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And 1,083 Lines of Lupine
The Plant Introduction Station, which maintains a stunning variety of plants at WSU, celebrated 50 years of maintaining genetic diversity in 2000.
» More ...The Plant Introduction Station, which maintains a stunning variety of plants at WSU, celebrated 50 years of maintaining genetic diversity in 2000.
» More ...The Rockwell Bean, a Whidbey Island Heirloom variety, has been grown in central Whidbey Island since the 1800s. Granny Smith's legendary baked beans take advantage of them.
» More ...Jane Kelley, associate professor in WSU’s College of Education, shares some book titles that show depictions of poverty.
» More ...David Cox’s life seems equally divided between his South Bend pharmacy and hunting. And family encompasses both.
Cox is the second generation of a three-generation dynasty of pharmacists in South Bend, the county seat of Pacific County, just upstream on the Willapa River from Willapa Bay.
Don Cox ’46 graduated from Washington State University twice, first in chemistry before joining the Army during World War II, then in pharmacy in 1946. He began his career in Long Beach, then started the South Bend Pharmacy in 1958. The business is difficult to miss. Just off of U.S. 101, it is painted a tasteful gray with … » More …
On a windy night, when some of us might worry about things going bump in the dark, Dan Rottler ’92 frets over 20-ton boxes of gears turning more than 200 feet above the ground. The gearboxes are like outsized automobile transmissions, capable of cranking the energy of the slowly turning 16-rpm blade of a wind turbine up to 1,800 rpm.
As plant manager of Puget Sound Energy’s Wild Horse Wind and Solar Facility, Rottler has 149 of these beasts to lose sleep over. Not to mention wildfires, lightning strikes, microbursts of changing weather, blizzards, ice-covered power lines, and even more unexpected things, like the time … » More …
Despite its many mysteries, biomechanics serves up surprises about strained muscles and bones broken and mended.
Earlier this year, at the ripe age of 38, Bernard “Kip” Lagat ’01 became the fastest American ever to run two miles indoors. It was a feat of both speed and longevity, helped in large part by a fluid, seemingly effortless running form the New Yorker describes as “perfect.”
It was not always so. In fact, Lagat’s performance, as well as two Olympic medals and several other American records, may never have taken place without the long tutelage of James Li MS ’87 MS, ’93 PhD, who recruited … » More …
Bernice “Bunny” Levine ’51 is free for lunch. She thinks. But first she has to call her agent to make sure she doesn’t have an audition.
The last time I checked in with her, the 80-something actress was on her way to shoot a Hooters commercial. Her life has gotten so much more interesting since she retired, she says. Especially now that she has moved to California and thrown herself into her lifelong dream of being an actress.
Levine grew up in East Orange, New Jersey. She had a sister whom she describes as the pretty one, but, she admits, she got the attention. “I’ve … » More …
Perhaps the most venerable of tree fruits, the pear is luscious, but can be difficult.
Maybe, say some, the Washington pear needs some new blood.
Ray Schmitten ’85 and I stand on a grassy bench above the Wenatchee River Valley, a forest of Anjou pears at our back, as he points and talks about the interplay between his family and the landscape of the valley.
In 1897, his great-grandfather had a sawmill up Brender Canyon. He started out taking the mill to the timber.
“He moved up to that ridge and logged it out. Finally in 1921, he moved the mill and everything down here … » More …
“I was determined to know beans.”
—Thoreau, Walden
Having abandoned journalism and returned to her family’s farm on Whidbey Island, Georgie Smith ’93 started gardening, and one thing led to another. Smith had at least two things going for her, family land and a knack for farming. Farmer’s markets sales led to supplying restaurants, and ten years later, she’s still in business, farming 20 acres on Whidbey’s Ebey Prairie outside of Coupeville with four full-time employees and the same number of three-quarter time workers.
Even though Smith grows multifarious crops—greens, alliums, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, whatever—at the heart of her enterprise right now is a lovely … » More …
Although varieties abound, wheat can be more simply considered as either hard or soft, hardness being a measure of the kernel’s resistance to crushing.
All wheat originally was soft-kerneled. And there is, so far as we know, no evolutionary advantage to either the hard or the soft trait.
But clearly, somewhere along the line, that section of genetic material that determines the hardness of the kernel underwent a random mutation. Specifically, the Puroindoline a or Puroindoline b genes, which have long been a focus of Craig Morris’s research.
In order to understand the hard/soft divide, Morris, a plant physiologist, suggests that we consider the … » More …