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Congress has been historically unproductive. How did we get here?

During the first half of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Democrats controlled both chambers, 365 bills were signed into law. Then Republicans took control of the house in the 2022 midterms.

More than halfway through its two-year term, the 118th Congress has enacted, and Biden has signed, 47 pieces of legislation. The last 10 Congresses averaged almost 390 bills enacted per term.

“It is the least productive Congress in at least 50 years in terms of the numbers of bills,” said Cornell Clayton, a political science professor at Washington State University and the director of the university’s Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service.

And an unproductive Congress means an unproductive president, at least in terms of bills signed. But judging a Congress’ productivity solely on the number of bills passed isn’t entirely accurate, Clayton said.

“I think quantity is important, but more important than quantity is quality,” he said. Still, the 118th Congress hasn’t done well on either count.

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Spokesman-Review

Testing AI to advance health equity

A sociologist at Washington State University will test how people at risk for lung cancer in a rural area of the state respond to AI-generated text messages encouraging them to visit a local clinic to be screened for the disease.

Two versions of messages will be sent to some 200 patients, one direct and one polite, said Anna Zamora-Kapoor, who’s leading the NIH-funded project that aims to advance health equity and researcher diversity.

Why it matters: The project aims to help rural clinics use the limited resources they have to reach out to a higher number of patients than they’ve been able to in the past.

It should also show which message would most effectively convince people to be screened for cancer.

Zamora-Kapoor’s project targets people between ages 50 and 80 with a history of smoking who would benefit from a low-dose CT scan to detect lung cancer as early as possible. But the insights from the project could also be useful for screening for other cancers, she said.

“We need to create structures to make sure that emerging and powerful tools like AI and machine learning are democratized,” she told Carmen. “Right now, if we just let the market decide who’s going to access these tools, they’re just going to benefit the rich, they’re just going to benefit urban areas and they’re just going to benefit the white majority that doesn’t have an accent,” she said.

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Future Pulse (Politico.com)

Heat, cold extremes hold untapped potential for solar and wind energy

Conditions that usually accompany the kind of intense hot and cold weather that strains power grids may also provide greater opportunities to capture solar and wind energy.

A Washington State University-led study found that widespread, extreme temperature events are often accompanied by greater solar radiation and higher wind speeds that could be captured by solar panels and wind turbines. The research, which looked at extensive heat and cold waves across the six interconnected energy grid regions of the U.S. from 1980-2021, also found that every region experienced power outages during these events in the past decade.

“These extreme events are not going away anytime soon. In fact, every region in the U.S. experiences at least one such event nearly every year. We need to be prepared for their risks and ensure that people have reliable access to energy when they need it the most,” said lead author Deepti Singh, a Washington State University climate scientist.”Potentially, we could generate more power from renewable resources precisely when we have widespread extreme events that result in increased energy demand.”

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ScienceDaily
EnergyCentral
TechXplore
SolarPowerConference

 

 

Genes identified that allow bacteria to thrive despite toxic heavy metal in soil

Some soil bacteria can acquire sets of genes that enable them to pump the heavy metal nickel out of their systems, a study has found. This enables the bacteria to not only thrive in otherwise toxic soils but help plants grow there as well.

A Washington State University-led research team pinpointed a set of genes in wild soil bacteria that allows them to do this in serpentine soils which have naturally high concentrations of toxic nickel. The genetic discovery, detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, could help inform future bioremediation efforts that seek to return plants to polluted soils.

“We can say with certainty that these are the genes that are letting the bacteria survive the heavy metal exposure because if we take them away, they die. If we add them to a new bacterium that was sensitive to the heavy metal, all of the sudden it’s resistant,” said Stephanie Porter, the study’s senior author and a WSU evolutionary ecologist.

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Phys.org
ScienceDaily
TechnologyNetworks

New Genetic Tools Have Dramatically Changed Wildlife Conservation

The collection of eDNA is just the first step in trying to identify species from the bits of themselves they leave behind as they roam different habitats. The dead skin, saliva, scat, and other cellular material that organisms shed must then be analyzed in a laboratory using molecular methods.

At Washington State University’s School of the Environment, associate professor Caren Goldberg extracts the DNA trapped in the filters that [National Park Service biologist Andy] Hubbard sends from southern Arizona. “We do one species at a time, and then sometimes we have to do some extra cleaning on the samples, and then we process all the data, and we double-check it to make sure everything looks good before sending it back,” she said.

Environmental technology is a valuable tool for finding elusive species like frogs, Goldberg said. She knows how slippery the creatures can be because, as a University of Arizona student, she completed her master’s thesis after chasing barking frogs in the mountains and surveying Chiricahua leopard frogs that can be difficult to see in murky, and often deep, water holes.

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Undark.com
The Good Men Project