Skip to main content Skip to navigation
CAS in the Media Arts and Sciences Media Headlines

Ask Dr. Universe: Why do some birds cheep loudly while other birds cheep quietly?

Jessica Tir.
Jessica Tir

When I got your question, I called up my friend Jessica Tir, a graduate student at Washington State University who studies songbirds.

She said one of the main reasons a bird will make a loud sound is to attract a mate. When the birds find each other, they can make a nest for their eggs and wait for babies to hatch.

“That’s the song they are going to sing for the rest of their life,” Tir said.

In the lab at WSU, Tir records songbirds’ songs on microphones to learn more about how they communicate with each other, especially when they are hungry. The research will help us learn more about communication and how much food there is some birds’ habitat.

While humans can make sounds with help from their vocal cords, birds use a part called the syrinx (SEE-RINKS). Ostriches have a much bigger syrinx than, say, a tiny swallow, but they work in similar ways.

Find out more

Ask Dr. Universe 

The Hidden World of Holy Spies: A Q&A with NEH Public Scholar Matthew Avery Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton.
Sutton

In civics classes across the country, students are taught that a metaphoric wall separates church and state. However, the church-state connection is far more complicated, according to NEH Public Scholar Matthew Avery Sutton professor of history at Washington State University. “During the 1940s,” he writes, “American leaders came to understand in deeper and more explicit ways how central religion was to crafting successful foreign policy.” They hatched numerous plans to use spirituality as a political tool, but one in particular stuck: hiring missionaries to “serve God and country” as spies.

Sutton’s book, Double Crossed: the Missionaries who Spied for the United States during the Second World War, examines this “holy” espionage throughout WWII, presenting a fledgling U.S. intelligence agency, its religious assets, and their unusually close alliance.

Sutton is currently writing a book on the history of American Christianity, from colonial times to the present. In it, he hopes to explain how Christianity has developed in and shaped the United States.

Find out more

National Endowment for the Humanities

Ask Dr. Universe: What gives leaves their shapes?

We can find all kinds of leaves on our planet. Just think of tiny pine needles, fern fronds, ivy vines, or a big banana leaf.

Eric Roalson.
Roalson

My friend Eric Roalson is a professor in the school of Biological Sciences at Washington State University who is very curious about plants. He said there are a few things that give leaves their shapes.

A lot of plant families have been around for hundreds of millions of years—so they have had a lot of time to adapt to their environments, too. Plants may keep the qualities that have helped them survive through the years. They might develop new qualities that help them survive in their habitats. Or they might lose the qualities that are no longer useful.

Roalson also told me that plants in the same family often have similar shaped leaves. But not always. We see a lot of biodiversity in plants—that is, a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes in a community of living things.

Find out more

Ask Dr. Universe

Big Questions, Few Answers About What Happens Under Lake Ice

Stephanie Hampton.
Hampton

By Stephanie Hampton, WSU professor in environmental sciences, and colleagues

Historically, research on inland waters has focused on the warmer months of the year. Limnologists have mostly avoided studying lakes in winter, especially lakes that experience seasonal ice cover, as if dynamics beneath the ice were unimportant.

But multiple lines of evidence now present a compelling case that winter is indeed a fascinating and important time for lakes. Under dark conditions, when snow and ice obscure light penetration, degradation of organic material already in lakes still occurs, and when clear ice allows some light through, this light can fuel primary production to levels even higher than those in summer.

Winter fieldwork on lakes is still difficult and dangerous, particularly on ice-covered lakes. Thus, although basic understanding about winter limnology has increased in the past decade, the pace of scientific progress has not kept pace with rates of ecological change.

Find out more

Eos

Opinion: Toppling statues is an American tradition, not historical erasure

Lawrence Hatter
Hatter

By Lawrence Hatter associate professor of early American history at Washington State University

In the searing July heat in New York City, radical militants gathered in a Manhattan park, determined to tear down a statue. Over the past few years, this public monument had become the focus of protests against unpopular government measures, including a shocking act of police brutality in Boston that cost the lives of five civilians. The statue was a frequent target of graffiti. This time, however, it was coming down. With ropes tied around the statue, protesters heaved together, pulling it down. In the frenzy that followed, the crowd decapitated the statue and cut up what remained.

This event in New York almost 250 years ago could almost be snatched from today’s headlines. Over the past few weeks, a popular wave of Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism has targeted statues around the globe in response to the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department. From the felling of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, to a crowd throwing the slave trader Edward Colston into the sea in the English port city of Bristol, protesters have attacked symbols of white supremacy in our commemorative landscape.

Monuments are not history. They may depict historical figures or events, but statues and other monuments use the past to articulate the civic values of the present. Statues demonstrate what it is that we want to celebrate about the past. Statues are about our collective memory; they are not history itself. We can remove statues without erasing the past.

Find out more

Inlander