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WSU students lobby state legislature

Eighty-one WSU students from the Pullman, Global, Tri-Cities and Vancouver campuses traveled to the Washington State Capitol in Olympia to lobby in front of Washington State’s legislature Monday.

The students were led by Collin Bannister, ASWSU legislative affairs director and second-year philosophy and political science pre-law major. After training consistently throughout the semester, the team met with legislators, the Secretary of State and the Washington State Treasurer to discuss the upcoming 60-day voting session.

“Washington State’s budget operates in a biennium. At the start of each Biennium, it is called a budget year which is where they allocate funding. That was in 2023,” Bannister said. “Now in 2024, we have entered the second half of the biennium which is referred to as a short session. There are fewer days to pass policy and generally a lot less money.”

Students were broken into groups of four and five on the morning of Jan. 22. Each group was assigned a handful of legislators or their legal assistants to talk to throughout the day. The students were able to get feedback and answer questions from the legislators concerning the bills.

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The Daily Evergreen

Guide on how to use climate data to inform human adaptation

A framework for combining climate and social data could help scientists better support climate change adaptation ahead of future weather-related disasters.

The Washington State University-led research draws on the expertise of climate and social scientists to show how data on different characteristics of climate variability can be used to study the effectiveness of various human responses to climate change. It could ultimately help policymakers and organizations determine where and under what conditions different climate adaptations have worked in the past and where they may work in the future.

“Our framework enables researchers across many fields to better study the relationship between characteristics of climate and adaptation, including which adaptations emerge under which conditions,” said Anne Pisor, lead author of the paper in the journal One Earth and a WSU associate professor of anthropology. “Our hope is this research will help the global community heed warnings from the recent United Nations Climate Conference (COP28) and direct adaptation funding into programs and efforts that can better support communities as they respond to ongoing change.”

Pisor’s coauthors for the study included Deepti Singh, assistant professor in the WSU School of the Environment.

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MSN.com
Phys.org
WSU Insider

Grizzly Bears Are Mostly Vegan

But humans made them more carnivorous.

On the subject of grizzly bears, the San Francisco Call—a short-lived newspaper that went out of print in 1913—wasn’t what you’d call kind. Describing the 1898 downfall of a California grizzly nicknamed Old Reel Foot, a supposedly 1,350-pound “marauder and outlaw,” an unnamed journalist cataloged the bear’s sins.

Despite its drama, the account was typical for the time. Especially in the years following the Gold Rush, newspapers and other historical records billed California grizzlies as an unusually meat-loving, bloodthirsty bunch. If California grizzlies were ever anything like the horrors our predecessors made them out to be, they didn’t start out that way. Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week.

The California grizzly isn’t the only wild creature whose diet humans have made more meat-centric. Coyotes and condors also boosted their carnivory after the arrival of Europeans. In modern times, Charles Robbins, a bear biologist at Washington State University, and his colleagues have documented brown bears in Yellowstone beefing up their consumption of elk calves when native vegetation and fish grow scarce—due in part to human activities, along with diseases and pests that people introduced. Mairin Balisi, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the Alf Museum who’s studying the diets of urban carnivores, suspects that similar changes may be playing out in today’s raccoons and rats—maybe foxes and bobcats too.

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The Atlantic

Tasmanian devil die-off is shifting another predator’s genetics

Devil population crashes caused by contagious tumours have knock-on effects elsewhere in the food chain.

Declining numbers of the endangered Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) are affecting the evolutionary genetics of a small predator, the spotted-tailed quoll (Dasyurus maculatus), according to a study published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution1.

The findings fit with what scientists would expect — typically, when a top predator’s population dwindles, smaller predators increase in number because there are more resources available and less competition.

But little is known about what the effect of a top predator’s decline is on the evolutionary genetics of other species in the food web, says study co-author Andrew Storfer, an evolutionary geneticist at Washington State University in Pullman. “This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that.”

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Nature
WSU Insider

How the NBA’s Great Insult Artists Outlasted a Moral Panic and Normalized Talking Trash

As the NBA boomed in the ‘90s, smack talk became a problem. Here’s how players solved it.

Ostensibly, the NBA’s earliest efforts to regulate trash talk in the 1990s—in combination with its stricter penalties and heftier fines for in-game fights—were meant to ward off the high-profile brawls and lower-profile “scuffles,” as former NBA referee Bennett Salvatore puts it, that seemed to increasingly interrupt the course of competition. But really, it was about business as much as anything. As a more demonstrative brand of trash talk emerged from the playgrounds, and out of the fledgling culture of hip-hop, the sports world’s rule makers fretted more than ever about what might look bad for their widening (and predominantly white) television audiences.

There has long been a racial double standard when it comes to trash talk. Black athletes who talk during games are often cast as loudmouths, volatile, and showy, while vocal white players are lionized as leaders or scrappy hardworkers who leave it all on the floor.

“It becomes a sign of his love of the game, and not, ‘Oh, he’s talking trash and gets angry,’” says David J. Leonard, a professor in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at Washington State University, Pullman. Before his exhibition bout against Conor McGregor, boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.—whose public image is complicated by the fact that, in real life, he has done some genuinely villainous things—called out the sports media for criticizing his use of trash-talk tactics as “arrogant” and “cocky” and “unappreciative,” while Conor McGregor—also maybe not a candidate for the World’s Best Person Award—was lauded for doing the exact same things. But critiques of trash talk are almost always as much of a code as the trash talk itself. “What makes the conversation about the NBA particularly interesting,” adds Leonard, “is it becomes a way to dismiss and deny the artistry and athleticism and the intelligence of players, when it should be, in fact, evidence of all those things.”

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GQ