CAS in the Media | Washington State University

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Who Killed the Knapp Family?

January 13, 2020 adriana

Across America, working-class people are dying of despair. And we’re still blaming the wrong people.

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, problems in African-American communities were often blamed on a lack of “personal responsibility.” William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist who earned his doctoral degree in sociology at WSU, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill, Oregon, a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.

Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.

It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs: The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years. The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh.

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The New York Times

Remembering Kelvin Lynn

January 10, 2020 adriana

Eminent Faculty and Regents Professor Kelvin Lynn passed away unexpectedly while skiing in Salt Lake City on Jan. 2, 2020.

Nationally renowned in the fields of materials science, physics, and positron and crystal growing research, Lynn was the Boeing Chair of Advanced Materials Science and a faculty member in both the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He had a wide variety of research interests, including muon, high energy, and atomic physics; antimatter for defects in mono-energetic beams; electronics development; radiation detectors; high-power laser materials; computer modeling and theory development; and materials, including metals and alloys, silicon, silicon carbide, diamond, solar cells, and gemstone-quality synthetic rubies.

Lynn was an international leader in crystal growth, developing methods to produce high-quality crystals used in industry, academia, and federal agencies. Manmade crystals inspired by Lynn’s innovative research power an astonishing range of devices from the sensors that control electronic functions in cars to the semiconductors driving computers and smartphones. In recent years, he and his colleagues made a key advance in cadmium telluride solar cell technology, overcoming a practical voltage limit that had been pursued for six decades.

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WSU Insider

WSU researcher joins international call to halt massive insect decline

January 9, 2020 adriana

From bees to butterflies, ants to wasps, insect populations of all kinds are at risk, according to a growing scientific consensus. Their decline also threatens the many ecosystem services that depend on them, including food production.

“It’s clear that we’re experiencing massive insect declines both in species and in abundance,” said WSU conservation biologist Cheryl Schultz. “We are becoming increasingly aware that species that were once common across the landscape are now rare.”

To avert this potential disaster, Schultz recently joined more than 70 scientists from 21 countries in issuing a “Road Map for Insect Conservation and Recovery” in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

In their road map, the scientists outlined steps to slow and help reverse the decline in insect populations. They propose immediate “no regret” solutions, steps that can only help insects recover while they work to build more scientific knowledge of the problem. These immediate steps include increasing landscape heterogeneity in agriculture; phasing out synthetic pesticides and fertilizers; and enhancing “citizen science” as a way of obtaining more data on insect diversity and abundance.

Longer term actions include creating large-scale assessments of insect populations, conducting new research to better understand human-caused stressors on insect survival and starting a global monitoring program. (For the full list of solutions see the image at the link below).

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WSU Insider

Developing rice for the future gets funding boost

January 7, 2020 adriana

WSU is part of an international effort to revolutionize rice production. The “C4 Rice Project,” co-led by Asaph Cousins, WSU professor of biological sciences, recently earned a five‑year, $15 million grant renewal from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Currently, more than 3 billion people depend upon rice for survival, and trends in population growth and land use mean there will be greater demand for rice and less space to grow it on: the same area of land that provided enough rice to feed 27 people in 2010 will need to support 43 by 2050.

The project, which involves seven institutions, aims to develop rice strains that are not only more productive but also more resilient. The long‑term effort, which was first conceived in the 1990s, earned its first Gates Foundation grant in 2008 and is now entering its fourth phase.

“We have learned a lot about the molecular biology, physiology, leaf development and biochemistry of C4 photosynthesis during the initial phases of this project, and it’s exciting that we have received additional support to implement this knowledge to enhance photosynthesis in rice,” said Asaphs, co‑principal investigator for the project, which is institutionally led by the University of Oxford.

Currently, rice uses the C3 photosynthetic pathway to convert light, carbon dioxide and water into energy, but the C4 pathway, which is used by crops such as maize and sorghum, is more efficient and productive even in higher temperatures and drought conditions. Both the C3 and C4 pathways are named for the type of carbon molecules that result from their respective photosynthetic processes.

The C4 pathway has evolved more than 60 times independently in plants. The C4 Rice Project aims to develop rice that uses this pathway to improve yield and endure harsher environmental conditions.

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WSU Insider

Dr. Universe: What do Axolotls eat? What species are they? Do you think they are cute?

December 20, 2019 adriana

An axolotl (ax-a-lot-l) is a creature with big frilly gills like a lion’s mane, tiny eyes with no eyelids, and a mouth in the shape of a smile. They come in lots of colors: pink, black, golden, or grey.

These animals have been nicknamed “the walking fish,” but they are not really fish. An axolotl is a type of salamander.

That’s what I found out from my friend Ed Zalisko. Zalisko earned his Ph.D. at Washington State University and is now a biology professor at Blackburn College in Illinois.

A salamander is a type of amphibian, a cold-blooded animal that has gills, can breathe air, and lives under water. We find axolotls mainly in Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco in Mexico. The species name is Ambystoma mexicanum.

Because humans need water to survive, that means there is less water left for some of the amphibians. Axolotls are actually a critically endangered species, Zalisko said.

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Dr. Universe