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Ask Dr. Universe: How do people stain glass to make it all the colors it can be?

Ever since humans discovered they could use sand to make glass, they’ve been experimenting with it. They even learned how to control the colors.

Dustin Regul.
Regul

My friend Dustin Regul is a stained glass artist and painter who teaches fine arts at Washington State University. He told me more about where glass gets its color.

“It’s actually metals that help change the color of the glass,” he said.

In medieval times, when stained glass first became really popular, people used a different technique. The glass pieces were held together with long strips of a bendy material made of lead. On each side of the lead strip was a little channel where the edge of glass could be tucked in. And like the technique Regul uses, adding heat to the strip helped keep the glass in place.

Humans can use these really small pieces of glass—in all sorts of colors—to form a bigger picture or story. Whether you are in the lab or the studio, it’s amazing what you can create and discover when you set your mind to it.

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Ask Dr. Universe

High-impact research: How meteorite strikes may change quartz on the Earth’s surface

Our Earth is constantly battered by tiny pieces of space rock. Most of them burn up in the atmosphere, and these are called meteors. But when these chunks of rock reach the ground, we call them meteorites. Thousands of meteorites hit the surface of the planet each year, often falling harmlessly into the ocean. Understanding more about how meteorites affect our planet is not only important for Earth science, but for modeling the formation and evolution of planets across our solar system.

Stefan Turneaure.
Turneaure

Washington State University Senior Scientist Stefan Turneaure — used the incredibly bright X-ray beams of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, to not only figure out more about how this planet and others may be affected by meteorites, but to begin to settle a decades-old dispute about the way quartz transforms under pressure.

Yogendra Gupta.
Gupta

It’s that combination of capabilities that makes DCS a “wonderful playground for knowledge,” in the words of Yogendra Gupta, professor at Washington State University and director of the Institute for Shock Physics. DCS is managed and operated by Washington State, and Gupta said its ability to both create shock impacts in materials and take vivid X-ray images of the effects sets it apart.

“DCS allows us to look at the atomic level using a variety of dynamic compression platforms,” he said. “This has not been possible before.”

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News Wise 

How Scientists Tracked Down a Mass Killer (of Salmon)

The salmon were dying and nobody knew why.

About 20 years ago, ambitious restoration projects had brought coho salmon back to urban creeks in the Seattle area. But after it rained, the fish would display strange behaviors: listing to one side, rolling over, swimming in circles. Within hours they would die — before spawning, taking the next generation with them. In some streams, up to 90 percent of coho salmon were lost.

Jen Mcintyre.
Mcintyre

“To be running into these sick fish was fairly astonishing,” said Jenifer McIntyre, now a toxicologist and professor at Washington State University who is part of a team that, years later, has finally solved the mystery of the dying salmon around Puget Sound. “In those early years, we debated intensely, what could be the cause of this?”

Partnering with a local fish hatchery run by the Suquamish Tribe, they decided to put the theory to the test, exposing fish to a mixture they created of chemicals they knew to be in roadway runoff, like heavy metals and hydrocarbons from motor oil. But the salmon were unaffected, even at surprisingly high concentrations.

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Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art announces Black Lives Matter Artist Grant winners

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, in a partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, announced the grant recipients for the Black Lives Matter Artist Grants.

The winning artists will each receive $2,500 to fund the creation of art that communicates the voices, experiences, and artistic expression of social justice efforts in response to systemic racism. Works from each of the artists are scheduled to be exhibited at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU beginning in the fall semester of 2021.

Mikayla Makle.
Makle

Mikayla Makle, English major, WSU Black Student Union (president) and member of the jury discussed the grant award process by saying, “This artist’s grant has not only provided me with the opportunity to work with an amazing panel of jurors, but it has also allowed me to be witness to impactful and nuanced artistry. I appreciated gaining knowledge throughout this process about the conceptualization of art, as well as developing appreciation for the stories surrounding it.”

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WSU Insider

Data analytics games provide education, professional opportunities, fun

Working to build community among students learning remotely this fall, expert problem solvers in the data analytics program at Washington State University designed course-related games to stimulate interaction while providing some educational fun and valuable professional networking opportunities.

Jan Dasgupta.
Dasgupta

In collaboration with academic advisors for the WSU Pullman, Everett, Vancouver, and Global campuses, the program director and statistics professor Nairanjana “Jan” Dasgupta brought together students from across the U.S. outside of class time to play online Data Analytics Bingo and a pandemic-inspired False Positive game.

“Our goal was familiarizing students with the 17 core classes, ranging from mathematics and statistics to philosophy and computer science,” Dasgupta said.

A fast-growing field worldwide, DA is used to solve complex problems often involving large datasets. The core curriculum and multiple specialization tracks in DA at WSU help students develop technical skills and knowledge in specific application areas, along with skills in communication and teamwork.

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WSU Insider