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While there is currently no explanation for why the Champlain Towers South building collapsed, Dawn Lehman, a Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been studying photographs, videos, drawings, reports and permits to investigate this tragedy to understand what happened. Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ News asked her to help us understand why buildings fail.

On Feb. 7, 2021, a wall of debris and water barreled down river valleys in India, destroyed two hydropower facilities and left more than 200 people dead or missing. A self-organized coalition of 53 scientists from 14 countries, including researchers from the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ, worked nonstop following the disaster to investigate the cause, scope and impacts.

When someone has the coronavirus, some of it is shed in their fecal matter. So what we flush has become useful to Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ researchers developing a new testing method for COVID-19 in sewage. They’re looking at wastewater that flows from people’s homes, sampling it at manholes and neighborhood pump stations before it goes to sewage treatment plants.

New books by Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ faculty members include children’s works profiling STEM researchers and a personal memoir of an immigrant’s journey to freedom. Also, Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ Press remembers a century of publishing, and a book on British colonialism is honored.

Recent honors and grants to Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ faculty and staff have come from the American Chemical Society, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Science Board and the family of engineers Ganesh and Hema Moorthy.

Communities underneath and downwind of jets landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport are exposed to a type of ultrafine particle pollution that is distinctly associated with aircraft, according to a new Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ study, the first to identify the unique signature of aircraft emissions in the state of Washington. The finding comes from the two-year Mobile ObserVations of Ultrafine Particles or “MOV-UPâ€� study funded by the Washington State Legislature to examine the air-quality impacts of aircraft traffic on communities located…

Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ researchers have found that air pollution from electricity generation emissions in 2014 led to about 16,000 premature deaths in the continental U.S. In many states, the majority of the health impacts came from emissions originating in other states.

A Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ team tested how well current water and wastewater disinfecting methods affect antibiotic resistance genes in bacterial DNA. While these methods work well to deter bacterial growth, they had varied success in either degrading or deactivating a representative antibiotic resistance gene.