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Elections experts, politicians say Colorado’s decision to ban Trump from the ballot is unprecedented

Some local politicians and political experts say the Colorado Supreme Court made a historically unprecedented decision Tuesday in its ruling to ban former president Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot.

The United States has not been this polarized since the Civil War, former Republican Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman said Tuesday evening. When she heard the news of Colorado’s decision, Wyman said she was “speechless.”

Each state has its unique way to choose presidential candidates. Some states have caucuses, while other states have primaries. Three states previously ruled against litigation to take Trump off their respective ballots. The issue is pending in many other states.

Deep divisions along party lines today pose the biggest threat to democracy the United States has seen in centuries, said Cornell Clayton, director of the Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University.

Clayton said in an interview that he is almost certain the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Colorado’s decision to ban Trump from the ballot. A central question in the case is whether the original framers of the Constitution intended the president to be considered an officer of the United States.

“There’s overwhelming evidence to show that the original framers considered the president an officer,” Clayton said. “It’s going to be very hard to write an originalist opinion finding the 14th Amendment does not consider the president to be an officer of the United States.”

Clayton added that resounding scholarly legal opinion considers the president to be an officer of the United States, and an overturn of Colorado’s decision would mean the conservative-led Supreme Court would be going against its standard belief that the Constitution should be enforced the way it’s written.

“I think it would behoove everybody to read this opinion – whether you support Trump or don’t support Trump – in terms of thinking about who we’re voting for,” Clayton said. “This is an extremely educational moment for the country. It should lead Americans to understand that the only thing that unites a country so deeply polarized is the Constitution, or better put, the rules of the game.”

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The Spokesman-Review
Yahoo! News

Even hibernating grizzly bears have a circadian rhythm

There is a pattern to when we wake up and get tired over a 24-hour period, scientists call it the circadian rhythm. Most other animals experience it too.

As winter arrives with its shorter days, grizzly and black bears begin their long naps, called hibernation. During this time bears will still move about a bit, but they don’t eat while hibernating.

Scientists at Washington State University were curious how grizzly bears’ circadian rhythms are affected during hibernation and conducted a study. What they found was although the animals are much less active, the energy their bodies produce still grows and fades over the course of a day as if they were awake, but at a much lower level.

Co-authors on the study include WSU graduate student and first author Ellery Vincent as well as Blair Perry (biological sciences) and Charles Robbins (environment and biological sciences), and Joanna Kelley of University of California, Santa Cruz. This research received support from the National Science Foundation and the Bear Research and Conservation Endowment at WSU.

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WSU Insider
The Missoulian
Billings Gazette

Forget FOMO. Embrace JOMO to discover the joy of missing out.

Your friends are probably having fun without you. For many, this knowledge would trigger a fear of missing out – popularly acronymized as FOMO. But emerging research suggests that missing out need not be something we fear, but something we can enjoy.

For better mental health this year, try reframing those feelings of FOMO and instead, try finding JOMO – the joy of missing out.

The fear embodied in FOMO is a social one. Humans have dealt with it since we realized that there were opportunities being missed, fun not being had and Joneses needing to be kept up with. But the rise of social media meant that FOMO arose in public consciousness and vocabulary.

“FOMO existed before social media did, but it just wasn’t such a salient part of our experience,” said Chris Barry, a psychology professor at Washington State University.

With the advent of social media, we were granted the profound ability to constantly see the highlight reel of everyone’s life – and all the possibilities for self-comparison. Research shows that higher levels of FOMO are associated with lower self-esteem, lower life satisfaction and more loneliness.

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The Washington Post
SFGate.com
MSN.com
New York Post
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
StarTribune
Malay Mail
The Star

WSU Experts Offer Advice on Turning New Year’s Resolutions Into Reality

From ancient Babylonians making new commitments to their gods to today’s average office worker pledging to give up soda, humans have been struggling with New Year’s resolutions for a very long time.

Yet there is hope, according to a group of Washington State University experts who offer their insights into keeping positive lifestyle changes going in the weeks and months ahead.

One solution is setting SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. By setting clear, quantifiable objectives, individuals looking to make positives changes can start accumulating small victories and maintain perspective of how far they’ve come and set the next milestone to aim for.

“If you’re committed to being healthier, you need to take stock of what that means and define what your goal is from the outset,” said Chris Barry, a professor in the Department of Psychology at WSU.

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Big Country News
WSU Insider

 

 

Modernizing an archaeological map collection for the next generation

In 1972, two archaeologists began a project on Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah. The project combined their interests in settlement patterns and statistical applications to archaeology based on probabilistic sampling theory. Little could the two archaeologists know that the project would lead to a 50-year collaboration that resulted in numerous significant contributions to the field of southwestern archaeology, or that Cedar Mesa itself would become involved in a contemporary fight for Indigenous control of ancestral lands as part of Bears Ears National Monument.

Bill Lipe brought the Cedar Mesa project to Washington State University when he joined the faculty in 1976. By the time he arrived on the Palouse, Lipe had been researching the ways in which Ancestral Puebloan societies lived on the landscape of the Southwest since 1958, when he was a crew chief on the Glen Canyon Archaeological Project. His research partner, R.G. Matson, had joined the University of British Columbia in 1972. Together, the two men assembled a wealth of data from Cedar Mesa over four decades that detailed the development of a cultural landscape from a natural landscape.

The approach of considering the landscape as the unit for analysis was rare in archaeology at the time. In addition to the collected artifacts from 995 sites, WSU’s Museum of Anthropology curates the maps from the 800 square-kilometers surveyed during the Cedar Mesa project. Limited excavations occurred in a small number of sites, but the majority of the Cedar Mesa Project results have been based on systematically documenting surface artifacts, a process called archaeological survey.

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Daily News