Cherie Winner
The Portals of Discovery
Poised for playing
Anyone who has taken music lessons has probably absorbed enough instructions about posture to feel like a raw recruit at basic training: Stand straight! Head up! Toes forward!
Leah Jordan, who is starting her senior year at Washington State University, says not to worry about forcing yourself into the “proper” position for playing an instrument. In fact, she says you’ll probably play better if you don’t—and she has the hard scientific evidence to prove it.
Jordan converted her personal experience as a trumpet player into an honors program research project that showed that most players play better if they stand the way their bodies … » More …
Safer skies
When Alaska’s Mount Redoubt volcano rumbled to life this past spring, images of the plume of ash rising from it probably revived terrifying memories among 240 people who survived its last eruption in 1989.
They’d been passengers on KLM flight 867, a Boeing 747 bound for Anchorage. Ten hours after the volcano erupted, the plane flew through an ordinary-looking cloud. Except it wasn’t a cloud. It was ash from the Redoubt eruption.
The plane lost all communications, radar, electronic cockpit displays—and, within the span of one minute, all four engines. It plunged almost 15,000 feet before the crew managed to restart three of the … » More …
The Shape of Things to Come
"Life is a process of self-assembly," says biochemist Alex Li. Proteins make up our hair and muscle, our brains and lungs, our enzymes and antibodies, and each one must attain a particular shape in order to do its work. Which they do with no outside help, following specific assembly codes built into their structure.
» More ...Borrowing nature's designs
In Michael Knoblauch’s lab, the gap between fundamental research and practical applications is a narrow one.
Knoblauch studies the inner workings of phloem (FLOAM), the channels that transport water and nutrients throughout a plant. Research doesn’t get much more basic than that—yet one of his recent discoveries is leading him straight to the patent office.
He’s found that structures in the phloem of some plants have great potential as high-tech, microscopic valves, sensors, and motors.
Knoblauch named the structures “forisomes,” which means “gate-bodies.” He found that they keep the phloem from leaking after it’s been injured.
Phloem is comprised of parallel tubes, or sieve elements, … » More …
Student of light: Recent grad transcends boundaries
“When you come to a fork in the road,” said Yogi Berra, “take it.”
Xavier Perez-Moreno has done just that.
Last spring the effusive, pony-tailed Spaniard received a Ph.D. conferred by Washington State University and The Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. WSU officials think he is the first Cougar to earn a doctoral degree jointly with a foreign institution.
Xavi (SHAH-vee), as his friends call him, clearly isn’t big on either/or choices. Besides bridging universities on two continents, his dual degree also combines different kinds of research and departments: theoretical physics here, experimental chemistry at Leuven.
But Xavi didn’t set out to break institutional … » More …
Contagion! Emerging diseases: Unraveling the mystery
What makes some strains of pathogenic microbes nastier than others? Why do they emerge when and where they do? Are we more susceptible now than in the past, and if so, why? At least partial answers to these troubling questions may lie with snails and salamanders.
» More ...Creatures from the Dark Lagoons
Cynthia Haseltine wants everyone to know that the microbes she works with are not bacteria.
They look like bacteria; each Sulfolobus is a single cell that has one circular chromosome and lacks a nucleus. But in their genes and the way they read and repair their DNA, these organisms bear a closer resemblance to us than to bacteria—and those similarities make Sulfolobus an excellent model system for learning about how our cells handle DNA, and how the process sometimes goes wrong.
Haseltine’s microbes belong to the group of organisms known as Archaea (ar-KAY-uh). Most Archaea are extremophiles, living in hot, saline, acidic, or other extreme … » More …