The featured video on UW Today includes Jennifer Ruesink of Biology,  Emma Timmins-Schiffman of SAFS, and Taylor Shellfish Farms’ Joth Davis, who is a UW affiliate faculty member. 

Biologist Jennifer Ruesink considers UW oyster research and work with the shellfish industry in face of today’s environmental challenges, including ocean acidification. The UW 360 segment also includes Emma Timmins-Schiffman, aquatic and fishery sciences graduate student, and Taylor Shellfish Farms‘ Joth Davis, who is a UW affiliate faculty member.  View the video here. 

Trees benefit our communities in may ways, and we’re getting better at understanding those ways.  Kathy Wolf’s work is cited in this short article about the continuing research on the effects of trees on people, communities and cities. 

Over 2005 to 2009, the School of Oceanography published 566 papers, or 2.25% of the entire body of work for that time period, according to a Thompson-Reuters analysis.  The only school more prolific was Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, with 766 papers, or 3.04%.  Read more here. 

A team of 9 researchers, including Atmospheric Sciences’ David Catling, has published a paper in the December issue of Astrobiology that enumerates two ways of narrowing down the growing number of known exoplanets and exomoons to those that might harbor life – an Earth Similarity Index (ESI) for categorizing a planet’s more earth-like features and a Planetary Habitability Index (PHI) for describing a variety of chemical and physical parameters that are theoretically conducive to life in more extreme, less-earthlike conditions.