Physicist: Saran wrap vs. motorcyclist a bad situation
Shoshone Co. Sheriff deputies are investigating a group of individuals that take saran wrap and attach it to columns along Interstate 90, then stream it across the roadway. » More …
CAS in the Media
Arts and Sciences Media Headlines
Undergrad helps develop method to detect water on Mars
A Washington State University undergraduate has helped develop a new method for detecting water on Mars. Her findings appear in Nature Communications, one of the most influential general science journals.
Kellie Wall, 21, of Port Orchard, Wash., looked for evidence that water influenced crystal formation in basalt, the dark volcanic rock that covers most of eastern Washington and Oregon. She then compared this with volcanic rock observations made by the rover Curiosity on Mars’ Gale Crater.
The project was funded by the WSU College of Arts and Sciences’ Grants for Undergraduate Scholars and by the NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Scholarship in Science and Engineering.
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Discovery opens new path to superfast quantum computing
Researchers at Washington State University have used a super-cold cloud of atoms that behaves like a single atom to see a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago and witnessed only once since.
The phenomenon takes place in the seemingly otherworldly realm of quantum physics and opens a new experimental path to potentially powerful quantum computing.
Working out of a lab in WSU’s Webster Hall, physicist Peter Engels and his colleagues cooled about one million atoms of rubidium to 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. There was no colder place in the universe, said Engels, unless someone was doing a similar experiment elsewhere on Earth or on another planet.
WSU astrobiologist: Millions of planets in our galaxy may harbor complex life
The number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy which could harbor complex life may be as high as 100 million, according to WSU astrobiologist Dirk Shultze-Makuch and a team of researchers from Cornell and the University of Puerto Rico. It is the first quantitative estimate of the number of worlds in our galaxy that could harbor life above the microbial level, based on objective data.
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Shultze-Makuch’s column on the Air & Space/Smithsonian website
Physicists sound-out acoustic tractor beam
First proposed in 2006 by Philip Marstonof Washington State University and realized using light in 2010 by David Grier and colleagues at New York University, the technique involves firing two beams of ultrasonic waves upwards at a triangular-shaped target at about 51° either side from the vertical direction.
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