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Spring 2024

Cherie Winner

Summer 2007

Jane Goodall visits Pullman

Nearly 6,000 people came to Beasley Coliseum the evening of March 8 to hear Jane Goodall speak about chimpanzees, conservation, and her own growth from shy child to scientific celebrity. In the early 1960s, she became the first person to observe chimps using sticks to dig up termites to eat. That finding demolished the notion that tool use is a distinctively human activity and led to other studies showing that chimps have high mental abilities and a rich emotional life that includes joy, anger, grief, and embarrassment. What remains uniquely human is our complex speech and the ability to share ideas, said Goodall; no one … » More …

Summer 2007

Happy—and healthy—ever after

“In sickness or in health. . .”

That noble sentiment of the traditional marriage vow says your spouse promises to stick with you if you get sick. What it doesn’t say, and what a study by Washington State University psychologist John Ruiz (photo) and researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University now shows, is that your spouse’s personality can help you heal–or speed your demise.

And, in the happiest of endings, being satisfied with your partner, no matter what his or her personality, is like an inoculation against all the bad things wrought by depression and anxiety.

Drawing on a subject group … » More …

Summer 2007

Questioning the questions

A few years ago, when an academic publisher approached Dirk Schulze-Makuch about writing a book on the search for extraterrestrial life, the astrobiologist couldn’t resist.

“You’re not often getting asked to write a book about life in the universe,” he recalls. “It was just too tempting.”

Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints was published shortly before Schulze-Makuch joined Washington State University’s Department of Geology in 2005. Coauthored by Louis Irwin of the University of Texas-El Paso, the book takes a close look at what’s really necessary for life-not life as we know it here, but life as it might be on other worlds.

“We’re … » More …

Summer 2007

Counting cougs

Between 1995, the year before Washington banned the hunting of cougars with hounds, and 2000, the number of human-cougar encounters nearly quadrupled. Although encounters have returned to pre-ban levels in some areas, the public perception is that cougars are making a comeback--and must be stopped. But Hillary Cooley and Rob Wielgus insist that much of what we think we know about cougars is wrong. And their argument rests with the young males.

» More ...