“Understanding the complex and often positive role the microbiome plays in the health of plants and animals has precipitated a real renaissance in biology,” says microbiologist Stephanie Porter, who studies the evolution of cooperation and plant–microbe symbiosis. “There’s been a blossoming of ideas due to new genomic tools for understanding this microbiome—the set of all […]
Poetry is art: uniting words with “a form to hold anything you want to say.” “[We all] have a unique way of seeing the work and being in it. I’m intrigued by how different our perceptions are,” said Cameron McGill, teaching assistant professor in the Department of English and assistant editor for the online journal […]
Glacier mice could be something from a fairytale—mossy little puffballs filled with tiny fanciful creatures. “They are adorable—they really do look like little rodents,” says glacier biologist Scott Hotaling, a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Biological Sciences at WSU. Hotaling studies organisms that live in the world’s coldest locations such as the ice sheets […]
Workers experiencing job and financial insecurity are less likely to follow the CDC’s guidelines for COVID-19, such as physical distancing, limiting trips from home and washing hands, according to a study led by WSU Vancouver psychology professor Tahira Probst. “We all have a finite set of resources at our disposal, whether it’s money, time or […]
Charles Kirkham. Noel Plowman. Toll Seike. Allen Ferguson. Sidney Beinke. Myron “Mike” Carstensen. Archie Buckley. They were husbands, fathers, sons, brothers. One was a standout college athlete and beloved coach. A couple were pilots. A few quit school to serve. Some were never found. These seven servicemen are a handful of nearly 260 military personnel […]
Intrigued by the dramatic uptick in online discussions of plague literature in spring 2020, and inspired by Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, nearly 60 years after the bubonic plague swept through London, ethnic studies associate professor John Streamas decided to write a plague journal for the current coronavirus health […]
Following a talk about the Fallen Cougars Project in Pullman last Veterans Day, Kathy Aiken (’80 PhD history) shared a faded newspaper clipping with the speakers. The obituary for her father’s friend noted that he had—like Aiken’s dad— attended Washington State College for a year and a half before joining the United States Army to […]
Over the next decade or so, enormous breakthroughs in quantum theory and engineering are expected to deliver products that will boggle the mind. The revolution includes the work of visionary researchers at WSU like theoretical physicist Michael Forbes. Forbes, whose voice carries traces of his Canadian roots, studies the extreme properties of neutron stars. When […]
A talented geophysicist specializing in planetary evolution and an award-winning teacher in the School of Environment, Associate Professor Katie Cooper blends chemistry, biology, physics, geology, and mathematics to helps students understand the world we live in and connect concepts from the classroom to real-world issues.
Love is not the reason why we sing and create symphonies—at least not the primary reason, according to a new evolutionary theory of the origins of music. “Sex and mating are a part of the story, but music seems to expand far beyond that particular domain,” said Ed Hagen, WSU evolutionary anthropologist and a co-author […]