Biological sciences
A New Land
John Bishop was late getting to Mount St. Helens.
He was only 16 years old when it blew in 1980, and it would be another decade before he began crawling around the mountain as part of his doctoral studies.
“I was worried I missed all the action—‘Ten years, it’s all been studied,’” he recalls.
It turns out the dust, pumice, and other ejecta were only beginning to settle, and the mountain would continue to rumble, spit, and recover. In 1994, he found himself running from a mudflow, then watched as it moved fridge-sized boulders and shook the earth beneath his feet. Arriving at WSU Vancouver … » More …
Nature twice: Poetry and natural history
I lean on a glass case that displays stuffed egrets, herons, and sparrows. Across the room, Larry Hufford—director of the Conner Museum of Natural History and professor in the School of Biological Sciences—taps data into his computer. Larry is tall with thick graying hair and sharp blue eyes. I’m a full foot shorter, and this, coupled with the fact that I’m a professor in the English Department, makes for an unusual collaboration.
I used to feel alien in Larry’s scientific domain, even though my office is just a five-minute walk across campus. But over the last six … » More …
The deadly cough
Few creatures in the course of human history have ever been as influential as the one that crawls and jumps and drinks blood in the lab of Viveka Vadyvaloo.
It hit the world stage in the sixth century, starting in Lower Egypt, traveling by ship to Constantinople, then into western Europe. It took about half a century to kill 100 million people, half the earth’s population.
Seven centuries later, it fanned out from the Crimean seaport of Caffa to revisit Constantinople and Sicily, from which it swept through Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany, Austria, and Hungary. One-third of Europe, about 25 million people, was … » More …
First We Eat
Too much of a good thing
Science has been predicting and measuring our warming planet for more than a century now. But it was only in the last two decades that most Americans came to believe the earth’s temperature was indeed rising and that the main culprit is the growing amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Now scientists are giving a lot of thought to another culprit: nitrogen. Like carbon dioxide, it’s seemingly benign—colorless, odorless, tasteless, and a foundation of life on our planet. Left alone, it tightly binds to itself in inert, two-atom molecules, or N2. It’s ridiculously commonplace, making up four-fifths of our atmosphere. It’s also a modern … » More …
Cows deposit piles of diversity
Holly Ferguson knows her cow pies about as well as anyone. In the first study of flies in managed pastures in the Pacific Northwest, the entomologist has spent an unusual amount of time traveling the state and assessing its cow pies.
No matter the obvious jokes, dung dispersal in pastures is serious business. Wherever there are cows, there will be cow dung, and lots of it. A beef cow can produce nearly a ton of manure per month. And if that ton sits there untended, there will be problems.
Oddly enough, the conditions of the cow’s other major habitat, the feedlot, reduce the problem … » More …
Big Ideas
Video: Jaak Panksepp on the brain and searching the web
Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discusses how a simple web search can be driven by one of the brain’s most fundamental impulses.
Read what other WSU professors say about reading and thinking in the digital world in “Dear reader” in the Summer 2010 issue of Washington State Magazine.
Video: A new biofuel crop for Washington farmers?
Meet the WSU Researcher: Michael Neff
Part 2: A new biofuel crop for Washington farmers?
Washington State University botanist Michael Neff discusses how to transform camelina as a possible biofuel crop in Washington.
Neff’s lab works on camelina, an oilseed used for lamps from the Iron Age that can grow on marginal farmland and not compete with food crops.
Neff shows how his work uses transgenic seeds to make camelina a better fuel crop, complete with rose-colored glasses and green LEDs to see which seeds have been changed.
Read more about Neff’s work in “Seeing red (and far-red).”
Watch » More …