Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Fall 2024

Search Results

Fall 2008

Reconsidering the oyster

FOR AN OYSTER LOVER, speeding down the Willapa River in an open boat toward Willapa Bay and its oyster beds must be like approaching the Celestial City. Even if it is cold for May, and gray, and spitting rain, everyone in the boat is smiling beatifically.

Approximately 15 percent of the oysters consumed in the United States come from Willapa Bay, just north of the mouth of the Columbia River. Ten thousand acres of the bay are devoted to oyster farming. Coast Seafood, whose CFO Kay Cogan ’79 and operations manager Tim Morris are escorting me to oyster heaven, is the largest oyster producer in … » More …

Fall 2008

Seeing red (and far-red)

Ask crop scientist Michael Neff about plant growth, and he won’t talk about rainfall or fertilizer. He’ll talk about what the plants see.

“What I’ve been interested in forever is how plants use light as a source of information,” says Neff. “Plants have photoreceptors that are completely independent of photosynthesis and chloroplasts, that read their environment and say, ‘I am in full sunlight, I’m in the shade of another plant, I’ve got plants that are growing too close to me,’” and so on. The photoreceptors then trigger a host of hormonal reactions that influence how tall the plant will grow.

Neff thinks it’s possible to … » More …

Fall 2008

Let the invasions begin

As Beijing prepared to welcome athletes and spectators to the Olympic Games, a quieter and much less welcome influx was already under way.

According to a new study by Washington State University ecologist Richard Mack and four Chinese colleagues, China’s explosive economic growth and ambitious public-works projects have allowed non-native species of plants, insects, and other organisms to spread throughout the country and inflict more than $14 billion of damage on the nation’s economy—and the Olympic Games could provide an opportunity for even more biological invaders.

Mack and his co-authors combed through trade and economic data to discover that China’s economic boom has been … » More …

Fall 2008

If you don’t ask…

Tiffany Ludka ‘04 has a piece of advice for students with big bills: It never hurts to ask for help.

During her first year of medical school at the University of Washington, the Colfax native hit on the idea of asking the medical community in her hometown to consider paying some of her medical school bills if she agreed to go into practice there. She’d known for a long time that she wanted to practice in a small town, preferably the one she grew up in.

Colfax, 13 miles north of Pullman, has a bustling downtown and is the county seat, but with a … » More …

Fall 2008

A new college guide

The market is full of books on how to get into and succeed in college, but few of those books are targeted at students who may be the first in their family to go beyond high school. Even fewer are targeted specifically to the needs of Native American students.

Two faculty members at Washington State University have sought to fill that need with a handbook titled The American Indian and Alaskan Native Student’s Guide to College Success, published in 2007.

The book is for students, but it’s also for “quite a range of stakeholders,” says Michael Pavel, the author and associate professor in the … » More …

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 ...