app also gives each pantry an activity feed where users can share food they’ve donated, report on stock levels, add requests to a wish list, post photos and leave other notes. The research team also retrofitted some pantries with sensors that anonymously auto-report their usage and stock levels to the app in real time.

“This is an effort to document and quantify the phenomenon of micropantries,” said , a senior research scientist at the UW . “Lots of micropantries and community fridges popped up around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was curious about who uses them and how they are used.”

The team was cognizant of privacy concerns and designed the smart pantry tech accordingly.

“Putting cameras in the pantries could give us a lot of information about what specific foods are moving through the system, but that may also deter users who are concerned about privacy,” said , a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering who designed and built the sensor suite. “Instead, we settled on simpler sensors that measure weight and interactions like opening the door to measure stock levels while preserving everyone’s anonymity.”

The researchers hope that neighbors will find new ways to connect and help one another through these tools. A user might see that stock levels are low in a nearby pantry, for example, and decide to add some food. Another user might request certain foods to accommodate their dietary restrictions.��

The sensor-equipped pantries are a small subset of the dozens of pantries throughout Seattle, but in addition to providing some neighborhoods with enhanced food tracking, they will generate aggregate data that will help Dalla Chiara’s team study donor and usage behavior. Dalla Chiara also plans to survey donors to learn more about what motivates people to provide food to pantries.

“We know that there is a lot of food insecurity in Seattle and in the United States in general,” Dalla Chiara said. “But we know that there is also a lot of food waste — lots of people have a surplus of food. And we want to see how grassroots efforts like micropantries can address both food insecurity and waste at the same time.”

Dalla Chiara and his team recently completed a refit on a cold, sleeting March day at a pantry owned by Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church near Seattle Center. The church keeps the pantry regularly stocked, and rector Stephen Crippen is curious about the data the new system will produce.

“It puts numbers on what we’re actually accomplishing,” Crippen said. “It helps us get in touch with what’s going on on this street.”

The research team is also working with local businesses and nonprofits to encourage and track food distribution throughout the pantry network. In April, Seattle-based recycling startup ran a nonperishable food drive across Seattle and delivered 25,000 pounds of food to the ; from there, volunteers from the Cascade Bicycle Club’s distributed the food to micropantries around the city by bike, giving the network an infusion of both food and usage data. The and the nonprofit helped support the project’s community fridges effort.

Dalla Chiara recognizes that there are other grassroots online, and he doesn’t want his app to replace those services. Nor does he expect the smart pantry network to remain in service indefinitely — it costs about $150 to retrofit each pantry with sensors, and all that tech will be difficult to maintain after the study concludes in October of this year. At its core, the project is an effort to learn about micropantry usage and explore how technology might encourage sharing of resources and mutual aid systems.

“We’re trying to measure and quantify goodwill,” Dalla Chiara said. “Behind each little free pantry there is a whole system of behaviors — people trying to help one another. If we can understand that system better, we can support it better.”

Other UW collaborators include , professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Urban Freight Lab; , assistant teaching professor of environmental and occupational health sciences; , assistant professor of food systems, nutrition and health; and , assistant professor in the Allen School.

For more information, contact Dalla Chiara at giacomod@uw.edu.

Some Alaska cruises are to this year after a landslide-generated tsunami barreled through the narrow channel during peak season last August. A new analysis of the event from researchers at the University of Calgary and the ��������, , describes how glacial retreat caused by global warming primed the fjord for the colossal wave and what, if any, warning signs preceded it.

At 5:26 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2025, a piece of the mountainside one kilometer tall and 200 meters thick collapsed into the Tracy Arm Fjord, a scenic waterway south of Juneau. Rock crashed into the water, taking with it chunks of the South Sawyer glacier and producing a 481-meter high tsunami so powerful that it scraped surrounding hillsides bare.

The event would have been “unsurvivable for any ship of any size,” said co-author a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, but fortunately the tsunami occurred too early for tours and no one was harmed.

Later that day, as many as 20 boats, including large cruise ships, may have visited the fjord. Tourist vessels often draw near the fjord wall to get the best vantage point for photographs of towering glaciers and mountains. The slope that failed was only recently exposed to the water below it due to glacial retreat.

“It was only in the last few years that the glacier retreated back past the bottom of where the hillside failed,” Roe said.

Tracy Arm Fjord hosts two glaciers, the Sawyer and South Sawyer, which both stem from the , a frozen expanse spanning the Alaska-British Columbia border. The larger South Sawyer glacier terminates in the water, making it a tidewater glacier, while the Sawyer retreated onto land in 2023.

Satellite observations indicate that the ice has retreated nearly 10 kilometers since the beginning of the industrial era, with the pace accelerating after 2000.

Mapping the change in position and mass of a tidewater glacier can be difficult because they shrink in multiple directions. Exposed ice melts in the sun and chunks break off and fall into the water at the glacial front. Glaciers around the world have been retreating in response to global warming, but tidewater glaciers don’t always follow general trends.

To understand the link between global warming and the 2025 tsunami, researchers used a computational method developed by Roe and , a UW research scientist in Earth and space sciences. Their approach combines hundreds of simulations from various computer models to estimate how different certain climates would look without human influence.

“With these data, we can quantify how unusual the observations are compared to the expected natural variability in the climate had we not been burning fossil fuels,” Berdahl said.

In the study, they conclude that 100% of the industrial-era warming in this region of Alaska is human-caused. As it gets warmer, less snow accumulates and the ice retreats.

“Snowline elevations are rising, ice is thinning, and the ice cap is shrinking. Even though tidewater glaciers can be more complicated to study, we are fully confident that the retreat is primarily due to the changing environment, and we are the cause of the changing environment,” Roe said.

It is possible that glacial retreat destabilized the slope that failed, but specific landslide triggers are notoriously difficult to discern. Either way, if the surface beneath the slope had been glacial ice, the slide wouldn’t have produced such a massive tsunami.

Although no one was harmed by the wave, those nearby raised the alarm. Kayakers awoke early in the morning to water flowing past their tents and carrying away some of their gear. A cruise ship anchored near the mouth of the fjord described large waves rolling through and shifting currents. These reports allowed researchers to triangulate the landslide, but the authors say there were very few advance warning signs.

“Normally with these gigantic rock avalanches, they often give some sort of warning signs in the weeks, months or years prior when the slope is slowly moving down the mountain. It’s sagging and then it catastrophically gives way in a rock avalanche,” said lead author , associate professor of Earth, energy and environment at the University of Calgary. “In this case, that didn’t happen.”

The researchers did note an increase in low frequency seismic noise before the landslide.

“The long precursory phase of seismic activity before the landslide is fascinating, and to my knowledge, rarely observed,” said , a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. “Given its duration and the relative ease of detection, this type of signal could conceivably provide advance warning of large slides if enough seismic monitoring can be deployed.”

Until that happens though, it will be difficult to predict the behavior of changing terrain.

The unexpected event presents challenges when it comes to disaster reduction in high-risk areas, Shugar said. Cruise ship companies, captains and other stakeholders should pay close attention, particularly in areas on the West Coast and in polar regions where glaciers are thinning due to the changing climate.

This study was funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Alberta Innovates, Canadian Space Agency, U.S. Geological Survey Landslide Hazards Program, the U.S. National Science Foundation, NERC, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation, and the Carlsberg Foundation.

This story was adapted from

For more information, contact Roe at groe@uw.edu.��

Biodiversity loss is directly threatening human health and welfare, according to new research by a multi-institution team including the ��������. The study, , reveals for the first time how the decline of insect pollinators undermines essential ecosystem services that support human nutrition and livelihoods.

It’s been long known that insect pollinators are vital for producing many of the fruits, vegetables and legumes that supply essential vitamins and minerals in our diets, yet clear evidence of how their decline affects people has been limited.

Working in 10 smallholder farming villages and their surrounding landscapes in Nepal, researchers traced the full chain of connections between wild pollinators, crop yields and the nutrients families rely on. By tracking diets, crop nutrients and the insects visiting those crops over a year, the research team showed how pollinators directly support both nutrition and livelihoods.

“This study directly connects the crops that local pollinators visit with people’s diets, nutrition and income,” said , a research scientist in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the UW. “It was a real collaborative effort across many partners to collect and analyze a large body of data, making it possible to explore these links.”

The study found insect pollinators were responsible for 44% of people’s farming income and contributed more than 20% of their intake of vitamin A, folate and vitamin E. When pollinators decline, families risk poorer nutrition leading to higher vulnerability to illness and infections, and deeper cycles of poverty and poor health. One quarter of the global population currently suffer from this “hidden hunger.”

The research shows there is real potential for positive change — nutrition and income can improve when communities support pollinators. Simple steps like planting wildflowers, using fewer pesticides or keeping native bees can help boost pollinator numbers, strengthening both nature and people’s wellbeing.

Even though smallholder farmers are highly vulnerable to biodiversity loss, these practical local actions could enhance their food security and economic resilience. The findings could also help improve the health and livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers around the world.

“Our study shows that biodiversity is not a luxury — it is fundamental to our health, nutrition and livelihoods,” said lead author who completed the research while at the University of Bristol and is now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of York, both in the United Kingdom. “By revealing how species like pollinators support the food we eat, we highlight both the risks of biodiversity loss for human health and the powerful opportunities to improve human lives by working with nature.”

The research shows that human health is deeply tied to the health of nature. By tracking how pollinators support food production and diets, the study reveals that biodiversity loss isn’t just an environmental problem, it threatens public health and economic stability — as highlighted in the recent U.K. government.

With around 2 billion people relying on smallholder farming and with many facing vitamin deficiencies, protecting the ecosystems that support nutritious food is essential and crucial for sustainable development.

The study’s findings offer a practical framework to help policymakers and farmers design more nature‑positive farming systems. Although the research is focused on Nepal, the same connections shape food systems everywhere. Diets, even in industrialized countries, still depend on the pollinators and ecosystems that sustain global agriculture.

The researchers — spanning universities and non-governmental organizations across Nepal, the U.K., the U.S. and Finland — are now putting their findings into action across Nepal to tackle pollinator declines and repair the pollination systems that support food production. Working with farmers, local organizations, researchers and government partners, they are helping people understand the value of pollinators and how to support them in everyday farming.

By demonstrating why pollinators matter, and sharing simple, practical techniques to support them, the researchers are already seeing farmers adopt changes that boost crop yields, nutrition and income.

“A ‘win-win’ scenario exists where we can simultaneously improve conditions for both biodiversity and people,” said co-author , professor of ecology at the University of Bristol. “It takes ecological understanding, but it costs remarkably little and there are significant gains for both parties.”

This story was adapted from a

For more information or to contact the researchers, email Alden Woods at acwoods@uw.edu.

Artificial intelligence has swept into American schools, and more is sure to come. This year, both Google and Microsoft — the two biggest companies at the forefront of the AI boom — in AI training for teachers.��

But what do teachers think of this transformation of their work?

, a �������� professor in the Information School and co-director of the Center for Digital Youth, studies how technology affects young people’s learning and development. Davis has also been teaching for over two decades — first as an elementary school teacher and now as a professor — so she’s acutely aware of how earlier technological revolutions in teaching have not always played out as hoped.

Davis and a UW-led team of researchers interviewed 22 teachers in in Colorado — a district that’s investing heavily in AI through systems like Google’s Gemini and , an AI tool that helps teachers plan. Overall, teachers were ambivalent about the technology. They liked that it could reduce workload, especially for rote tasks, but worried that it could erode the social aspects of teaching.

The team April 15 at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona.

UW News talked with Davis about the study and how ostensibly democratizing technologies can widen disparities in schools.��

Why did you want to study AI adoption by schools?

Katie Davis: At least since the introduction of the radio, every new technological invention has been hyped for how it will change teaching and learning. Computers are the prototypical example. They were pushed into schools only to start collecting dust, because they didn’t really change anything. We saw it with , too. Ten or 15 years ago, these courses were supposed to transform education and put colleges and universities out of business. But that hasn’t happened.

Often the hype centers on closing educational inequities. But these new technologies actually tend to aggravate existing inequities. The schools serving the most affluent students have the resources to think carefully about how to incorporate technologies into their curriculum so that they’re supporting student learning goals and outcomes, whereas more under-resourced schools don’t have the resources or the time to do that kind of work. So they end up incorporating technologies in ways that don’t necessarily help students learn; instead, they make things more efficient or keep track of students.

When AI started being intensely pushed into schools, I thought here we go again. AI is here and it’s not going anywhere, so I would love for us to understand how it’s being taken up in schools and, ideally, to prevent this recurring pattern.

What did you hear from teachers about AI?

KD: Teachers expressed a deep ambivalence toward AI. It wasn’t as if any one teacher said it’s all great or it’s all terrible. I think the single strongest driver for teachers to use AI was to prevent burnout. Teachers are being asked to do more and more — not just teach, but care for students’ entire emotional, cognitive and academic lives. It really weighs on them. So a lot of them talked about turning to AI to be a thought partner, to help them brainstorm lesson ideas, create assessments and differentiate lessons for different learners.

Another really big benefit for this particular school district was multilingual support. The district serves students who speak more than 160 languages. One teacher we spoke with said she had four main languages represented in her classroom but she only spoke English, so she was turning to AI to help her translate materials for her students and for their families so that she could communicate with them.��

I think it’s really important to note that this district is going all in on AI. They’re encouraging teachers to use it and providing professional development, and teachers are talking among themselves and sharing ideas. This kind of institutional support and more informal teacher conversations are also encouraging teachers to use AI and explore how they might incorporate it into their teaching practice.

AI is often presented as a democratizing technology, but a recently showed that higher wage earners are using AI more than lower wage earners in the same industry — possibly increasing disparities. Are you seeing anything like that playing out in education?

KD: The way that manifests in education is in the kinds of support that students have access to. It’s more likely that better-resourced schools are also going to provide some form of AI literacy instruction — to really engage students in thoughtful reflection about what AI is, how it may or may not be useful for their learning, and to actually get them to think about these issues in a deep way. Whereas in under-resourced schools, the easiest thing to do is to just block AI. That’s not going to prevent students from using it, but they will end up using it in a communication vacuum, without any adult guidance. You can see how that would create disparities in how well students can use it.

I was really interested in the finding that teachers are concerned that students will know they’re using AI.

KD: That is one of the most interesting findings for me. Teachers are definitely aware that if their students think they’ve used AI, students and their parents will feel that their teachers are cheating them out of a proper education. Teachers are very worried about both students and their more AI-resistant colleagues seeing them that way. I don’t think this is unique to teachers — I feel it in university jobs, too. Many people have this perception that using AI is cheating or taking the easy way out.��

But there’s another layer: Teachers are personally worried about their own authentic voice and professional identity. They’re asking, “If I am using AI, at what point am I no longer a teacher? Where’s that line between using AI as a thought partner to augment my professional practice versus it now replacing my professional practice?”��

What are ways schools might amplify the positive parts of using AI while mitigating some of these negative effects?

KD: One of the first things is to bring AI out of the shadows and talk about it. Since we published this piece, I’ve been engaging with groups of teachers around the country in professional development experiences around AI, and they really enjoy having a community of practice. They feel that those spaces don’t necessarily exist in their schools. It’s like there’s this vacuum of communication — students don’t talk about it because they’re implicitly getting the message that it’s not OK to use it, and it’s the same with teachers.

Professional development is also very important. But a lot of professional development for teachers is just one-off PowerPoint presentations. It doesn’t really connect to whatever is going on in the classroom. Professional development needs to be done in a sustained way that meaningfully connects AI to teachers’ immediate classroom experiences.

School leaders need to be able to communicate AI policies, so that teachers are aware of them and understand how they apply in their specific schools. If you take Washington state as an example, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction has a really great blueprint and guidance for using AI. But my sense is that not many teachers are aware of it, or even if they are, there hasn’t been any concerted effort to say, “OK, this is what that means in our school.” We need to be working at many levels to make sure that AI is integrated into education well.��

Is there anything you want to add?

KD: Something I hold very dear as a teacher is that teaching is relational. Kids don’t learn in isolation. The gave saying the ideal vision is for every kid on the planet to have their own personal AI tutor and for every teacher to have their own personal AI teaching assistant. Maybe that would be great, but I worry that this push toward AI will erode the relationships between teachers and students. Teaching and learning are social processes. It’s not just about putting information into a student’s brain. Students learn through dialog, through participation in cultural practices. To remove that element of learning really concerns me.

Co-authors include, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering; of Artech and of Rutgers University, both of whom contributed to this research as UW graduate students in the Information School; of Columbia University; of Aurora Public Schools;, a UW associate professor in the Information School;, a UW professor and chair of human centered design and engineering; of Lahore University of Management Sciences; of the University of Colorado Boulder; and of Boston College. This research was supported by a Spencer Foundation Vision Grant and the AI Research Institutes program by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences.

For more information, contact Davis at kdavis78@uw.edu.

Sunbirds may look similar to hummingbirds — small, iridescent birds with thin bills — but it turns out the two are only distantly related. Sunbirds live primarily in Africa, Asia and Australia, and have a unique way to slurp up nectar. Unlike hummingbirds, which use minute movements in their bills to sip nectar, sunbirds use their tongues as a straw. published in Current Biology, a team led by researchers at the �������� showed that these long-billed birds can change the pressure at the base of their tongues to create suction that moves nectar through their tongues and into their mouths, a novel mechanism never before seen in vertebrates. The researchers used multiple techniques — including high-speed video of sunbirds drinking red-dyed nectar from transparent artificial flowers — to demonstrate this phenomenon across multiple sunbird species as well as build a mathematical model that describes how it works. Sunbirds pollinate the flowers they drink from, and researchers are interested in understanding how different sunbird species’ plant preferences affect the plant-pollinator networks across continents.

For more information, contact lead author , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in biology, at david_cuban@brown.edu.����

The other UW co-author is . A full list of co-authors and funding is included . Related stories in and .��

Seattle Fault gets 5,000 more years of sleep��

Just over 1,100 years ago an on the Seattle fault rocked — and reshaped — the Puget Sound region. It lifted the sea floor and sent a powerful tsunami through the sound. Researchers have estimated that this fault, which runs east to west beneath the middle of the city, will produce a large earthquake every 5,000 years or so. However, , recently published in Geology, pushes that estimate back to 11,000 years. The researchers extended this window by scouring submerged shorelines for evidence of significant elevation changes. The geological record at these sites dates back 11,000 years, but they only found evidence of one major earthquake. This information could be useful to those making seismic hazard maps, which help people understand the risks associated with different regions. Although other regional faults and the imposing pose more imminent risks to residents, the main Seattle fault doesn’t appear to be ready for rupture anytime soon.

For more information, contact lead author , UW research scientist of Earth and space sciences, at edav@uw.edu.

The other UW co-author is . A full list of co-authors and funding is included in the paper. Related story in .

The PNW has many rivers, but no system for gauging landslide dam risk

Scientists have a new tool for estimating lesser known hazards in the Pacific Northwest: and outburst floods. Landslides along rivers can block the flow of water downstream, creating a lake just above the slide area. Most landslide dams fail within 10 days, releasing trapped water in an outburst flood, which can be devastating. Last fall, 20 people died after in Taiwan. published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, UW researchers debut a mathematical approach to mapping landslide dam hazards based on valley width and projected slide size. When they applied the tool to a mountain range in Oregon, they found that roughly one-third of rivers in the study area were susceptible to landslide dams, with risk increasing in mountainous areas. If a landslide dam does form, alleviating pressure by for water to escape can help prevent flooding. Identifying high risk areas can help guide emergency response efforts following storms, earthquakes and other events that increase landslide risk.

For more information, contact lead author , UW doctoral student of Earth and space sciences, at pmmorgan@uw.edu.

The other UW co-author is . A full list of co-authors and funding is .

Rubin observatory expected to spot many ‘imminent impactor’ asteroids

Small asteroids — those 1 to 20 meters in diameter —�� hit the Earth 35-40 times per year, though they’re very rarely spotted by telescopes before impact. That could soon change: published in The Astrophysical Journal, UW astronomers calculate that the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory could discover one to two Earth-impacting asteroids annually , roughly doubling the number currently logged. The researchers expect Rubin to discover these asteroids an average of 1.5 days before impact, which is more warning time than ever before. Advance notice is extremely valuable in the case of larger asteroids that could be a threat to people or infrastructure. Because the Rubin Observatory is located in the Southern Hemisphere, it will likely discover many Earth impactors that existing asteroid surveys — concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere — miss.

For more information, contact lead author Ian Chow, a UW graduate student of astronomy, at chowian@uw.edu.

Other UW co-authors are Mario Jurić, Joachim Moeyens, Aren N. Heinze and Jacob A. Kurlander. A full list of co-authors is included .

Many marine microbes share a genetic toolbox for fixing supper at sea

Researchers have now identified a set of genes that allow some bacteria to process a compound, called homarine, that is abundant in the ocean and appears to play a key role in nutrient cycling. Phytoplankton produce loads of homarine, but scientists weren’t sure what became of it until now. In a recent study published in Nature Microbiology, researchers found a set of genes present in common and far-flung bacteria that convert homarine into glutamic acid, an essential building block for life. This suggests that homarine may be a vital and overlooked resource and highlights the importance of bacteria in stabilizing marine ecosystems. Previous studies also found that homarine serves as and helps small crabs . The UW team will continue studying homarine to better understand how it fits into the broader ecological landscape.

For more information, contact senior author , a UW professor of oceanography, at aingalls@uw.edu.��

The other UW co-authors are , , , , , and �� A full list of co-authors and funding is

Even though he wanted to bike commute from his Capitol Hill home to the ��������, Jared Hwang often took transit because he struggled to find a good bike route. Apps like Google Maps and Strava might suggest hilly, busy streets simply because they have bike lanes. He even headed to Reddit to crowdsource ideas.��

“I was like, surely, this cannot be the best way to do things,” said , a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “This data is out there. We know where bike lanes are, what the roads are like, what the speed limits are. We should be able to easily access all this information at once.”

So Hwang and a team of UW researchers built , a demo web app that lets users find personalized bike routes in Seattle. Cyclists plug in their origin and destination — just like in other mapping apps — and can then create personalized routes by adjusting eight sliders.����

Researchers initially worked with four participants to understand how cyclists tend to plan their routes. Based on that, they built a prototype of BikeButler. For the basic street layout and other info, they pulled data from OpenStreetMap and government data sets. But those didn’t have information on more subjective qualities.��

For those, researchers turned to Google Street View. They used a visual language model, or VLM — a type of artificial intelligence — to analyze street images and rate subjective attributes like greenery and pavement quality. The team had the VLM rate the level of greenery on streets and then compared this with two researchers’ ratings. The humans agreed with each other about as much as they agreed with the VLM — about 60% of the time. Future research might try to gather individual users’ greenery preferences to offset this discrepancy.��

Once they’d mapped most of Seattle, the team tested the prototype with 16 participants.��

“Overall the response was really positive,” Hwang said. “We found that people do, in fact, have contextual preferences. A cyclist riding for fun on a Saturday might want a safer, greener route compared with their fast work commute. People intuitively know this, but it hadn’t been established through research.”��

Researchers say future work might integrate feedback from the user study, such as the ability to drag routes to change them slightly and an option to take fewer turns. The team is currently studying how to quantify cyclists’ preferences around intersections and turns.

The researchers note that the quality of BikeButler’s recommendations is constrained by the recency and accuracy of the data it uses. For instance, a new bike lane might not yet appear on a map, or it could appear in OpenStreetMap but not Google Street View. Also, since the team planned this as a proof of concept, BikeButler is limited to Seattle, though it could be expanded to other areas.��

“I’m a lifelong biker and bike commuter,” said senior author , a UW professor in the Allen School. “What excites me most about Jared’s work is how it points to a future where we receive route choices individualized to our preferences. So whether I’m biking with my two young children, or riding for groceries, I can find a route for that context.”

Co-authors include , a student at Issaquah High School and intern in the Allen School; , a UW doctoral student in urban design and planning; and , a UW student in the Allen School. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Hwang at jaredhwa@cs.washington.edu.

Mammals and dinosaurs coexisted on Earth until . Despite the devastation, some animals survived, including rodent-like mammals in the Cimolodon genus. These creatures are part of , a group that arose during the Jurassic Period and survived over 100 million years before going extinct. Studying these animals helps researchers better understand how mammals survived the mass extinction event and then diversified into the variety of mammals around today.

A research team led by the �������� has identified a new species in the Cimolodon genus from a fossil the team discovered at a research site in Baja California. The researchers estimate that this fossil is about 75 million years old. The new species, named Cimolodon desosai, was about the size of a golden hamster, the researchers said. It likely scampered on the ground and in trees and ate fruits and insects.

The researchers April 22 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“The genus Cimolodon was a pretty common mammal during the Late Cretaceous, the last epoch of the Age of Dinosaurs. Cimolodon fossils have been found throughout western North America, from western Canada down through Mexico,” said senior author , a UW professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum. “This new species, Cimolodon desosai, was ancestral to the species that survived the extinction event. It and its descendants were relatively small and omnivorous — two traits that were advantageous for surviving.”

When Wilson Mantilla and his team discovered the fossil in 2009, they found teeth, a skull, jaws and parts of the skeleton, including a femur and an ulna.

“It’s very hard to find fossils at this site compared to other areas,” Wilson Mantilla said. “At first, my field assistant found just a little tooth poking out. If he had just found that, I would have been over the moon. But then when we looked inside the crack of the rock, we could see there was more bone.”

The fact that the researchers uncovered more than just teeth for C. desosai means that they can better understand its size and shape and how it likely moved. It also helps fill out the picture of this genus and the habitat in which it lived, and contributes to a better understanding of the multituberculate group in general.

The researchers used digital imaging and a tool called micro-computed tomography, or micro-CT, to get high resolution images of the fossil. Then the team compared the teeth of C. desosai to those of its cousins in the Cimolodon genus to establish it as a new species.

“That far back in time everything is named based on their tooth characteristics,” Wilson Mantilla said. “If you find a skeleton that’s missing teeth, sometimes it’s hard to attach it to a name.”

The team named this species after Michael de Sosa VI, the field assistant who first found it, because de Sosa died while they were still analyzing the fossil.

“He was a great field assistant, and he was like a little brother to me,” Wilson Mantilla said. “It’s a great specimen to be associated with.”

Additional co-authors are , UW doctoral student in biology, at the University of Rhode Island; Yue Zhang, who completed this research as a UW postdoctoral fellow in biology; Meng Chen, who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in biology; and and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

This research was funded by UC MEXUS-CONACYT, Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico PAPIIT IN111209-2, the UW College of Arts and Sciences, the UW Department of Biology and the American Philosophical Society.

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