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The Living Voters Guide, created by the ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®and presented with Seattle’s CityClub, just won a regional award and has been updated for the 2012 election. This year the guide has expanded to include a California edition, and the Washington guide will include fact-checking of selected points by Seattle Public Library staff.

King County has no substantial food deserts, provided one has a car. Take away the car, however, and food deserts — areas where low-income people have limited access to low-cost, nutritious food — appear to fill the county map. New research from the ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®, published in the American Journal of Public Health, shows only about one-third of the vulnerable populations studied could walk to a nearby supermarket, and as few as 3 percent could walk to a low-cost…

Global health researchers are working on cheap systems like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other diseases. A new chemical technique makes medically interesting molecules stick to regular paper — a possible route to building such paper-based diagnostics from paper you could buy at an office-supply store.

A tiny digital tag developed at the ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®can for the first time see when birds meet in the wild, offering a window into animal social networks. A study in Current Biology used the tags to track the social habits of New Caledonian crows, and found a surprising amount of interaction among the tool-using birds.

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau today show that, after increasing since 2008, the poverty rate for the U.S. remained stable at 15 percent between 2010 and 2011. In Washington state, the estimated poverty rate increased from 11.5 percent (774,000 residents) to 12.5 percent (854,000 residents) between 2010 and 2011.

ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ® President Michael Young will be the featured speaker at the UW’s 29th annual Freshman Convocation, which begins at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 23 in the Alaska Airlines Arena at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. About 4,800 people are expected to attend this event, which welcomes the entering class. Convocation officially marks the beginning of the academic year, with classes starting Sept. 24. The event will be broadcast live and will be rebroadcast by UWTV. The academic procession will be…

Researchers have discovered molecular and protein signatures that predict rapid onset of liver damage in hepatitis C patients following a liver transplant. The markers appeared soon after transplant and well before clinical evidence of liver damage. Such early detection of susceptibility to hepatitis C virus-induced liver injury could lead to more personalized monitoring and treatment options after a transplant. Also, because the markers stem from an underlying pathology occurring at a very basic level, they might reveal why hepatitis C…

Washington state’s housing market continued to improve during the second quarter of 2012 despite a slight drop in existing home sales, according to the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies at the ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®. Existing home sales during the second quarter of 2012 increased 10.4 percent compared with a year ago, however the seasonally adjusted annual rate dropped 2.6 percent from the first quarter. “The market is clearly stronger than a year ago, but it eased off a bit…