Noel Vest’s goal was to go to community college to earn a degree as a chemical dependency counselor when he walked out the doors of a Nevada prison on June 28, 2009.
Other than hard labor, it was the only career he thought was possible for a formerly incarcerated person.
Almost a decade later Vest is about to graduate from Washington State University with a PhD in psychology and start the next chapter of his life as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
“Never in a million years would I have dreamed I’d be where I am today,” Vest said. “There’s a lot to be said about finding what drives you and for me that has been pursuing a career in higher education. It gave me the direction and motivation I needed to turn my life around.”
This June, Vest will move to Palo Alto to begin working with Keith Humphries, professor of psychiatry at Stanford and one of the world’s foremost experts in the prevention and treatment of addictive disorders.
One of the most important things we can do to prevent more pollution is to keep our garbage, especially plastic, out of the ocean. That’s what I found out from my friend Richelle Tanner, a marine biologist and researcher at Washington State University.
Tanner said it’s a lot easier to keep plastic out of the ocean than to get it out of the water. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates the amount of garbage humans put into the ocean every year is equal to about 90 aircraft carriers, those big ships at sea where planes take off and land.
Tanner said you might work with your class to pick up trash near waterways in your community. You might also share what you’ve learned and talk about it with family and friends.
One other thing you can do is try to reduce your own plastic use. For a week, keep track of all the plastic you use. Then, track another week and see if you’ve improved. Ocean pollution is a big problem, but we can all take small steps to help make a big difference.
Farmers rely on phosphorus fertilizers to enrich the soil and ensure bountiful harvests, but the world’s recoverable reserves of phosphate rocks — from which such fertilizers are produced — are finite and unevenly distributed.
The Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., is spearheading an international effort to map the global flow of phosphorus, much of which will be absorbed by crops, then eaten and excreted as waste by animals and people — and jump-start efforts to recapture and recycle the vital nutrient.
Powers
The team showed that there are significant untapped opportunities for recycling phosphorus. First-author Steve Powers, an associate researcher at Washington State University who conceived of the study, is now trying to figure out exactly how much phosphorus can be recaptured from animal and human waste and hopes to identify other opportunities for more efficient phosphorus use.
“If we can recycle more of this locally available waste phosphorus back into agriculture, we might be able to keep it away from leak points while reducing our dependence on future fertilizer imports and mining,” Powers said.
Washington State University Vancouver will present four awards at its spring commencement ceremony for advancing equity, research, student achievement and teaching. Among these recipients is Bala Krishnamoorthy, an associate professor and program leader in mathematics and statistics. He will receive the Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence.
As planes take off at an Army National Guard airfield in Concord, New Hampshire, a tiny, delicate life form exists that’s arguably more reliant on the U.S. military than the soldiers are themselves. Small green caterpillars, barely distinguishable from the leaves they feed on, are the next generation of the Karner Blue butterfly, an insect that landed on the Endangered Species List in 1992.
Schulz
Twenty-five years ago, Cheryl Schultz—now a conservation biologist at Washington State University, Vancouver—partnered in a study of the Fender’s Blue butterfly, a relative of the Karner Blue that was believed to be extinct until small populations were rediscovered in 1989.
For the Fender’s Blue, a controversial approach using fire in the butterflies’ habitat is working, and scientists want to determine whether the same methods will work for the Karner Blue.
Like Karner Blues, Fender’s Blue larvae dine solely on lupine plants. Maintaining these habitats is challenging. If left alone, grasslands grow into shrub lands or forests that choke out low-growing lupines. And even though nature has its own system for preserving grasslands—modern day humans have essentially wrecked that system by either taking over prairie lands entirely or corralling the animals and small fires that keep these areas intact.
Controlled burns could help maintain grasslands, but they also introduce a conundrum: Use fire and some endangered larvae also go up in flames. But avoid fire and grasslands collapse—taking the butterflies, too.
Since those early test fires at Baskett Slough, Fender’s Blue populations have increased at least nine-fold, possibly more. There are currently an estimated 14,000 to 28,000 Fender’s Blues flitting between lupine plants, Schultz says—a population size that’s large enough to give conservationists hope that the species will survive.
“Here’s a story where we’ve turned it around, but that’s not the usual story,” she says. “Many of our butterflies are sharply in decline, and not just the rare ones.”
