Passionate about plants and nearing graduation with a master’s in cultural anthropology, Amanda Thiel has traveled overseas for her research and educated elementary school children about botany. Thiel went to rural Guatemala in the summer of 2016 to research ethnobotany, the study of how people use plants in their region. During her two-month stay, she […]
Researchers at Washington State University and 13 other institutions have found that the arc of prehistory bends towards economic inequality. In the largest study of its kind, the researchers saw disparities in wealth mount with the rise of agriculture, specifically the domestication of plants and large animals, and increased social organization. Their findings, published this […]
Every day students, faculty, staff and administrators throughout Washington State University process a vast torrent of messages. Between lectures, reading assignments, tweets, texts, emails, advertisements, news stories and casual conversations, they’re processing countless discrete pieces of socially transmitted information. Much of this information is so advanced that Cougs can go on to breed new species […]
A total of 10 College of Arts and Sciences students received two types of awards from the WSU Office of Undergraduate Research. Recipients of the Carson and Auvil awards will work with faculty mentors throughout the 2017-18 academic year on research, scholarly and creative projects that advance or create new knowledge in a specific field.
The Dominican boy had a leaf draped over his head, secured with a length of vine. Anthropologist Marsha Quinlan was intrigued. “I asked him, ‘Is that a hat?’” she recalls. “And he explained that, no, he woke up with a headache and the leaf makes your head feel better. And I thought that was so […]
For thousands of years, coyote and other types of wild tobacco have provided what many consider a versatile healing remedy and meditative, spiritual channel to the Creator. Much of the botanical lore was muddled, however, with the arrival of Europeans and subsequent cultural upheaval. WSU researchers Shannon Tushingham and David Gang ’99 PhD are using […]
In the mid-to-late 1200s, some 30,000 ancestral pueblo farmers left their homes in southwestern Colorado’s Mesa Verde region and never returned. Where these people went and why they left are two of American archeology’s longest-standing mysteries.
Five of this year’s Top Ten Seniors are receiving a degree in the College of Arts and Sciences. A sixth is receiving two CAS minors. For more than 80 years, Washington State University has recognized 10 of the top seniors in each graduating class. These five women and five men represent the Pullman campus’ highest […]
The death last year of a woman in Reno, Nev., from an infection resistant to every type of antibiotic available in the U.S. highlights how serious the threat of antimicrobial resistance has become. Washington State University scientists are addressing growing global concern about the spread of antimicrobial resistance in Africa, where the World Health Organization […]