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WSU faculty member, students to perform at Carnegie Hall

Washington State University students Francis Fay and Gordon Shaw, and faculty member Ruth Boden will make their debut in Carnegie Hall on Nov. 3 in Manhattan, New York.

The three will perform with international cellist Mischa Quint and the InterHarmony Cello Ensemble.

Two musci students and their professor with their instruments.
Francis Fay, Gordon Shaw and Ruth Boden, l-r, to appear at Carnegie Hall. The invitation came as a result of their participation in the InterHarmony International Music Festival this summer in Aqcui Terme, Italy.

The invitation was extended to the trio as a result of their participation in the InterHarmony International Music Festival this summer in Aqcui Terme, Italy, where Ruth Boden was on faculty, and Francis Fay and Gordon Shaw were students.

Fay is a junior music major studying cello performance, and Shaw is a sophomore music major studying music composition, cello and guitar. Boden is an associate professor in the WSU School of Music where she teaches cello, bass, music theory and coordinates the chamber music program.

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WSU Insider

Grant supports improving cider industry—‘Apple to Glass’

A new group, led by WSU researchers, will work with orchardists and cider makers to develop the best apples for cider.

Hard apple cider is growing in popularity around the country, and craft ciders from small cideries are the fastest growing segment of that market.

Equipped with a grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a new group, led by Washington State University researchers, will work with orchardists and cider makers to develop the best apples to make the tasty libation.

The $500,000 grant, called “Apple to Glass: Improving orchard profitability through developing regional craft ciders” covers three years of funding.

Marcia Ostrom.
Ostrom

“We want to make sure our orchards and cider makers benefit from this new market,” said Marica Ostrom, a professor in WSU’s School of the Environment and the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. “We’re aiming to help family-scale orchards and cideries, with the idea being to provide benefits to both groups.”

WSU scientists will work with colleagues in Michigan, Vermont and Wisconsin on the grant. They will conduct needs assessments with orchardists to find out what barriers exist for producing cider apples. They also will host focus groups with cider makers to see what they’re looking for when selecting cider apples.

In addition, researchers will conduct research with consumers to try and understand how to communicate cider features produced in a particular place, much like the concept of “terroir” in wines.

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WSU Insider
Fruit Growers News

Researcher warns of possible reprise of worst known drought, famine

A Washington State University researcher has completed the most thorough analysis yet of The Great Drought — the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years — and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50 million lives.

She warns that the Earth’s current warming climate could make a similar drought even worse.

Deepti Singh.Deepti Singh, an assistant professor in WSU’s School of the Environment, used tree‑ring data, rainfall records and climate reconstructions to characterize the conditions leading up to the Great Drought, a period of widespread crop failures in Asia, Brazil and Africa from 1875 to 1878.

“Climate conditions that caused the Great Drought and Global Famine arose from natural variability. And their recurrence—with hydrological impacts intensified by global warming—could again potentially undermine global food security,” she and her colleagues write in the Journal of Climate, published online Oct. 4. The paper comes as a United Nations report this week predicts that rising worldwide temperatures will bring about more frequent food shortages and wildfires as soon as 2040.

The Global Famine is among the worst humanitarian disasters in history, comparable to the influenza epidemic of 1918‑1919, World War I or World War II. As an environmental disaster, it has few rivals. Making matters worse were social conditions, like British colonialists hoarding and exporting grain from India. Some populations were particularly vulnerable to disease and colonial expansion afterwards.

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The Maya Kept Jaguar Zoos for Centuries

A chemical analysis of excavated bones shows that Mesoamericans had a long history of keeping jaguars and pumas—some of the fiercest predators around—in captivity.

Erin Thornton.“It’s absolutely solid work,” says Erin Thornton, an anthropologist at Washington State University who specializes in isotope analysis.

“With animal remains from Mesoamerica, it’s very hard to tell if you’re dealing with a captive animal from bones alone,” she said. “Stable isotopes are really the only way to tell if an animal was removed from the wild and put under human management.”

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The Atlantic

 

America’s “off-the-rails” politics

WSU political science professor discusses paranoia, populism, state of fake news

Cornell Clayton.
Cornell Clayton

During a lecture in Kane Hall on Tuesday, Washington State University political science professor, Cornell Clayton, attributed the current landscape of fake news and conspiracy theories to a combination of both populism and paranoia in Americans.

Clayton, the director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at WSU, visited the UW as part of the UW Graduate School’s set of lectures entitled “BUNK: The Information Series,” which Ronan Farrow kicked off Oct. 2.

Clayton explored how American politics have become a space for suspicion in the form of conspiracy theories, such as the birther conspiracy that holds that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. However, Clayton noted that both Republicans and Democrats have recently been led by paranoid leaders.

“Which conspiracy theories we believe and how we think about populism is deeply structured by our preexisting partisan and ideological identities,” Clayton said. “That’s the nature of today’s off-the-rails politics.”

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The Daily