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Cerreta named president of nation’s professional society for minerals, metals, and materials scientists and engineers

Ellen Cerreta, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s division leader for Materials Science and Technology, has been named president of The Minerals, Metals, & Materials Society (TMS), a professional society for scientists and engineers in those fields.

“TMS aspires to be the professional society where global materials, science, and engineering practitioners come together to scope the future of materials engineering and technology,” said Cerreta. “As such, I am honored to have been selected by the membership of this society to serve as president.”

Cerreta has previously served as the deputy division leader for Explosive Science and Shock Physics, and as the program manager for High Explosives Safety at Los Alamos.

She has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in this area of research and is also an adjunct faculty member in The Institute of Shock Physics at Washington State University and was inducted into the 2016 ASM Fellows Class.

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Mirage News

 

WSU women honored for their accomplishments

WSU announced its 15th class of distinguished women and held a virtual award ceremony April 15 to honor those recognized.

Michelle Lee, senior majoring in political science, was honored as the Undergraduate Student Woman of Distinction. Lee said she transferred to WSU in 2019 from a private university in Malaysia and plans on attending law school next year.

She founded a branch of the Student Legal Research Association at WSU. Lee said the association examined WSU police records to better address racial disparities in university campus arrests.

Lee said the receiving award was a total shock because she was not expecting to be nominated.

“I thought it was a joke,” she said, “like one of those spam emails. I was so surprised but so grateful.”

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The Daily Evergreen

Curators need help identifying more than 10,000 photos taken in 1960s and ’70s featuring Yakima Valley farmworkers

The woman at the edge of the black and white photo looks overwhelmed, but the seven young children clustered near her are beaming.

Lipi Turner-Rahman.
Turner-Rahman

They are among the people and places that inspire Lipi Turner-Rahman, a history instructor and manager of the Kimble Digitization Center at WSU Libraries. She needs the help of the people in the photos and those who knew them. She wants to know who they are and more about the moment when Nash stood nearby and pressed the camera’s shutter button.

“I’m really interested in the storytelling. If they remember this is me, and I remember that day, and we were doing this. This is my life story. This is how I came to be in this photo,” Turner-Rahman said.

Students hired with a grant and donations have already digitized 6,271 of the images and work to add a few hundred more every week. They hope to have all of them uploaded by the end of June, if not sooner, so the collection becomes an accessible resource for everyone. Efforts to make it a more complete collection by identifying people and providing context for the photos will continue.

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The Seattle Times

Climate change makes Indian monsoon season stronger and more chaotic

The monsoon rains that batter India each summer, unleashing 80% of the country’s yearly rainfall in four months crucial for its farmers, are at the whim of forces far beyond its borders.

The first study, a paper published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews in April, found that dust particles swept into the atmosphere from deserts in the Middle East grow so hot under sunlight that they change the air pressure over the Arabian Sea. This creates a kind of heat pump in the sky, which drives moisture from above the ocean to the Indian subcontinent, leading to a wetter monsoon season that then strengthens winds and could whip up even more dust particles.

Deepti Singh.
Singh

The study finds that “even with modest warming projected under the low-emission trajectories, the monsoons are likely to intensify,” said Deepti Singh, an assistant professor in the School of the Environment at Washington State University Vancouver. “One of the key findings is that these latest climate models project even more pronounced intensification of the monsoon.”

While most studies agree that these dust aerosols strengthen the Indian summer monsoon, their estimates of how and where rain is likely to fall vary widely, according to the new Earth-Science Reviews paper on dust in the Mideast.

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DW
DT Next

 

Prehistoric Pacific Coast diets had salmon limits

Humans cannot live on protein alone – even for the ancient indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest whose diet was once thought to be almost all salmon.

Shannon Tushingham.
Tushingham

In a new paper led by Washington State University anthropologist Shannon Tushingham, researchers document the many dietary solutions ancient Pacific Coast people in North America likely employed to avoid “salmon starvation,” a toxic and potentially fatal condition brought on by eating too much lean protein.

“Salmon was a critical resource for thousands of years throughout the Pacific Rim, but there were a lot of foods that were important,” said Tushingham the lead author of the paper published online on April 8 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. “Native people were not just eating salmon. There’s a bigger picture.”

The authors focus on the limits of salmon, which used to be considered a “prime mover” of Pacific Northwest populations, but their analysis also has implications for the study of historical human nutrition. If their argument is correct, it is unlikely that any human society was fully driven by pursuit of protein alone as their diets had to be more complex.

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