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It’s So Hot in the US and Canada Right Now Infrastructure Is Melting

OK, maybe that was an understatement. It’s hellishly hot in the Pacific Northwest right now – temperature records in Canada have been smashed day after day, and hundreds of people are dying. The environment in Seattle hospitals has been described as similar to how it was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, except this time it’s because of heatstroke, and cities across the region have seen people retreat to “cooling centers” to escape the heat.

Deepti Singh.
Singh

“This is not a one-in-a-lifetime event,” Deepti Singh, assistant professor at Washington State University, Vancouver, told Gizmodo. “These are conditions that are likely to recur, potentially quite frequently, in our near future because of increasing global warming.”

“[O]ur infrastructure development needs to account for the changing climate conditions and our communities, public officials and we as individual[s] need to be prepared to cope with severe heatwaves and other impacts of climate change that we are currently vulnerable to.”

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IFL Science

Sick legacy — how DDT exposure from the past can affect many generations to come

New research is providing worrying evidence that your grandparents’ exposure to toxic pollutants like DDT could increase the risk of illnesses for you and all your future offspring.

Michael Skinner.
Skinner

Michael Skinner, a biologist from Washington State University, studies how environmental toxicants, like DDT, affect epigenetic inheritance. That is the science of how changes to the way our DNA gets expressed can be transmitted to future generations.

He’s found the effects of DDT exposure can be passed down four generations in rodents, but said based on other studies with different animals, and with different toxic chemicals, the effects could be expected to last many more generations, and may, in fact, be permanent.

Given the effects he and other scientists have seen, Skinner said our current and ancestral exposures — to DDT and many other toxic synthetic chemicals we’ve been exposed to over the years — could be behind the rise in chronic diseases around the world today.

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CBC

Songbird plumage and testosterone levels are altered by wildfire

Fire can put a tropical songbird’s sex life on ice. Following habitat-destroying wildfires in Australia, researchers found that many male red-backed fairywrens failed to molt into their red-and-black ornamental plumage, making them less attractive to potential mates. They also had lowered circulating testosterone, which has been associated with their showy feathers.

“Really, it ended up all coming down to testosterone. There’s no evidence that the birds were actually stressed. Wildfire was just interfering with their normal, temporal pattern of elevating testosterone and then producing that colorful plumage,”Jordan Boersma, study lead author and doctoral student in biology at Washington State University.

Jordan Boersma.
Boersma

In an earlier study, Boersma and his colleagues showed that testosterone helps the fairywren process pigments in their diet called carotenoids to create their colorful feathers. This study adds further evidence of that connection as well as the birds’ response to wildfire.

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News Medical
News Scientist
WSU Insider
Science Daily
Explica.co
Inside Science
Spokane Public Radio

Using new technology to uncover wrongs from the past

The discovery of the remains of 215 children at the defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia this spring has put a new focus on ground penetrating radar (GPR), the technology that was used to detect these unmarked graves.

Colin Grier.
Grier

Colin Grier, a Washington State University professor of anthropology, is the principal investigator for a National Science Foundation-funded effort to shed light on the capabilities of GPR to find and identify archaeological features, including graves, that are many decades or even centuries old. He hopes that ultimately his work will help bring closure to the families of the thousands of First Nation children who went missing at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, which operated between 1883-1996.

“The sad reality is that the discovery at the Kamloops School is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” Grier said. “There are hundreds more schools like this across Canada and similar institutions in the United States where it is likely other discoveries of remains will be made. Therefore, we need to develop a better understanding of what ground penetrating radar can and cannot do.”

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WSU Insider

Acclaimed tenor Roland Hayes frequented Pullman

Nearly a century before Billie Eilish or Drake, Roland Hayes was one of the hottest tickets in music. And over the course of 33 years, the Pullman campus was a regular stop for the man world-renowned for his mellow tenor voice and his wide-ranging musical selections.

Hayes would return to Pullman four more times over the next 33 years, concluding with an October 16, 1960, concert and leaving an important mark on the University’s growth.

Horace Alexander-Young.
Young

For example, WSU music Professor Horace Alexander Young speculates Hayes could have been an early artist-in-residence of sorts. It’s likely Hayes held seminars, workshops and even lessons with students during some or all of his visits. He taught music at Boston College and mentored many younger African American singers, including Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price and William Warfield.

“You couldn’t necessarily hire black faculty back then, so the next best thing was to bring in artists in residence,” Young said. “In some ways, WSU was on the front line in having a hands‑on relationship with issues of race, diversity and inclusion.”

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WSU Insider