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A team of astronomers including Eric Agol of the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ has found that the seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are all made mostly of rock, and some could even have more water — which can give life a chance — than Earth itself. The research was led by Simon Grimm of the University of Bern in Switzerland, and published Feb. 5 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Agol is among about two dozen co-authors. The scientists…

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ announced the creation of the Northwest Institute for Materials Physics, Chemistry and Technology — or NW IMPACT — a joint research endeavor to power discoveries and advancements in materials that transform energy, telecommunications, medicine, information technology and other fields.

Now serving its sixth cohort of students, the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship has helped more than 8,400 students attend the state’s universities and colleges. The Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ has the largest number of scholarship recipients — 1,679 across all three campuses — and has seen more than 1,300 scholars graduate.

Two faculty members in the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ College of Engineering have been elected as 2018 fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Tom Furness, professor of industrial and systems engineering, was honored for “leadership in virtual and augmented realityâ€� and Siddhartha “Siddâ€� Srinivasa, professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was recognized for “contributions to robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction.â€�

The CleanTech Alliance has presented the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ with the organization’s 2017 CleanTech Achievement Award. The honor recognizes the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ’s dedication to research and development of transformative clean energy technologies, facilities, pipelines for startups and industry partnerships. The award was announced on Nov. 8 at the annual meeting and 10th anniversary of the CleanTech Alliance, a Seattle-based consortium of more than 300 businesses and interest groups across six U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. The organization cited the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ’s…

Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ and UCLA engineers have developed a flexible sensor “skinâ€� that can be stretched over any part of a robot’s body or prosthetic to accurately convey information about shear forces and vibration, which are critical to tasks ranging from cooking an egg to dismantling a bomb.

The Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ Board of Regents on Thursday approved the naming of the new computer science building under construction on the Seattle campus as the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering. The naming of the building was made possible by gifts from Microsoft Corp. and a group of local business and philanthropic leaders who are longtime friends and colleagues of the couple.

The Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ is home to a new national center of excellence for research, education and training in materials science. The Molecular Engineering Materials Center is funded by a $15.6 million, six-year grant from the National Science Foundation as part of its highly competitive Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) program.

Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ researchers have demonstrated for the first time that devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers — breaking a long-held barrier and potentially enabling a vast array of interconnected devices.

A team of researchers including the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ’s Marina Alberti has devised a new classification scheme for the evolutionary stages of worlds based on “non-equilibrium thermodynamics” — a planet’s energy flow being out of synch, as the presence of life could cause.

A $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant will daylight thousands of specimens from their museum shelves by CT scanning 20,000 vertebrates and making these data-rich, 3-D images available online to researchers, educators, students and the public. The Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ is a partner institution contributing most of the fish and bat scans.