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Some Chemicals May Alter Gene Function for Several Generations

Michael Skinner portrait
Michael Skinner

Groundbreaking research by Mohan Manikkam and Michael Skinner of Washington State University at Pullman helped establish the principle of transgenerational toxicity by showing how toxic chemicals affect subsequent generations that are not directly exposed.

In one study, the researchers tested the transgenerational impacts of mixtures of chemicals that people are commonly exposed to in everyday life, including bug repellents, plastics additives and jet fuel.

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ewg.org

The surface of Mars is probably too toxic for bacteria to survive

 

Dirk Schulze-Makuch
Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Mars is not a very welcoming place. It’s cold, there’s hardly any atmosphere, and its bombarded with deep space radiation. Even the soil wants to kill you; as the Phoenix lander confirmed in 2009, the Martian regolith is laced with perchlorates—chlorine-based compounds that, when heated up, can rip apart organic materials, like cells and their building blocks.

To try to find out exactly what those perchlorates might do to Martian microorganisms, researchers at the University of Edinburgh pitted bacteria against this compound in a battery of tests. What they found does not bode well for the search for life on Mars: Under Mars-like conditions, the perchlorates were indeed toxic to the microbes.

“We knew before that any life would have an incredibly hard time to survive on the surface, and this study experimentally confirms that,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

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Popular Science

$1.7 million x-ray microscope to unleash WSU materials research

Aurora Clark
Aurora Clark

When it arrives on campus this October, a powerful new $1.7 million x-ray microscope will help Washington State University scientists develop specialized materials for technologies such as self-healing roads, printable batteries and super-efficient solar cells.

The unique microscope can create three-dimensional models of a material’s interior down to 50 nanometer resolution. Such precision will enable researchers across the university to design more efficient and powerful components for technologies ranging from batteries and solar cells to drug delivery methods that use nanoparticles to target cancerous tumors. It also will provide faculty a competitive advantage when applying for future research grants.

“In order to make high performance materials better or more versatile, you need to be able to characterize and control the arrangements of atoms inside them,” said Aurora Clark, professor of chemistry and principal investigator for the Xradia Ultra program. “Previously, WSU scientists had to go somewhere like the Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago to do the kind of imaging we will now be able to do in-house.”

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WSU News

 

African farmers’ kids conquer the marshmallow test

Barry Hewlett
Barry Hewlett

Children of Nso farmers in Cameroon know how to master the marshmallow test, which has tempted away the self-control of Western kids for decades. In a direct comparison on this delayed gratification task, Cameroonian youngsters leave middle-class German children in the dust when challenged to resist a reachable treat while waiting for another goodie, a new study finds.

While Nso values and parenting techniques generally characterize small-scale farming populations, especially in Africa, hunter-gatherers are another story, says anthropologist Barry Hewlett of Washington State University in Vancouver. Traditional hunter-gatherer groups value individual freedom and consider everyone to be relatively equal, regardless of age. Parents usually don’t tell their kids what to do, and children show little deference to parents and elders.

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Science News

Iron blood levels in Guatemala improve with WSU project

Washington State University students and faculty recently returned from a 10-day volunteer effort to help assess whether a health project designed to increase iron levels in the blood of rural Guatemalan people has been successful.

WSU participants worked hand in hand with Hearts in Motion (HIM), a nonprofit organization, on the medical service project.

“After my first year participating in HIM, I realized Guatemalan diets are primarily starch-based,” said Kathy Beerman, a WSU professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a veteran HIM volunteer. “This caused me to believe that many Guatemalans are probably faced with a lack of iron in their diets, and therefore at increased risk for iron deficiency anemia. That is when we started our research.”