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Feb. 6-8: Art music festival free to public

February 4, 2014

The WSU Festival of Contemporary Art Music, one of the University’s signature events, will feature guest composer Dana Wilson, whose works have been performed and/or commissioned by diverse ensembles worldwide.

Free, public events Feb. 6-8 include the Student Composers’ Concert, featuring new music written by WSU students and performed by School of Music faculty and students. The Faculty Composers’ Concert presents works by Scott Blasco, Ryan M. Hare, David Jarvis and Gregory Yasinitsky. The Electroacoustic Music Concert features the world premiere of a surround-audio minimalist/drone composition by Blasco and a genre-bending and -blending (“hybrid vaporwave/dance/noise”) composition.

Get more details and a list of events

Persistent photoconductivity discovery continues to make headlines around the world

December 6, 2013

News of a potential four hundred-fold conductivity increase in strontium titanate crystals by WSU researchers was reported in newspapers, on blogs, in academic circles and over the airwaves from Seattle to Toronto to Europe to the Philippines. (See original post on 11/14/2013.)

Read the published research paper

Listen to the KPLU-FM story

Other sources:

United Press International
ProEdgeWire
Science Blog
La Colmena
Ubergizmo
Gadgets & Tech
French Tribune
DotGizmo
Gizmodo
Moscow-Pullman Daily News
Tech Today
AllVoices
Energy and the Environment
GMA News Online
Yahoo Philippines News
Spokesman-Review.com
Geek.com
The EDGE
LunaticOutPost
Innovation Toronto
Digital Journal

Shaking the tree: researchers revise Darwin’s invasive species theory

December 4, 2013

“We thought we understood how things happened, but maybe they happened for another reason,” says Emily Jones, a Rice University researcher in evolutionary ecology who started pondering Darwin’s conundrum while a post-doctoral researcher in the Washington State University lab of Richard Gomulkiewicz. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jones and colleagues Gomulkiewicz and Scott Nuismer of the University of Idaho say the relatedness of new and established species is not as important as the details of how they go about doing their business..

“Darwin put out a lot of interesting ideas back in the day but he didn’t have the means to check them with rigor,” says Gomulkiewicz, a professor in the WSU School of Biological Sciences. “That’s what we did with our mathematical model, and we found that Darwin’s logic on this issue doesn’t quite pan out.”

Other sources:

Brightsurf Science News

The Archaeology News Network

Waller County News Citizen

Light exposure improves conductivity

November 14, 2013

Quite by accident, Washington State University researchers have achieved a 400-fold increase in the electrical conductivity of a crystal simply by exposing it to light. The effect, which lasted for days after the light was turned off, could dramatically improve the performance of devices like computer chips.

WSU doctoral student Marianne Tarun chanced upon the discovery when she noticed that the conductivity of some strontium titanate shot up after it was left out one day. At first, she and her fellow researchers thought the sample was contaminated, but a series of experiments showed the effect was from light.

Other sources:
Nanowerk
Nanotechnology News
VRForums
innovations-report
someone somewhere
ScienceNewsline
Machines Like Us
ZME Science

WSU researcher tracks levels of microcystins

September 18, 2013

Ellen Preece wants to know if microcystins, liver-damaging toxins produced by algal blooms in freshwater lakes, accumulate in Puget Sound seafood.

She’s not the only one who wants to know. Preece, a doctoral student in the WSU School of the Environment, is helping the Washington Department of Health determine whether seafood accumulates enough microsystins to be a health concern for populations who rely on locally harvested seafood to meet their protein needs.