5 Astonishing Discoveries

1. From the teeth of skeletons excavated at a long-vanished town founded by Columbus on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, UW anthropologists extracted chemical isotopes that reveal the early life histories of the individuals, some of whom may have been among Columbus’s crew, and possibly the first Africans in the Americas.

2. Cats prefer their own music. For enrichment, many people play music for their pets. Some think Mozart might appeal to felines, but a UW study has shown that cats prefer music composed to a pitch and tempo that matches their own sensory system, not ours.

3. Computers may seem like the ultimate arbiters: dispassionate and objective. But the algorithms that process data, it turns out, have built-in biases. A tool called FairSquare, under development by UW computer scientists, not only detects bias in algorithms but also provides an immediate automated fix, promising a more level playing field for everything from loan applications to credit scores.

4. Sloths are slow and deliberate due to their tree-dwelling lifestyle, a rare one among vertebrates. It turns out that a diet composed almost exclusively of leaves is a key contributor to a metabolism that determines life in the slow lane, UW researchers have found.

5. Roughly 450 million years ago, the first land plants appeared, setting the stage for the vast array of terrestrial life, from dinosaurs to daffodils. UW researchers discovered that the freshwater algae from which the first land plants evolved were already genetically wired to form the partnerships with microorganisms — bacteria and fungi — that life on land requires.