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Winter 2018

Archives

Women in Kade & Vos clothes - Courtesy Kade & Vos
Winter 2018

Fit for every body

Inside an old yellow craftsman house, sewing machines whir, sketches adorn the walls, underwear and tank top prototypes hang from clothing racks, and a cat wanders through the living room.

Debbie Christel’s childhood home in north Tacoma has transformed into the headquarters of Kade and Vos, a start-up company helping women get the clothes they need.

“We ask women, what do you need to be comfortable?” says company cofounder Christel ’08. “Our design process doesn’t go through a weight-biased filter. We don’t take a small pattern and make it bigger. We know that doesn’t work.”

In the United States, 67 percent of women wear a … » More …

Houses on the Arctic
Winter 2018

Days of future past

Rapid global cooling 13,000 years ago challenged early occupants of Alaska to adapt. People used to hunting mammoths and other megafauna with big stone tools suddenly found their weapons shattering in the cold. Access to the stone they used to make them got buried under snow.

As with any climactic change, the cold resulted in a shift in fauna, requiring new tools. Early Alaskans turned to microblade technology, a technique they’d kept alive for hundreds of years along with their dominant hunting tools. Microblades made efficient use of now-scarce toolstone and met the needs of a changing climate.

“Throughout the Holocene, the importance of microblade … » More …

Greg Urquhart (Photo Robert Hubner)
Winter 2018

Peace for the wounded warrior

Since the earliest days of the republic, Native Americans have stepped up to defend the United States at higher rates than any other ethnic group.

From General Washington’s inclusion of Tuscarora and Oneida warriors at Valley Forge, through the world wars and Vietnam to today’s conflicts in the Middle East, Native Americans continue to answer their cultural calling to serve.

Traditionally, these soldiers were welcomed home with healing ceremonies that helped reintegrate them with the tribe and wider society. Compassionate medicine men, and women, used time-honored practices to mend the emotional, spiritual, and physical trauma of war.

“Unfortunately, the U.S. government banned Native religious ceremonies … » More …

Bags of donated food
Winter 2018

Hungry

At Rosario’s Place, food on the shelves comes and goes like a tide. When staff at the Women’s Center at Washington State University, which manages Rosario’s, puts out a call for donations, stock rises and then falls again as students take what they need to get by.

Rosario’s Place has a private entrance on the Pullman campus, and that simple fact, says Women’s Center director Amy Sharp, reduces stigma; no one asks who you are or what you are doing. You just come in, take what you need (or leave what you can). In addition to food, Rosario’s also stocks baby and toddler supplies … » More …

Genetically modified pig. Photo Luke Hollister
Winter 2018

Pork futures

Pig 135 snuffles and grunts inside his pen. Jon Oatley reaches through the bars to pet the more than 500-pound genetically modified animal.

“People have this image in their head of a pig with deformities, but they’re just normal pigs,” says molecular biologist Oatley ’01 MS, ’04 PhD as he rubs the pig’s ears.

The enormous, three-year-old pig is one of a handful bred by Oatley, director of WSU’s Center for Reproductive Biology, and his team to be surrogate fathers. Through genetic tinkering, Pig 135 is able to produce sperm that contains the genetic material of another pig rather than his own. This … » More …

Superbug. Illustration Luciano Cosmo
Winter 2018

Superbugs

A woman lies dying in a hospital bed in an acute care facility in Nevada. She has a common infection induced by a common bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae. But she’s untreatable: her infection is resistant to all 26 of the antibacterial drugs available in the United States capable of treating the bacterium. The infection spreads further, which causes her blood pressure to drop precipitously until she finally succumbs to septic shock.

While death by “superbugs” is still fairly rare, the World Health Organization warns that, if bacteria keep evolving drug resistance at the rate they have been, such bugs will globally cause 10 million deaths per … » More …

Carolina Parada (Photo Raymond Yuen/Nvidia Corporation)
Winter 2018

Making artificial intelligence smart

It’s not a simple thing to get a car to see what we see.

“The world is very complex. That’s what makes vision for self-driving cars a challenge. There are millions of scenarios and millions of contexts,” says Carolina Parada (’04, ’06 MS Elec. Eng.) from her home in Boulder, Colorado.

A senior manager for Nvidia, a company probably best known in the video gaming community for its top-shelf graphics cards but with a strong presence in the machine learning market, Parada and her team are working on machine perception, a key piece of getting self-driving cars safely on the
… » More …

Stephenson Complex (Courtesy Stephenson South Residence Hall)
Winter 2018

Once upon a time in Stephenson South

In 1972, the tenth floor of the Stephenson South residence hall housed seven strangers. The stranger part didn’t last, as they soon became fast friends and poker buddies.

Today, those seven friends still meet and play cards, and have done so for the past 36 years.

“We just immediately bonded,” says Marc Anderson ’76.

Anderson was a sophomore when he lived in Stephenson while the rest of the group were freshmen. The friends hailed from all over Washington: Tonasket, Gig Harbor, Forks, Oak Harbor, and Seattle.

Most of the group still lives in the state while one is in Idaho and another in California. … » More …

Woman's dentalia cape (Courtesy Plateau Peoples' Web Portal)
Winter 2018

Fabric of Washington

Stories, photos, paintings, and belongings like baskets and tools tell the rich history of Plateau tribes of the inland Pacific Northwest, a history now shared online.

The Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, a gateway to those cultural materials, is maintained by Washington State University’s Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (CDSC) in partnership with WSU’s Native American Programs.

The materials have been chosen and curated by tribal representatives from the Spokane Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Nez Perce Tribe, and … » More …