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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

Recent weather won’t reverse snow drought in Pacific Northwest

This week’s snowfall likely won’t be enough to pull the Pacific Northwest out of its snow drought.

Snowpacks were at a record low across the Western U.S. in early January, the National Integrated Drought Information System reported last week. The Cascade Mountains’ snowpack is 40 percent to 60 percent of normal. Record lows also extend to California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming, with the northern Rocky Mountains facing the brunt of the snow drought.

“It is kind of striking that the pattern here is so widespread,” said Luke Gilbert Reyes, a doctoral student at Washington State University Vancouver who studies snowpack.

Multiple atmospheric rivers dumped snow atop mountains in early December. However, temperatures increased and light flakes turned to heavy rain, resulting in little mountaintop snow accumulation across the West. A dry wave lingered for the rest of the month, worsening the snow drought.

If winter precipitation is constant and temperatures remain cool through March, the snowpack might rebound, Reyes said. However, the current El Niño winter — abnormally warm and dry — will ultimately lead to below-average snow accumulation, he said.

Yet this seasonal weather pattern isn’t the only contributing factor hindering snow levels.

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The Columbian

 

 

 

Are anxiety and depression social problems or chemical disorders?

Two anthropologists question the chemical imbalance theory of mental health disorders.

Twentieth-century science was supposed to change everything. Indeed, thanks to vaccinations, antibiotics, and improved sanitation, humans thrived like never before. Yet in that mix was thrown pharmacological treatments for mental health disorders. On that front, little progress has been made.

It can be argued—it is being argued, in a new paper in American Journal of Physical Anthropology—that we’re regressing in our fight against mental health problems. As Kristen Syme, a PhD student in evolutionary anthropology, and Washington State University anthropology professor Edward Hagen argue, psychopharmacological treatments are increasing alongside mental health disorder diagnoses. If the former worked, the latter would decrease.

There are numerous problems with the current psychiatric model. Journalist Robert Whitaker has laid out the case that antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other pharmacological interventions are the real culprit behind chemical imbalances in the brain—a psychiatric talking point that’s been challenged for over a half-century. Patients suffering from minor anxiety and depression are placed on ineffective drugs, often being placed on a cocktail of pills. With many consumer advocacy groups being funded by pharmaceutical companies, we’ve reached a tipping point in mental health protocols.

As Syme and Hagan write, consumer advocacy groups are not the only compromised organizations. One review of 397 clinical trials discovered 47 percent of these studies reported at least one conflict of interest.

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Freethink.com

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