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WSU Experts Offer Advice on Turning New Year’s Resolutions Into Reality

From ancient Babylonians making new commitments to their gods to today’s average office worker pledging to give up soda, humans have been struggling with New Year’s resolutions for a very long time.

Yet there is hope, according to a group of Washington State University experts who offer their insights into keeping positive lifestyle changes going in the weeks and months ahead.

One solution is setting SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. By setting clear, quantifiable objectives, individuals looking to make positives changes can start accumulating small victories and maintain perspective of how far they’ve come and set the next milestone to aim for.

“If you’re committed to being healthier, you need to take stock of what that means and define what your goal is from the outset,” said Chris Barry, a professor in the Department of Psychology at WSU.

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Modernizing an archaeological map collection for the next generation

In 1972, two archaeologists began a project on Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah. The project combined their interests in settlement patterns and statistical applications to archaeology based on probabilistic sampling theory. Little could the two archaeologists know that the project would lead to a 50-year collaboration that resulted in numerous significant contributions to the field of southwestern archaeology, or that Cedar Mesa itself would become involved in a contemporary fight for Indigenous control of ancestral lands as part of Bears Ears National Monument.

Bill Lipe brought the Cedar Mesa project to Washington State University when he joined the faculty in 1976. By the time he arrived on the Palouse, Lipe had been researching the ways in which Ancestral Puebloan societies lived on the landscape of the Southwest since 1958, when he was a crew chief on the Glen Canyon Archaeological Project. His research partner, R.G. Matson, had joined the University of British Columbia in 1972. Together, the two men assembled a wealth of data from Cedar Mesa over four decades that detailed the development of a cultural landscape from a natural landscape.

The approach of considering the landscape as the unit for analysis was rare in archaeology at the time. In addition to the collected artifacts from 995 sites, WSU’s Museum of Anthropology curates the maps from the 800 square-kilometers surveyed during the Cedar Mesa project. Limited excavations occurred in a small number of sites, but the majority of the Cedar Mesa Project results have been based on systematically documenting surface artifacts, a process called archaeological survey.

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Daily News

Early spring heat waves may be melting PNW water supply

Increasingly frequent spring heat waves are prompting premature snow melts across the Pacific Northwest, jeopardizing a key water source for area residents, a new study has found.

Successive stretches of unseasonable heat have been occurring earlier in the year in a region that depends on snowpack for summer water, according to the study, published Wednesday in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

“Short-term events like heatwaves have had an under-appreciated impact on accelerating snow melt, and cumulatively, they can amplify each other,” lead author Luke Reyes, a doctoral student in Washington State University’s School of the Environment, said in a statement.

Heat domes, weather events in which the atmosphere traps hot ocean air, triggered record temperatures that rose to nearly 122 degrees Fahrenheit across the Pacific Northwest in late June 2021.

So extreme was this event that British Columbia endured severe floods in several snow- and glacier-fed watersheds, as well as a large rock avalanche, the authors noted.

While the researchers had intended to examine the snowmelt caused by that single event, they ended up finding that much of the region’s snowpack was already gone before the heat dome arrived.

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The Hill
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The Columbian
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Obesity may be caused by ancestors’ exposure to toxic chemicals

Decades ago, someone’s grandmother was exposed to a toxic pesticide that was later banned. A Washington State University professor’s research suggests that person’s grandchild may be suffering the consequences of that environmental exposure.

The inheritance that WSU epigeneticist Michael Skinner studies does not come from genes – those are set in stone after birth. But epigenetics, the way those genes express themselves, do change throughout a person’s life and can also be passed down through the generations.

Skinner suggests that today’s high rates of obesity could be linked to epigenetics rather than just diet and exercise.

Though each cell in the body has an identical DNA sequence, the form and function of cells are often quite different. That is because different epigenetic processes can “turn on and turn off” different cells, according to Skinner.

“Disease we now know primarily comes from an abnormal epigenetics, which is causing an abnormal set of genes to turn on or off and gives genes an abnormal function,” he said.

Unlike DNA, the body’s epigenetics can change throughout their life – largely based on environmental factors. That’s how exposure to a chemical can cause disease decades later.

Over his decades of research, Skinner’s contribution to the field of epigenetics has been the discovery that epigenetics is inherited just like the genes themselves.

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Spokesman-Review
The Columbian

New Method Aims to Curb Disease Spread in Animal Trade

A new article published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution by Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers describes a simplified method to detect a deadly fungus killing European salamanders. The ability to rapidly find the fungus is significant as the disease, although not detected in the U.S., could impact the millions of amphibians and salamanders annually imported.

The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or Bsal, threatens salamander diversity. Initially identified in northern Europe, evidence suggests it was introduced from Southeast Asia via the pet trade.

“The impacts of Bsal in Europe have been idiosyncratic but include some of the most severe population declines we have witnessed,” said Jesse Brunner, the study’s principal investigator and associate professor at Washington State University. “A large, diverse group of researchers, government biologists, and amphibian lovers in the pet trade are working hard to avoid such devastating impacts.”

Despite a temporary U.S. ban on importing about 200 salamander species, Brunner noted the researchers’ focus is on preparing for potential arrivals and safeguarding amphibians. To address that concern, the research team developed a noninvasive method to quickly detect Bsal in shipments and captive settings, surpassing the conventional individual animal infection determination — this new method tests environmental DNA for Bsal DNA to assess the pathogen’s prevalence.

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Mirage News
Phys.org