Need to add a little wow-factor to your day?  Check out these colorful – but toxic – sea-slugs! 

Across the world, big old trees face a dire future globally from agriculture, logging, habitat fragmentation, exotic invaders, and the effects of climate change, warn leading scientists in an article published this week in Science magazine.  Jerry Franklin – School of Environmental and Forest Sciences – is a co-author.  Read more here. 

This city’s urban shoreline on Puget Sound was never built with photo-snapping tourists in mind, or technology entrepreneurs jogging in the rain. In decades past, stretching back to the big-timber-and-fish era of the 1800s, the waterfront was a place of gaff hooks, warehouses and stink.  But as brawny old Seattle faded, the hard parts of its industrial past — a shadow-casting highway viaduct, a crumbling sea wall — remained behind like bleached fossils even as the modern gloss of restaurants, hotels and apartment towers moved in.  

Researchers have discovered what may be the earliest dinosaur, a creature the size of a Labrador retriever, but with a five foot-long tail, that walked the Earth about 10 million years before more familiar dinosaurs like the small, swift-footed Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus. UW Biology post-doc Sterling Nesbitt led the study – read more here.