More than a quarter of Washington State University students who delivered virtual presentations won monetary awards at the annual Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) on March 29 in Pullman.
SURCA is the unique WSU-wide venue for students from all majors, years in college, and from all WSU campuses. Nearly 150 students from the Pullman, Vancouver, Spokane, and Global campuses delivered presentations detailing their research, scholarship, and creative activities conducted with a mentor.
Faculty, postdoctoral students, and community experts used a common rubric to judge and score all presentations in nine SURCA categories that are designed to cover all disciplines at the university.
Fifteen CAS students won 10 different awards across seven categories at the 2021 event held online.
Currently, diamond is regarded to be one of the hardest and most scratch-resistant natural materials in the world. Most diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry display a cubic crystal structure, a repeating pattern of 8 atoms forming a cube with carbon atoms at its vertices. Each carbon atom forms four bonds with its neighbors, explaining the overall stability and hardness of the crystal structure.
Now scientists at Washington State University’s Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness and also calculated their hardness. The results of their experiments are published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
Gupta
“Diamond is a very unique material,” said Yogendra Gupta, director of the Institute for Shock Physics and corresponding author on the study. “It is not only the strongest—it has beautiful optical properties and a very high thermal conductivity. Now we have made the hexagonal form of diamond, produced under shock compression experiments, that is significantly stiffer and stronger than regular gem diamonds.”
Sociologists at Washington State University found both liberal and conservatives in the United States disapprove of individuals putting the health of their community at risk, but conservatives cared more about why those individuals were taking the risks in the first place.
HorneKirkpatrick Johnson
Sociology professors Christine Horne and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson asked Americans across the country whether they approved of actions like wearing a mask or stockpiling necessities.
“The more harm there was, the more disapproval there was,” Johnson says. “People were more disapproving of social gatherings than they were about doing a job.”
Johnson and Horne randomly assigned half of their respondents to read a scenario where an individual was putting their own health at risk, and the other half read about someone who was putting the health of the community at risk. They then asked the respondents whether people would disapprove of the behavior in the story and how much they thought liberals and conservatives would disagree.
Veterans make up an important portion of Washington State University’s student population, with 3.1% of students either previously or currently serving in the military, according to Fall 2020 student data. This is a distinctive student population that brings a unique set of experiences and abilities to the classroom.
On WSU’s Pullman campus, two English department faculty members, who happen to be veterans themselves, are doing what they can to build awareness and understanding of this unique student population by delivering Student Veterans Awareness training for English 101 faculty members.
Edwards
“Veterans, military members, and their families are a vital and vibrant part of the WSU Cougar community,” said Mike Edwards, an assistant professor of English. “We want these students to know that they are welcome here and that their service and life experiences are valued.”
Coleman
Edwards, a US Army veteran and previous instructor at the US Military Academy at West Point, has been teaching the Student Veterans Awareness training for fellow English faculty members every year since 2013. Elijah Coleman, another English faculty member who is a Marine veteran, co-leads the training.
In the run up to hibernation, grizzly bears go on a colossal binge, consuming as many calories as possible to get them through the long winter. Yet, little was known about how much energy the massive mammals use as they shamble around their rugged territories. “Moving across the landscape in search of food can be a huge energetic expense for some animals,” says Anthony Carnahan, a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences.
Robbins
Fortunately, the Washington State University Bear Research, Education and Conservation Center (WSU BREC), where Carnahan is based, is home to 11 bears, including four that formerly lived in Yellowstone National Park, so he and Charles Robbins (also at WSU BREC) decided to measure the animals’ metabolic rates as they sauntered on the flat, and up and down gradients to find out how much energy they use on a daily basis. The team publishes their discovery that grizzly bears prefer to walk on shallow paths to save energy in Journal of Experimental Biology, explaining why the animals often appear on human hiking trails.
After months of patiently measuring the bears’ oxygen consumption at speeds ranging from 0.4 to 1.3m/s on the level and gradients up to 20deg to calculate how much energy they used, it was clear that ascending and descending the slopes was quite costly, although the bears used less energy bowling downhill at higher speeds. Most surprisingly, the bears didn’t seem to have much spare gas in the tank to maintain long high-speed pursuits. They consume similar amounts of energy to climbing humans, wolves and wild cats, in contrast to fleeing elk and deer, which use 46% less energy than grizzlies over mountainous terrain.
