Western Carolina University
Iconic Beach Town Studying Storm Surge & Sea Level Rise
The town of Duck conducts a vulnerability assessment with help from the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines
Feburary 22, 2019
Nest Egg Science
Life of the Vikings
WCU Professor Leads International Team on Viking Research
June 25, 2016
Cherokee 101
Cherokee has been spoken for thousands of years. However, during most of that time, it was never written down. There simply wasn’t a need to do it.
The Cherokee syllabary, with symbols based on letters from the Latin alphabet, was developed between 1808 and 1824. Unlike the traditional languages and alphabets to which we are accustomed, those symbols represent syllables, not just letters.
This is hello written in the Cherokee syllabary:
Saving A Lost Language
Training Cadaver Dogs
It turns out that students in the forensic sciences aren’t alone using Western Carolina University’s Forensic Osteology Research Station. The outdoor human decomposition research facility is also used to train cadaver dogs and their handlers.
That may sound unusual at first, because it would seem that a search dog simply follows its nose to do its job. But it turns out a search dog needs to be taught what it is searching for and human remains contain a wide variety of volatile compounds that the canine nose can detect.