In the Media

The difference with the Greenlandic pandemonium is that, luckily, it caused minimal damage and zero casualties. Instead, Earth presented scientists with a riddle — and they went all-in to solve it, simply to satiate their curiosity. “It’s just cool to say: I see a weird signal — what is it?” said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach(opens a new tab), a seismologist and geophysicist at Western Washington University who was not involved with the new study. Sometimes, Hicks said, “this kind of science is the most fun.”

Dr. Dawna Drum is a Professor in the Department of Accounting, which provides a traditional bachelor’s degree as well as a bachelor of science degree that blends accounting with analysis-based business coursework. Her courses focus on imparting an understanding of the information systems, analytics, and risk management required in public and private accounting.

Drum has a BBA in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, an MBA from Edgewood College, Madison, Wis., and a PhD in Technology Management earned at Indiana State University. She has researched and published widely on topics around Accounting Information Systems (AIS), Accounting Technologies and Applications, and Advanced AIS. She has served on the board of the AIS Educators Association and is currently an Associate Editor for their journal.

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. The king, Charles II, had made clear through his policies and actions that he sought to centralize control by establishing an absolutist state modeled on France. English liberties were threatened. By issuing “declarations of indulgence” removing certain legal handicaps on Catholics and others who did not conform with the Church of England, Charles unilaterally canceled laws passed by Parliament. In towns and counties across the country, Charles removed local officials hostile to his policies and replaced them with his allies, bending the apparatus of the English state to his will. His critics decried these actions but were powerless to stop them. Worse, his brother James, next in line to the throne, threatened to build on Charles’s policies. What could be done?

Johann Neem, author of this piece, is a professor of History at WWU. Click link at right to read entire story.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated in 2020 that of the nearly $13 billion in federally appropriated resources for infrastructure retrofit and improvement, $500 million was designated exclusively for tribes.

These issues were among those highlighted in the new report by the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. The collaborative is led by the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians and the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, with partners Washington Sea Grant and Western Washington University.

The team held listening sessions with 13 tribes along the Pacific Coast of Oregon and Washington, and the Salish Sea.

(story also features WWU alumna Keeley Chiasson)

Laurie Trautman, director of Western Washington University’s Border Policy Research Institute, describes it as “border blindness.” Despite robust commerce between Whatcom County and Lower B.C., “Our understanding stops at the border,” she says. 

The masses of participants at the Surrey Vaisakhi parade in April barely registered notice a few miles south, other than in Whatcom County’s Sikh community of about 8,000 people.

Alternatively, Troy Abel, a professor of environmental policy with Western Washington University, said the omission might make sense. National polling indicates climate change ranks low among issues that motivate voters, he said. So there’s little to be gained by front-runners taking hard policy stances on the topic and they would risk alienating voters on the fringes. 

To learn more about their specific priorities, The Seattle Times reached out to the leading candidates and the two trailing behind — state Sen. Mark Mullet and Republican Semi Bird. The Aug. 6 primary will officially narrow the field to two. Here’s a glimpse at where they stand.

These findings could shed light on the behavior of other birds in the wild, says Chris Templeton, a biologist at Western Washington University who wasn't involved in the research. "Maybe these crows are able to really intentionally produce vocalizations, and they have this idea of what their vocalizations mean," he explains.

In a natural setting, he says, this combination of intention and meaning might allow an animal to communicate something specific to other individuals of their own or a different species. In previous work, Templeton found that the more dangerous a predator is, the more "dee" sections a chickadee produces in its calls. Perhaps the more scared a bird is, the longer its calls are. But this latest research suggests to him the possibility that perhaps the chickadees are intentionally adding more "dee" sections to signal something to their neighbors about the level of danger in the environment.

At Western Washington University located near Seattle, Troy Abel said he has “zero confidence” that stronger standards alone can be trusted to reduce health risks.

Environmental regulations “are only as good as their enforcement,” said Abel, a professor of environmental policy who has found that emissions at some oil refineries in the state have grown more toxic even while dropping in quantity. “And you will find less stringent rules enforcement in some states versus others.”

While exploring a crater on Mars that may give scientists insights into life that potentially once existed there, NASA said its Perseverance rover made an unprecedented discovery. The rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2021 specifically to probe the ancient Jezero crater, found a mysterious light-toned boulder earlier this month that was the first of its kind seen on Martian land.

Perseverance encountered the boulder while traversing the Neretva Vallis, a dried river delta that flowed into the crater billions of years ago, on its way to an area inside the rim where rocky outcrops are being examined for sediment that could shed light on Mars' history, said NASA. The rover had changed course along its route to avoid rough terrain when, traveling a short cut through a dune field, it reached a hill that scientists have dubbed Mount Washburn.

The hill was covered with boulders, some of which NASA described as belonging to "a type never observed before on Mars."

One small boulder particularly intrigued the scientists working with Perseverance from Earth. Measuring roughly 18 inches across and 14 inches tall, the speckled and conspicuously light-toned rock was spotted among a field of darker boulders on the hill.

"The diversity of textures and compositions at Mount Washburn was an exciting discovery for the team, as these rocks represent a grab bag of geologic gifts brought down from the crater rim and potentially beyond," said Brad Garczynski of Western Washington University, who co-leads the current Perseverance mission, in a statement. "But among all these different rocks, there was one that really caught our attention."