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Fallen Cougars Project: Preserving a nearly⁠ lost legacy

Samantha Edgerton.
Edgerton
Ray Sun
Sun
Kathy Aiken.
Kathy

Kathy Aiken carried the clipping with her when she attended a talk about the Fallen Cougars Project at the Pullman Depot Heritage Center last Veterans Day. After the presentation, she showed it to the speaker, Samantha “Sam” Edgerton (’17, ’19 MA History), a doctoral student, and Raymond “Ray” Sun, the WSU associate history professor who started the project.

“Samantha and Ray looked at it, and said, ‘We don’t have this guy in our project.’ And it started us on this odyssey,” says Aiken.

After the November 2019 presentation, Aiken visited one of Sun’s classes, then wrote to her siblings about the project, asking what they thought about redirecting monies from the WSU fellowship in their father’s name to help fund the research. They all agreed. “Those students are doing great work,” Aiken says, noting the Fallen Cougars Project is “ a really nice, hands-on history project.”

The William D. Aiken Memorial Scholarship is generally given to undergraduate or graduate students in support of scholarly activities and travel relevant to the study of history. His family set up the scholarship in his honor after his death.

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Washington State Magazine

WSU announces Visiting Writers Schedule for spring 2021

Washington State University announces the spring virtual Visiting Writers Series, a collaboration of WSU’s campuses in Pullman and Vancouver.

The first online event takes place Jan. 27 at 6:00 p.m. via ZOOM with a reading and talk by Ryka Aoki, an L.A.-based poet, composer, teacher, and author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele A Hilo (A Hilo Song), Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul and The Great Space Adventure.

A Japanese American and transgender woman, Aoki has been praised by the California State Senate as having an “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” She is a two-time Lambda Award finalist, and winner of the Eli Coppola Chapbook Contest, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and a University Award from the Academy of American Poets.

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Mirage News
WSU Insider

 

 

Experts on U.S. Capitol riots: We’ve never seen this, either

Historians and legal experts in the Inland Northwest described the events in the nation’s capital Wednesday as unprecedented.

Cornell Clayton.
Clayton

“There’s never been anything like it,” said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University.

“They never breached the Capitol like this,” Clayton said, as images of protesters marching through the Capitol’s Statuary Hall or climbing on the balconies showed on television screens.

“As a matter of Constitutional law, it’s not a contested election,” he said. Congress’ role at this point is merely to make sure the reports of the Electoral College votes are opened and read. “They have no role to judge them.”

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The Spokesman-Review

Jaguar kills ocelot in rare footage, and climate change might be behind it

Another wild cat was an unusual meal choice for a jaguar, so scientists are looking for the reason.

A camera trap at a watering hole in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve captured some extremely rare footage of an unusual jaguar meal: an ocelot. The footage showed the male jaguar letting a tapir pass by and waiting it out to instead nab the cat. Washington State University described the event as a possible “sign of climate-change-induced conflict” in a statement on Tuesday.

Ecologists from WSU and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) studied the footage and published a paper on the predator interaction in the journal Biotropica in late December.

Daniel Thornton.
Thornton

The timing of the watering hole incident was important. It happened in March 2019 during a serious drought. “Although these predator-on-predator interactions may be rare, there may be certain instances when they become more prevalent, and one of those could be over contested water resources,” said study co-author WSU assistant professor Daniel Thornton.

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C-net
Phys.org
WSU Insider
Daily Mail
Radio.com

Cannabis use blunts stress reactivity in female rats

Female rats that inhaled vaporized cannabis daily for a month developed a blunted physiological response to stress, according to a new study by Washington State University researchers.

The WSU scientists’ work also establishes a direct, experimental relationship between chronic cannabis use and dampened stress reactivity.

Carrie Cuttler.
Cuttler

“We were able to show pretty conclusively that chronic cannabis use can, in fact, significantly dampen stress reactivity in female rats,” said Carrie Cuttler, an assistant professor of psychology at WSU and co-author of the study.  “Until now, no one has been able to establish whether this blunted stress response is the cause or the consequence of cannabis use.”

After the 30-day self-administration period, only the female rats that had access to the medium potency cannabis demonstrated a significantly muted physiological response. The rats that were given access to the medium potency cannabis also tended to respond more for the substance and had higher concentrations of the drug in their blood after the experiment which may explain why this group specifically demonstrated the blunted stress response.

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Medicalxpress
WSU Insider
News Medical
Daily News
Culture Magazine