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Researchers find new way to estimate magma beneath Yellowstone supervolcano

Researchers at Washington State University and the University of Idaho have found a new way to estimate how fast magma is recharging beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Peter Larson.
Larson

While their findings offer no help in predicting if the volcano will erupt, they now can get a better understanding of a key factor behind how it works — a pool of basalt magma recharging the system. “It is the coal in the furnace that’s heating things up,” said Peter Larson, a professor in WSU’s School of the Environment. “It’s heating up the boiler. The boiler is what explodes. This tells us what is heating the boiler.”

Some 640,000 years have passed since the volcano’s last major eruption. But it can still be “super,” having produced one of the largest known blasts on Earth and spewing more than 2,000 times as much ash as Mount St. Helens did in 1980.

A major element in the volcano’s power is the explosive, silica-rich rhyolite that break’s through the Earth’s crust during an eruption. Larson and his colleagues focused on the plume of basalt magma heating the rhyolite from below.

“This gives us an idea of how much magma is recharging the volcano every year,” said Larson, whose findings appear in the latest issue of the journal Geosphere.

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Newsweek

WSU Insider

Other sources:

Express – click to view

KXLY – click to view

One News Page – click to view

Science Daily – click to view

Global Geothermal News – click to view

Inverse – click to view

Geology Page – click to view

Pullman Radio – click to view

Moscow-Pullman Daily News – click to view

Independent Record – click to view

TD News – click to view

Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press – click to view

Express.co.uk – click to view

Yellowstone Insider – click to view

Revolution Radio – click to view

 

Superstition is stopping Ebola victims from seeking medical care for the illness they believe is a ‘curse’

Ebola is spreading like wildfire in the Democratic Public of the Congo where many people are refusing to get vaccinated against the disease out of fear and superstition.

In some cases, even the sick are turning away treatment as distrust of Western medicine runs deep in Congolese culture.

Barry Hewlett.
Barry Hewlett

“As you can imagine, there’s a long history of outsiders manipulating and taking advantage of local people, so there’s generally some mistrust in terms of colonial history,” says Dr Barry Hewlett, professor of anthropology at Washington State University in Vancouver.

Though this wariness is not necessarily specific to medicine itself, Dr Hewlett, who studies the anthropology of infectious diseases and was the first such scholar to be involved in an Ebola outbreak response, says “any international health worker should assume that most people are not going to trust the service they’re providing….

“So much of outbreak control is behavioral and social, so we need behavioral and social scientists in there to work with the biomedical folks because local communities have to be behind [the response] and understand it on their own terms if control efforts are going to be effective.”

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Daily Mail

Imagining monarch butterflies at the Grotto

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service volunteer corps is planting native flowering plants, most notably milkweed, which is crucial for the survival of monarch butterflies. Monarchs lay their eggs in milkweed, which provides essential nutrition for the larvae. Milkweed has disappeared across the nation—and with it, monarch populations have crashed since the 1990s, down 75 percent or more.

Cheryl SchulzThe situation is especially dire for Western monarchs. Cheryl Schultz, an associate professor at Washington State University in Vancouver, was the lead author of a study that found that compared to the 10 million monarchs that overwintered in coastal California in the 1980s, today there are barely 300,000. That’s a trajectory that points to extinction.

While pesticides, logging, development and climate change probably all play a role, key to the butterfly’s annihilation is the loss of milkweed habitat.

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Catholic Sentinel

‘Man vs. Snake’: Netflix documentary highlights WSU professor’s record-breaking arcade gaming skills

Tom Asaki.Tom Asaki, an associate professor of mathematics at Washington State University, flicked a 1980s arcade machine joystick back and forth in the basement of his Genesee, Idaho, home, his hand strategically guiding a red snake through a maze as the machine beeped and booped in the background.

The game: a Pac-Man-esque, yet obscure, 1982 Rock-Ola release called Nibbler. The goal: consume all the food in the maze without letting the snake run into its own tail.

It is a seemingly simple concept, but only a handful of players in the world have gotten as far as Asaki, whose skills are featured in a 2015 documentary, “Man vs. Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler.”

The film, now on Netflix, takes an in-depth look at some of the best Nibbler players in the world, including Asaki, who said he was interviewed for the documentary about nine years ago on the WSU campus.

Asaki made headlines in May 1983 when he became the first recorded person to attempt to earn a billion points on Nibbler.

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Spokesman-Review

Wind quintet to take the stage

The Solstice Wind Quintet will perform at 7 p.m. Friday, May 25, at the Liberty Theatre, 1203 Commercial St., Astoria.

Ryan Hare
Hare

The quintet was founded in 1978 and is the resident faculty wind ensemble at Washington State University. It performs throughout the Northwest.

The group will perform works by composer Ryan Hare, who teaches composition, music theory and bassoon at WSU.

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Columbia Press