Humans use lasers for everything from scanning barcodes and putting on light shows to performing delicate eye surgery and measuring the distances between objects in space.
Keane
Cats also like to chase lasers, but I wasn’t sure how they worked. I asked my friend Chris Keane, a physics professor at Washington State University. Keane came to WSU from the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he helped work on a laser as big as a football stadium.
Headlines warning of the dangers of antibiotic resistance appear in the news almost every day. The United Nations predicted that by 2050, 10 million people could die each year from diseases that have become resistant to drugs.
Roberts
Miles Roberts wanted to know how science is working to counter this trend. So, for his Biology 402 class in spring semester, he reviewed 65 scientific articles and turned his research into a paper called “Maximizing Costs to Prevent Antibiotic Resistance Evolution.” His thorough investigation resulted in a perfect score in class and also WSU Vancouver’s 2019 Library Research Award.
The annual award recognizes students who excel in using the library. Roberts, a senior who will graduate in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and minors in math and chemistry, said he took maximum advantage of the library’s “wonderful online resources.”
Library director Karen Diller described the paper as “an excellent example of a scientific review paper and one that is working on a critical societal problem.” Noting that Roberts had identified key current research and synthesized it “in a logical, ethical and readable way,” she said he had also demonstrated breakthroughs in his own understanding of the research process.
Flowers not only smell nice to humans, but also to many insects and birds who help the flowers do a really important job, according to Rachael Bonoan, a scientist with the Conservation Biology Laboratory at Washington State University.
Let’s imagine that you are a bee or a butterfly. You don’t have a nose on your face, but instead use your two antennae to smell things.
As you fly around, you catch a whiff of chemicals floating in the air. Down below, you see a field of daisies. The flowers are releasing some chemicals, which are the building blocks of a smell.
You fly down to the field and land on a daisy’s petal. It’s just what the flower wanted you to do.
Not only can you drink nectar from the flower to get some energy, but you can help the flower get ready to produce even more flowers.
As you sip on the daisy’s sweet, liquid nectar, the hairs on your body start picking up pollen, sticky grains on the flower. If you are imagining yourself as a bee, you might also use your front legs to put the grains into your pollen baskets, or pollen pants, near your back legs.
Leslie New, a WSU Vancouver assistant professor of statistics who specializes in the impacts of humans on wildlife, has been named to a scientific panel studying endangered whales found in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Russia’s Sakhalin Island.
New will spend three years on the Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel, an independent scientific advisory body to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She and her fellow panelists will look for ways to assess and manage the impacts of the region’s oil, gas and fishing industries, evaluate ways to monitor the whale population, and study underwater noise from seismic surveys, vessel traffic and other sources.
It’s a career moment for New, who studied the IUCN in graduate school, wondering at the time how one got involved in its research.
“The goal of my research program has always been the application of statistics to help protect wildlife populations,” she said. “I am excited about being given such a wonderful chance to really put that into practice, building the tools needed to manage an endangered population, while advancing our understanding of science at the same time. It is a wonderful place to be.”
Washington State University has awarded 10 New Faculty Seed Grants (NFSG) to encourage the development of research, scholarly, or creative programs. The program supports projects that will significantly contribute to the researchers’ long range goals by kick-starting a more complex project or idea. The seed funding to junior faculty helps build the foundation for their research programs, allowing recipients to gather preliminary data, build collaborations, or establish creative programs. The funding also effectively provides a basis for faculty to seek extramural funding as well as opportunities for professional growth.
The Office of Research, the Office of the President, and the Office of the Provost fund the NFSG program. The 10 proposals selected this year represent the range of scholarly activity taking place at WSU. The total amount of grant funding is $212,524.
Awarded faculty and their projects include:
Deepti Singh, School of the Environment, will analyze the influence of multiple climate factors that govern the extent, severity, and duration of the impacts wildfires have on air quality and water resources.
Joe Hedges, Department of Fine Arts, will create and exhibit a new body of innovative intermedia art works that combine oil painting and new media objects, such as flatscreen televisions and tablets.
Rock Mancini, Department of Chemistry, will develop a new type of reaction to generate synthetic-biologic hybrids, enabling the synthesis of many new biomolecule therapeutics.
