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WSUV researchers develop much faster way to model aquatic vegetation

With half the world’s population—more than 3.5 billion people, according to an United Nations estimate—living less than 40 miles away from coastlines, scientists want to know how effectively coastal plants buffer inland areas from rising seas and extreme weather events. But doing the research was an arduous and limited task until three Washington State University Vancouver scientists got involved.

Lienard
Lienard
Nik Strigul
Strigul
Stephen Henderson
Henderson

WSUV environmental scientist Stephen Henderson worked with Nikolay Strigul, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, and Jean Liénard, a mathematics postdoctoral researcher, to develop a computer model that uses photographs to re-create the complex geometry of the plants to be used in a workable computer model.

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The Columbian

Rapture Me Up, Daddy: Trump, the End of the World, and Me

More than 40 percent of Americans believe that the Second Coming will take place by the year 2050, with that number rising to 58 percent among white evangelicals.

Matthew Sutton
Matthew Sutton

“Among lay people it’s just a given that the Rapture’s going to happen,” says Matthew Avery Sutton, history professor at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, in an interview with VICE. “Most evangelical churches would be shocked to find out that this is a 150-year-old concept and not a 2,000-year-old Biblical concept.”

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VICE

Ask Dr. Universe: Why do we find some things scary?

While our fears might be different, we all get scared sometimes. Perhaps for you it’s spiders, the dark, or the thought of monsters under your bed.

Michael Delahoyde
Delahoyde

My friend Michael Delahoyde is really curious about what freaks us out. As an English professor at Washington State University, he’s even taught a course about monsters.

Delahoyde explained that our brains like to categorize information to help us make sense of our world. But monsters sort of live between different categories.

“We are comfortable with animals. We are comfortable with humans. We’ve got the distinctions down,” Delahoyde said. “But when you have a monster, like a werewolf who is somewhere in the middle, then it freaks us out.”

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Dr. Universe

Kiggins presents radio-drama production of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

If the spectacle of a rich and famous man repeatedly forcing himself upon innocent women freaks you out, stay away from the Kiggins Theatre on Thursday night. Portland radio dramatist Sam Mowry and his Willamette Radio Workshop have unleashed Martian invaders at the Kiggins during several recent Halloween seasons. But this year they’ll bring the vampire back to life instead. Or, that is, back to un-death.

“Dracula” is so effective because it invokes a sly and seductive menace that absorbs and transforms what it touches, according to John Barber, who teaches in Washington State University Vancouver’s Creative Media and Digital Culture program, and who first facilitated bringing Mowry and crew to the Kiggins years ago as part of a project called “Reimagined Radio.”

“The novel examines society’s fears of the unnatural during late 19th- and 20th-century Victorian society,” he said. “The focus of its many interpretations has come to be how abnormality can evolve from one source and infect the surrounding society with discord, misfortunes and evil. Dracula, the vampire, infects others with his evil.”

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The Columbian

Heroic law officer, devoted Cougar receives alumni award

After a bomb exploded in a WSU dorm in 1979, student resident advisor Deke Gassett (BA ’80, criminal justice and criminology) organized fundraising for the University police to acquire more protective Kevlar vests. While a drug enforcement agent just eight years later, Gassett himself was protected by a Kevlar vest, saved others’ lives, and won awards for his actions.

For service in his law enforcement career and volunteer community work, and for his unfailing support of all things Cougar, Gregory Michael “Deke” Gassett recently was honored with the WSU Alumni Association Alumni Achievement Award.

While at WSU 1976-80, Gassett volunteered at the WSU/community crisis center, was a mentor in the Whitman County juvenile probation office and earned a state of Washington volunteer award.

His career in law enforcement has included service for the state gambling commission and work for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

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WSU News