Having a baby is a life-changing event that brings joy, but for many women also comes with stress and anxiety. The restrictions and uncertainties associated with the current COVID‑19 pandemic are undoubtedly adding to those fears and worries, so more than a dozen WSU researchers recently joined forces to form the WSU COVID‑19 Infant, Maternal, and Family Health Research Collaborative.

“We are exploring how maternal COVID‑19 infection is related to overall breastmilk composition and infant health and wellbeing. Specifically, we are interested in potential protective effects of breastfeeding during this time,” said WSU lead investigator Courtney Meehan, an associate professor of anthropology and associate dean of research and graduate studies in the WSU College of Arts and Sciences. “It is essential that we get this information quickly and accurately so we can better inform the public, as well as those who create policy,” she said, pointing to the varying recommendations that are currently being put forward by agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, and UNICEF.

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WSU Insider

Jack McNassar, a Washington State University Global Campus anthropology instructor, is the winner of the 2019-20 Excellence in Online Teaching Award. The student-nominated annual award is sponsored by Academic Outreach & Innovation.

The award, now in its fourth year, seeks to acknowledge and reward WSU faculty members teaching on Global Campus who employ best practices to engage, inspire, support, and show care for students in an online environment. He will receive $3,000 in faculty development funds and a trophy in recognition of his win.

“Professor McNassar continually inspired me and the other students in the course,” said one of his nominators. “He is open for questions, and he always responds in such a kind and caring way … his encouraging words made everyone want to be a better student and do their best work.”

McNassar earned his doctorate in anthropology from WSU in 2016 and has been teaching online through WSU Global Campus for five years.

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WSU Insider

Who could imagine a 21st century without data? Sophisticated information processing is key to the way societies function today. And it turns out it was also critical to the evolution of early states. According to new research led by an SFI team, the ability to store and process information was central to sociopolitical development across civilizations ranging from the Neolithic to the last millennium.

“There’s a fundamental relationship between the way in which societies process information and how large they are able to become,” says SFI External Professor Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University and an author on a new paper published this month in Nature Communications.

Kohler and his colleagues—a range of SFI resident and external faculty and researchers—dug into what’s called the Seshat Global History Databank, a massive assembly of historical and archaeological information spanning more than 400 societies, 30 regions, and 10,000 years of human history.

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Phys.org

WSU Insider

Just like insects, birds and animals, humans have a particular climate niche, scientists have found, with 6,000 years of human history demonstrating how society thrives when we stay within it and the turbulence that ensues when it is pushed out of this zone.

The study also finds a second band of temperatures that coincides with the region that benefits from the Indian monsoon, which helps support billions of people in South Asia. The average annual temperature in that region is between 68 and 77 degrees (20 to 25 degrees Celsius), the study found.

Study co-author Tim Kohler, professor emeritus of anthropology at Washington State University, says that while our technological progress has allowed us to settle virtually everywhere on Earth, and even in space, the study shows, “Our preferences (as opposed to our abilities) have long been for a rather narrow band of temperatures in which we typically have our densest numbers and greatest economic success.”

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