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Fall 2024

WSM Fall 2008

Fall 2008

Electricity from a beet

Chemists around the world are looking to the plant kingdom for ideas about harvesting the energy of sunlight. Plants, after all, have been making a living exploiting sunbeams for almost four billion years. And part of what plants accomplish each day creates a tiny flow of electrons—a form of electricity.

The familiar solar-electric panels on the roofs of RVs depend on pure silicon crystals, which are produced in an energy-intensive manufacturing process. The crystals are semiconductors “doped” with special impurities to make them work—impurities that are often toxic metals requiring special mining to unearth. These first-generation panels certainly work, but the electrical power we can … » More …

Fall 2008

60 minutes with Don Hewitt

This spring, while a reporter from a Spokane TV station sat face to face with 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, two Washington State University communications students waited quietly in the hall for their turn with the television legend.

Jamie Grosz, a senior who would soon be interviewing the CBS news veteran, used the time to run over her questions and switch into a pair of high heels for the on-camera interview. The cameraman, Brent Weisberg, started unpacking his equipment.

They weren’t missing much by waiting outside since the Spokane station interview covered many of same questions Hewitt had been answering over the past few … » More …

Fall 2008

The New Virtualism: Beijing, the 2008 Olympic Games, and a new style for world architecture

Something significant is happening in Beijing. It has to do with proclaiming a new style of world architecture at the dawn of the twenty-first century. I call it “The New Virtualism,” and because there are now enough of these buildings in existence, for the first time I can describe the “looks” of this new style.

It is not that New Virtualist architecture is found only in Beijing. As a matter of fact, unlike past architectural styles, which were always regional movements before spreading their influence further afield, New Virtualism is the first architectural style in the history of the world that is immediately global in … » More …

Fall 2008

To Err is Human

The older a woman is when she conceives, the more likely it is her eggs will have abnormal chromosomes. But beyond the fact of the biological clock, we often overlook a bigger story. Even with young mothers, chromosome abnormalities are the single most frequent cause of miscarriage and birth defects. Between 25 and 30 percent of all fertilized human eggs have the wrong number of chromosomes, a rate that seems peculiar to humans. » More ...
Fall 2008

Return to Warden’s Grove: Science, Desire and the Lives of Sparrows

Warden’s Grove is a tiny cluster of spruce trees in the generally treeless expanse of the north Canadian tundra, and Christopher Norment – who received his master’s degree from WSU in 1982 – spent three long summers there studying sparrows; this excellent little book is his account of those summers. Readers expecting a tale of high arctic adventure will be disappointed – there are no attacks by ferocious grizzlies, no horrifying acts perpetrated by men made desperate by starvation, and no daring escapades by intrepid explorers of the last frontier. Instead, Norment delivers a tale of patient waiting and watching, of detailing the daily lives … » More …

Fall 2008

Louisiana—A Pianist’s Journey

In one of my first musical memories, I am sitting with my grandfather at his player-piano, watching the punched rolls spin as we listen to the popular music of his youth. As a young child, I hadn’t yet developed a curiosity for the vast wealth and breadth of the piano literature. Hearing Louisiana—A Pianist’s Journey has given me a chance to revisit this type of music through a unique collection of works. Kenneth Boulton’s recording and the accompanying booklet effectively encapsulate Louisiana’s rich cultural history and transport the listener to a graceful era in American music.

This innovative two-CD set presents works by both American … » More …

Fall 2008

Where the Fins Meet the Frets

If life imitates art, then for Ray Troll, so does music. More specifically, his music imitates his art. The debut CD from Ray Troll and the Ratfish Wranglers titled Where The Fins Meet The Frets contains 16 original songs that one could say leap directly from Ray’s artwork, which is playful, humorous, and dripping with double entendre.

Ray Troll and his Ratfish Wranglers hail from Ketchikan, Alaska, a population of roughly 14,000 hard-working folks, mostly in the fishing industry. To say that Ray’s songs are influenced by this town and its people would be an understatement. Almost every track is fully drenched with Alaska wilderness … » More …

Fall 2008

During the War Women Went To Work

How often have you heard a group of women in their eighties reminisce about their service in World War II? My guess is—never. Out of all the interviews, books, films, and commemorations about World War II, female voices have seldom been heard. This video, funded by the Washington State legislature for use in the schools, and created by Bristol Productions under the direction of Karl Schmidt ’81, remedies this oversight. In it, more than 50 Washington women talk about their service in the state’s shipyards and aircraft factories, as WASP (Women Aircraft Service Pilots), in the Army (WACs), and the Navy (WAVES), as nurses, and … » More …

Fall 2008

The Little Book of Dinosaurs

I can remember, as a boy of 10 or 12 in Massachusetts in the early ’50s, prowling the stacks at the Cambridge Public Library⁠—a ponderous but beautiful Romanesque stone building set in a park between Cambridge High and Latin School and Rindge Tech—looking for books on paleontology. I didn’t know the word “paleontology” then, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have cared what it meant. What I wanted to know about was dinosaurs. All I could find were text-heavy tomes, not especially designed for people my age, sparsely peppered with meager little line drawings, plus, if I was lucky, a full-page black-and-white plate or … » More …