With murmurs and pointing, the crowd watches as a face and then hands—holding a large object—appear in the twelfth-story window of WSU’s Webster Physical Sciences Building. On the ground, Butch T. Cougar begins a countdown: five, four, three, two… At one, the hands release a 10-pound, half-frozen pumpkin that rockets to the courtyard, exploding in […]
WSU researchers have determined that Nez Perce Indians grew and smoked tobacco at least 1,200 years ago, long before the arrival of traders and settlers from the eastern United States. Their finding upends a long-held view that indigenous people in this area of the interior Pacific Northwest smoked only kinnikinnick or bearberry before traders brought […]
WSU Vancouver cultural anthropology major Emma Johnson has received a prestigious and nationally competitive Udall Undergraduate Scholarship in its tribal public policy category. “The Udall (Scholarship) is incredibly important to me,” said Johnson. “Completing all the work to apply and then being successful, it’s a really huge deal. It is helping me complete my education.” Johnson, […]
Researchers analyzing the genomes of cultivated cacao trees have traced their origin to a “single domestication event” some 3,600 years ago. The discovery opens a new front in a long-running argument regarding when and where humans started growing the source of chocolate. “This evidence increases our understanding of how humans moved and established in America,” said […]
As the battle lines are drawn for next month’s hotly contested midterm elections, some Americans may be comforted to know there is at least one area of common ground for Democrats and Republicans: regardless of political standing, age or gender, U.S. voters are in favor of renewable energy, according to research by Christine Horne, professor of […]
A Washington State University researcher has completed the most thorough analysis yet of The Great Drought — the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years — and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50 million lives. She warns that the Earth’s current warming climate could make a similar drought […]
Hard apple cider is growing in popularity around the country, and craft ciders from small cideries are the fastest growing segment of that market. Equipped with a grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a new group, led by Washington State University researchers, will work with orchardists and cider makers to develop […]
“The Cross-Up” — a short comedy film about a mafia-like character receiving a visit from God to turn his life around — features music composed and performed by WSU’s Greg Yasinitsky, Regents professor of music, saxophone, composition, and jazz studies. The entire process for creating the soundtrack took approximately a year, Yasinitsky said. This involved […]
Political polarization, decreasing trust in government, and rising populist rhetoric, have made political civility a hot-button topic. WSU’s Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service has been tackling this issue head-on for quite some time. Pursuing that goal, Cornell Clayton, director of the Foley Institute, announced that the institute has joined the National […]
It’s hard to say exactly what would happen if you had three hearts and one of them stopped. Humans, and cats, have just one heart, so we have no experience with this. Octopuses, on the other hand, do have three hearts. When I called my friend Kirt Onthank, a professor at Walla Walla University who […]