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Dr. Universe: How does sand stick together?

Lauren Barmore.Sand is actually made up of lots of different things. When we look at it under the microscope, we can see cooled lava, coral, seashells, and other kinds of wonderful, colorful rocks.

If you add just the right amount of water to sand, it transforms into a pretty good material for shaping towers, walls, and spires for a sandcastle. At first, I thought the wet sand stuck together because of a chemical reaction. But it turns out this interplay of sand and water creates what scientists call a physical reaction.

That’s what I found out from my friend and physicist Lauren Barmore, a graduate researcher at Washington State University who is very curious about matter and how things work on our planet.

She explained that if you had two rocks and put a bit of water in the middle, the water would be attracted to the rocks and form a kind of liquid bridge between them. One property of water is that it doesn’t like to touch the air. Water would rather hang onto something else.

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Dr. Universe

Pre-market societies could sometimes have a lot of violence

A study called “The Better Angels of Their Nature: Declining Violence through Time among Prehispanic Farmers of the Pueblo Southwest” discusses some periods when native American life was quite violent. Here are some excerpts:

Tim Kohler
Kohler

“Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

“If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death,” said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to 0 in 30 years.”

“It wasn’t just violent deaths that poke holes in the harmony with the land and each other myth. A paper in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the Southwest also had a baby boom between 500 and 1300 that likely exceeded any population spurt on earth today. The northern Rio Grande also experienced population booms but the central Mesa Verde got more violent while the northern Rio Grande was less so.

Kohler has conjectures on why. » More …

Summer got you feeling stressed? Cannabis may help

Cannabis has been considered a stress reliever for nearly half a millennia and modern science has verified that this treatment works. Not only has research confirmed the efficacy of the medical marijuana, more and more Americans are treating stress-related conditions with the herb.

Carrie Cuttler.
Cuttler

In a recent study, clinical assistant professor of psychology Carrie Cuttler and fellow scientists at Washington State University examined how peoples’ self-reported levels of stress, anxiety, and depression were affected by ingesting different quantities and types of cannabis.

Their work, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, reveals that cannabis can significantly reduce short-term levels of depression, anxiety. The study marks one of the first efforts by American scientists to examine how cannabis with varying amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) affect consumers’ feelings of well-being when consumed outside of a research lab. » More …

The fate of future endangered species could hinge on a semantic argument

Among a series of changes to the Endangered Species Act recently proposed by Trump administration officials is a provision that would define the “foreseeable future” as the time period extending “only as far as they can reasonably determine that both the future threats and the species’ responses to those threats are probable.”

Rodney Sayler
Sayler

Environmental groups and scientists see the proposed changes as an attempt to limit the protections extended to new species.

“It is difficult to place any trust whatsoever in an administration that so openly disdains data, logic, information, reason, and the critical role of science in informed decision making,” says Rod Sayler, associate professor of environmental science at Washington State University. “By opening the door to interpreting what ‘foreseeable future’ means, people may discount potential longer-term threats (such as those from climate change) and argue for shorter-term perspectives and more immediate benefits of development activities.”

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Popular Science

The ‘Fire Problem’ Is climate change fueling fires?

WSU, UI professors say the answer is yes

Matthew Carroll.Fire seasons are getting longer, unleashing the potential for a higher frequency of blazes and more damaging fires, according to Matt Carroll, a professor in the School of Environment at Washington State University.

“We talk about the ‘Fire Problem,’ not so much about how many acres burn or how many fires are burning, but where fires burn in the way we don’t want,” he said.

Carroll said there are three factors that influence the Fire Problem—past fire exclusion leading to pine fuel build up, climate change and where people choose to build houses.

“The literature suggests that fire seasons have gotten longer as a result of climate change,” Carroll said. “There’s a longer window now when unwanted fires can do unwanted things.”

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Moscow-Pullman Daily News