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Ask Dr. Universe: What is mutualism in nature?

I talked about your question with my friend Angeliqua Montoya. She’s a graduate student at Washington State University. She works on a mutualism between pea plants and bacteria.

“I study ecology, which is looking at interactions between different species,” she said. “Mutualisms are interactions where both species benefit.”

Living things interact with each other in lots of ways. When a lion kills a rabbit, that’s an interaction. When a bird builds a nest in a tree, that’s an interaction. When a bee collects pollen from a flower, that’s also an interaction.

Some interactions are good for just one individual and bad for the other. The lion gets a meal. But the rabbit becomes a meal.

Some interactions are good for one individual but neutral for the other. The bird gets a nice place to lay eggs. The tree isn’t helped or harmed.

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Ask Dr. Universe

Shining a light on political ads

WSU’s Travis Ridout and others are working to bring more transparency to the sophisticated, evolving advertising campaigns politicians are doing online

With a little more than a year to go until the 2024 general election, voters can expect to see a tsunami of political ads in the coming months.

AdImpact, a firm that tracks ad spending, recently projected political advertising will top $10.2 billion during the 2023-24 election cycle. That’s an increase of 13% compared to 2020, and nearly four times the amount spent in 2016.

Travis Ridout, the director of Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy and Public [Affairs], said much of the spending will go toward digital ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

In recent years, campaigns have also begun allocating a larger and larger percentage of their budgets to online video streaming services.

This explosion in digital advertisements is raising concerns among democracy advocates. Because the online platforms are largely unregulated, it’s hard to track who’s paying for the ads, what they’re saying or how they’re trying to influence voters.

Ridout is part of a multiinstitute team of researchers who want to bring more transparency to the issue. They recently received a National Science Foundation grant to help expand their efforts to monitor online political advertising.

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The Lewiston Tribune
Pullman-Moscow Daily News

FTX chatted about $500K in ‘dark money’ support after Sen. Murray fundraiser

Last August, as she was seeking reelection to a sixth term against a well-funded Republican challenger, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray stopped by an intimate political fundraiser at a swanky Washington, D.C., town house. The host of the event benefiting Murray’s campaign was Gabe Bankman-Fried, the younger brother of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

A few months later, Gabe Bankman-Fried, his brother, and other top executives at FTX discussed a $500,000 “dark” money transfer “to help Murray,” according to encrypted chat messages revealed by prosecutors this week at the federal fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried in Manhattan.

Campaign finance experts say there are a range of legal options for wealthy donors to discreetly employ dark money to influence politics and policy. Dark money donors can engage in fundraising conversations with a super PAC that’s supportive of a candidate, rather than a candidate’s direct campaign staff, said Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigations manager at OpenSecrets.

Donations can also be routed to dark money groups that spend on thinly veiled “issue” advertising campaigns, rather than ads that directly urge people to vote for a certain candidate. This money would not be reported as a donation for a candidate to the FEC.

A line campaigns must not cross is a promise of money in exchange for policy change, said Washington State University political science professor Travis Ridout.

Ridout, who reviewed the Signal chats filed in the Bankman-Fried trial at the request of The Seattle Times, said it was difficult to tell what exactly was going on with “Murray folks” and the $500,000.

“One concern that I think would be illegal is a quid pro quo,” Ridout said. “You give this money, presumably a 501(c)(4) gets this money in exchange for you doing something for me. I don’t know if anything like that happened or not.”

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The Seattle Times

 

Re-Imagined Radio presents ‘The War of the Worlds’

The simple power of sound can be strong enough to transport people’s imaginations anywhere, or convince them of just about anything — even Earth getting overrun by creepy-crawlies from another planet.

Re-Imagined Radio, a sound-art and -storytelling project based at Washington State University Vancouver, has been exploring the way such mischief was, and still is, done for the past decade.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Re-Imagined Radio will relaunch an entirely audio Martian invasion of Earth on the night before Halloween as it stages “The War of The Worlds” at Kiggins Theatre.

“It might be harder to spook people than it was in the 1930s,” said John Barber, the founder of Re-Imagined Radio and a faculty member in WSU Vancouver’s creative media and digital culture program. “But it was so effective, in its day, it’s been legendary ever since.”

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The Columbian

 

Science Now: Foraging rabbits

When your task is trapping a rabbit, you gotta be on the hop. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. 

“[The eastern Idaho] Lemhi valley [is] a high desert valley that runs along the border with Montana and it’s the sagebrush steppe environment which means it’s a mix of shrub and grasslands and it is just a gorgeous gorgeous intact piece of sagebrush landscape.” With support for the National Science Foundation, mammalian ecologist Janet Ratcliffe with the University of Idaho and a team want to understand this critical habitat from the perspective of a small but important long term resident: the pygmy rabbit.

The rabbits live in burrows under raised clumps of sage called moema mounds so they have kind of a tough life. … Putting themselves in places where they’re close to burrows, where they can quickly escape from predators, that’s really important.”

Sheltering from the heat and cold is important, too, but so is food. Sometimes they risk a venture into the open to eat. Lisa Shipley is a foraging ecologist with Washington State University: “Especially in the winter, it might eat 99% of its diet in sagebrush. It’s very nutritious. It has a lot of protein in it but it also has a lot of toxic chemicals. It’s the only mammal that can eat sagebrush for virtually exclusively its diet.”

Using tracking data from the collars and imagery from where and when the rabbits spend their time in burrows under the sagebrush and out in the open. maps like these can tell them a lot about how the rabbits use and ultimately shape the landscape around them.

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Science Now (FOX 49)