WSU Pullman

WSM review: Bringing Water to the Idaho Desert

Growing up on a farm near Inkom, Idaho, the young Hugh Lovin (’56 MA history) would engineer ways to divert water to the crops he produced for his livestock. Later in life, after years of writing histories of labor, Lovin turned his attention again to irrigation. In a number of articles, collected for the first […]

Navarro‑Daniels named Matteson Distinguished Professor

Recognizing her international reputation in service to language and culture studies, the College of Arts and Sciences named Vilma Navarro‑Daniels recipient of the Marianna Merritt and Donald S. Matteson Distinguished Professorship in Foreign Languages and Cultures. “Professor Navarro‑Daniels is a prolific scholar whose international recognition and prominence continue to rise, and the Matteson award, with its […]

McNair scholar bridges cultures in life, research

It’s fall 2014. New freshman Lysandra Perez, the first in her family to attend college, sits on the bed in her Streit-Perham Hall dorm room. The emotional farewells are done, and her parents are driving back home to the small town of Moxee, near Yakima. Her roommates won’t be arriving for another few days. She […]

The curation crisis

More than 8,500 years ago, a group of people used a rock shelter at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake Rivers as a base camp. When rediscovered in the early 1950s, the shelter amazed scientists, including Washington State University archeologist Richard Daugherty, with its wealth of artifacts—and the age of its human remains. Named […]

$3M interdisciplinary grant to pursue epigenetic biomarkers

Washington State University researchers have received nearly $3 million from the John Templeton Foundation, the second such grant in four years, to see if they can anticipate and prevent diseases by developing epigenetic biomarkers that could provide early stage diagnostics for disease susceptibility. Their approach would be a departure from traditional “reactionary medicine,” which treats diseases after […]

The physics of fall

With murmurs and pointing, the crowd watches as a face and then hands—holding a large object—appear in the twelfth-story window of WSU’s Webster Physical Sciences Building. On the ground, Butch T. Cougar begins a countdown: five, four, three, two… At one, the hands release a 10-pound, half-frozen pumpkin that rockets to the courtyard, exploding in […]

Northwest Indians used tobacco long before European contact

WSU researchers have determined that Nez Perce Indians grew and smoked tobacco at least 1,200 years ago, long before the arrival of traders and settlers from the eastern United States. Their finding upends a long-held view that indigenous people in this area of the interior Pacific Northwest smoked only kinnikinnick or bearberry before traders brought […]

Cacao analysis dates domesticated trees back 3,600 years

Researchers analyzing the genomes of cultivated cacao trees have traced their origin to a “single domestication event” some 3,600 years ago. The discovery opens a new front in a long-running argument regarding when and where humans started growing the source of chocolate. “This evidence increases our understanding of how humans moved and established in America,” said […]

Renewable energy offers common ground for Democrats, Republicans

As the battle lines are drawn for next month’s hotly contested midterm elections, some Americans may be comforted to know there is at least one area of common ground for Democrats and Republicans: regardless of political standing, age or gender, U.S. voters are in favor of renewable energy, according to research by Christine Horne, professor of […]