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Pullman exhibit explains discovery and significance of 2,000-year-old tattoo tool

The discovery of the oldest tattooing artifact in western North America earned a Washington State University PhD student international acclaim earlier this year from the likes of National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and the New York Times.

Now, faculty, staff, and students have the opportunity to learn firsthand about the ancient implement and the Ancestral Pueblo people of Southeastern Utah who made it.

Andrew Gillreath-Brown.
Gillreath-Brown

Andrew Gillreath-Brown, an anthropology PhD candidate, created a small exhibit outside the WSU Museum of Anthropology explaining the 2,000-year-old cactus spine tattoo tool he chanced upon while taking inventory of archaeological materials that had been sitting in storage for more than 40 years.

The exhibit explains how the tool was identified and gives viewers a rare glimpse into the long history of customs and cultures of Indigenous groups of the southwestern United States.

“Even the smallest artifacts can allow us to extrapolate and help us understand more about people of the past, how different things like tattooing got started,” Gillreath-Brown said. “In many ways, I think they also give us a better understanding of customs and cultural traditions today.”

This fall, Gillreath-Brown will use the exhibit to help his anthropology 101 students start thinking more critically about the conditions that enabled people in the ancient world to practice artforms like tattooing.

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WSU Insider

What a Virginia wildflower can tell us about climate change

When climates change, plants and animals often are forced to colonize new areas – or possibly go extinct. Because the climate is currently changing, biologists are keenly interested in predicting how climate-induced migrations influence organisms over time.

Nathan Layman.
Layman
Carly Prior.
Prior
Jeremiah Busch.
Busch

In a study to be published in the journal Evolution Letters, Washington State Unviersity biologists Nathan C. Layman, Carly J. Prior, and Jeremiah W. Busch, along with researchers at the University of Virginia, reveal how the colonization of new environments after the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago, fundamentally altered the American bellflower, a wildflower native to Virginia.

The WSU researchers sequenced the genomes of American bellflowers from across their current geographic range. They found patterns of genetic mutations that helped them identify a location in what is now eastern Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where the plant likely persisted during the last glaciation. They also showed that the process of expansion to the species’ current range in the eastern United States involved repeated periods when populations were small and gradually increasing through colonization.

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Technology.org

Celebrating Hanford’s 75th anniversary with community events

In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Hanford Site, Washington State University Tri-Cities’ Hanford History Project will host and partner to offer several activities throughout the month of September that provide a glimpse into the unique history of Hanford and impact that it has had on the region, state and world.

Robert Franklin.
Franklin

“Hanford is a unique place with unique history,” said Robert Franklin, WSU history instructor and alumnus and assistant director of the WSU Tri-Cities Hanford History Project. “It is also a really complicated place, with a complicated history, but that is what makes it interesting. It had a huge impact on the development of the city of Richland, and it had an impact on the rest of the world.”

Hanford is the location of the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor, the B Reactor, which also made the plutonium for the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb that was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 during World War II. It led to the creation of a variety of scientific and engineering discoveries and technology. It is now the site of one of the world’s largest nuclear cleanup efforts.

“This is a great opportunity to learn more about Hanford and its impact, especially on the regional Tri-Cities community,” Franklin said. “We want to make people more aware of just how accessible historical resources for Hanford are in our local community, and we want to bring that history to our community.”

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WSU Insider

Worried? Losing sleep? It’s hard not to be stressed in 2019

Local, national and even global surveys all show an increase in negative feelings and experiences over at least the last decade.

And stress and trauma can permanently change the developing brains of children, affecting lifelong health, educational, economic and social outcomes. There is even preliminary research from Washington State University biologists suggesting that stress can alter the biology of a person’s as-yet-unborn children and grandchildren, meaning susceptibility to anxiety and trauma could be passed to future generations.

Michael Skinner.
Skinner

“In animals, exposure to stress, cold or high-fat diets has been shown to trigger metabolic changes in later generations,” wrote Science, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society, in an article last month. “And small studies in humans exposed to traumatic conditions — among them the children of Holocaust survivors — suggest subtle biological and health changes in their children.”

The article quotes Michael Skinner, a biologist at WSU, saying, “This is really scary stuff. If what your grandmother and grandfather were exposed to is going to change your disease risk, the things we’re doing today that we thought were erased are affecting our great-great-grandchildren.”

What to do?

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TribLive

Still down the rabbit hole for ‘The Matrix’ 20 years later

In the time since its home release, and with the proliferation of YouTube and video essays, the film The Matrix has only risen in popularity among movie buffs. Along with 2010’s Inception, it’s one of the only mainstream movies to push certain types of philosophical themes so successfully on the masses.

Michael Goldsby.
Goldsby

And if you’re Michael Goldsby, who’s earned his doctoral degree in philosophy and teaches the subject at Washington State University, it’s a movie that best showcases those ideas.

Chief among them are thought experiments posed by 17th century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. His idea: What if sensory experiences don’t match reality. He considered cases where our senses typically deceive us, such as mirages or when we are dreaming.

He even considers the possibility that we are being systematically deceived by an all-powerful demon. How could one prove that we’re not? If we can’t prove that we’re not, then how could we trust our senses? What would it be like when we discover the truth? Similar to when Neo awakes in the vat of pink goo.

And not unlike Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, wherein a group of prisoners are chained to the wall of a cave. Their whole life is shadows on the wall from objects passing in front of a flame behind them. They’re content, don’t want to escape, until they do, which is when they discover life isn’t what they thought.

“The whole point of the project was to see what one can actually determine,” said Goldsby. “What one could say that they know. Even in the face of that sort of radical, global doubt.”

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Spokesman Review