Skip to main content Skip to navigation
CAS in the Media Arts and Sciences Media Headlines

Professor collaborates on ‘roadmap’ to interstellar space travel

Book coverBy Robert Strenge, WSU News

To Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and seven of his space-minded colleagues in an initiative called Star Voyager, it has never been enough for humans to simply dream about traveling to the stars. To them, interstellar travel is not so much a dream as it is an ultimate ambition.

With the release this month of their book, How to Develop the Solar System and Beyond: A Roadmap to Interstellar Space, the eight collaborators—scientists, engineers, economists, and assorted other professionals—lay out mankind’s plausible pathways to the stars. They present multiple scenarios for mankind’s space-faring future over the next hundred years, providing a comprehensive overview of the human, technological, and financial challenges of interstellar travel.

Among the first manned starship proposals, the Star Voyager Roadmap describes potential scenarios for our space faring future. From the development of earth-orbital operational platforms to systems of asteroid capture and deflection, the book describes the strategies and resource developments that will support and contribute to the overall goal of achieving interstellar travel. As with previous advances in space-focused technologies, new interstellar travel technologies will have benefits that advance science and technologies across the globe. Continue story →

Pulitzer grant funds coup coverage

By Phyllis Shier, College of Arts and Sciences

After navigating a coup and rebellion in West Africa with funding from a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant, a Washington State University English professor will share his first-person account in an e-book for a Washington Post publication.

Creative writing professor Peter Chilson’s investigative journalism will be the basis for the e-book, to be released early in December by Foreign Policy magazine. Tentatively titled We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from a Borderland in Africa, the book addresses the turmoil in Mali over the last year and how those problems relate to the legacy of Africa’s colonial borders.

Peter Chilson with Tuareg nationalists
Peter Chilson with Tuareg nationalists at the Mentao Red Cross refugee camp in northern Burkina Faso.

Chilson received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to cover the crises from Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso for six weeks from mid-May to early June. The Pulitzer Center partners with worldwide media agencies to provide coverage on issues of global importance underreported in mainstream American media. Chilson was one of four writers to receive grants to cover borderland disputes around the world. » More …

New way to save Africa’s beleaguered soils

By Eric Sorensen, WSU science writer

A Washington State University researcher and two WSU graduates make a case in the journal Nature for a new type of agriculture that could restore the beleaguered soils of Africa and help the continent feed itself in the coming decades.

Their system, which they call “perenniation,” mixes food crops with trees and perennial plants, which live for two years or more.

Thousands of farmers are already trying variations of perenniation, which reduces the need for artificial inputs while improving soil and in some cases dramatically increasing yields. One woman quadrupled her corn crop, letting her raise pigs and goats and sell surplus grain for essentials and her grandchildren’s school fees.

WSU soil scientist John Reganold wrote the article with Jerry Glover (’97 B.S. soil science, ’98 B.A. philosophy, ’01 Ph.D. soil science) of the USAID Bureau for Food Security and Cindy Cox (’00 M.S. plant pathology/phytopathology) of the International Food Policy Research Institute. The article, “Plant perennials to save Africa’s soils,” appears in the Sept. 20 issue of Nature. Continue story →

Homeless women’s stories shared in book, video

Book cover

By Brenda Alling, WSU Vancouver

Homeless women’s stories as shared in a book by a Washington State University faculty member are featured in a two-part video to be broadcast on cable TV six times in the next two weeks.

The video, “Women Surviving Homelessness,” includes Desiree Hellegers, WSU Vancouver associate professor of English, and narrator-activists whose stories are featured in Hellegers’ 2011 book, No Room of her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan). Hellegers is a founding co-director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice at WSU Vancouver.

Her book is based on extended interviews with 15 women gathered over nearly 20 years. It illuminates the physical challenges of homelessness on bodies already compromised by health issues and harrowing conditions, including routine threats of sexual and physical violence. Continue story →