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Summer 2024

Tim Steury

G. Roger Spencer DVM
Winter 2011

Outsmarting Dementia

We used to believe, says neuropsychologist Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, that if a person lived long enough, he or she would develop dementia.

Now we know better, she says. Whether caused by Alzheimer’s or other disease, dementia is not a normal aging process. Many people, such as G. Roger Spencer and colleagues pictured here, remain completely alert and engaged well into their 80s and 90s and older.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the chance of someone over 85 having the disease is nearly 50 percent. Other dementia-causing diseases raise that risk even higher. So what is it that enables someone to escape the dementia odds?

Besides age, … » More …

Fall 2011

Westward Ho!

There was a time, not so long ago, in our great Northwest when boundaries were not a great concern. When the first non-Indian settlers reached the Palouse and the Columbia Plateau, they could look to the distant horizon and see nothing but blue sky and virgin prairie and shrub-steppe, potential farmland as far as they could imagine. And as they learned to know the land, they reveled in what the college scientists told them, of seemingly endless topsoil, of windblown loess 200 feet deep. But even as that soil washed and blew away at an unsettling rate, they also learned to ignore the worries of … » More …

Summer 2011

Henry Grosshans—1921-2010

Henry Grosshans came to Washington State College in 1952, engaging in an active academic and intellectual life for three decades, after which he retired to Shoreline, Washington. Grosshans died last October, at the age of 89.

He was for many of those years editor of the University Press, raising its prestige and profile not only through the titles published, but through the journals he attracted to the press.

Before coming to WSC, Grosshans was a Rhodes Scholar, studying for two years at Oxford University between brief stints on the faculty at Kansas State and Bowling Green … » More …

Summer 2011

Carrots

Although a wine and carrot pairing is not immediately obvious, it is intriguing that carrots and wine grapes appreciate the same environmental conditions. In fact, Horse Heaven Hills, Washington’s newest viticultural region, is also home to the bulk of our carrot production, the carrots thriving on the same soil and warm days and cool nights that produce such great wine grapes.

Rob Mercer ’91, president of Mercer Canyons, oversees the production of nearly 2,000 acres of carrots, which represents a good chunk not only of state, but national carrot production. A planting density of a million seeds per acre or more … » More …

Summer 2011

Somewhere in France

The latest posting on our Coordinates website is from Margrit von Braun ’89 PhD, who writes from Nigeria. Margrit and her husband, Ian von Lindern, founded TerraGraphics, an environmental engineering company, in the 1980s. They have since developed an expertise in remediation of sites contaminated with heavy metals and are currently working to clean up lead contamination resulting from gold mining in Nigeria’s Zamfara State.

Over 400 children have died from the contamination. With no other income as lucrative as gold mining, the residents of Zamfara brought ore into family compounds, where women, many of whom are not allowed to leave … » More …

Summer 2011

Buddy Levy: Historical investigator

In a fabulously snide review of the first episode of Brad Meltzer’s Decoded on the History Channel, a reviewer for The New York Times refers to investigator Buddy Levy, “who could be a bus driver but who is in fact an English professor at Washington State University and a freelance writer of magazine articles about adventure sports.”

Levy himself thinks that’s pretty funny.

“I’m cool with that,” he says. “I’m a bus driver who can write a narrative history of the Amazon.”

That narrative history, which our charming reviewer neglected to mention, is Levy’s latest book, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of … » More …

Summer 2011

Fishes of the Columbia Basin: A guide to their natural history and identification

fishes

Dennis Dauble ’78

Keokee Books, 2009

It’s really pretty remarkable how much Dennis Dauble has managed to squeeze into this book of a mere 210 pages. If you read Fishes of the Columbia Basin:

You will get a good briefing on fish in Columbia Basin Indian culture and history.
You will know about the history of the introduced shad and its movement up the Columbia following the inundation of Celilo Falls.
You will … » More …