CORVALLIS, Ore. – The grand opening of the new Native American Longhouse at Oregon State University will take place Friday, May 17, at 4 p.m.

The new building, called Eena Haws, or ‘Beaver House’ in Chinook, is just south of the former longhouse, which is located at the corner of Jefferson Way and 26th Street in the heart of campus.

The new Longhouse, designed by Seattle architectural firm Jones & Jones, replaces a World War II-era Quonset hut.

The new structure reflects the shape and style of a traditional Oregon Coast longhouse while respecting the multiple tribal cultures represented at OSU. It was designed and developed in collaboration with Native students at OSU, who provided input and had decision-making roles throughout the entire process.

The Longhouse is the first of four new cultural centers Jones & Jones has designed for OSU. The centers are being funded with gifts from donors to The Campaign for OSU and university resources. The new 3,700-square-foot center includes a gathering hall, multi-purpose spaces for studying, relaxing and counseling, a kitchen, computer labs, an administrative office and a special sacred space.

For Mariah Huhndorf, an Alaska native of Athabaskan and Yupik descent, working at the Longhouse was a family tradition. Her older brother and sister worked at the center, and when she came to campus she was quickly welcomed into the community. The Longhouse was where she met her best friend, and where she had a chance to develop leadership skills and take on new responsibilities. It’s also where she learned to appreciate the ways in which her Native background made her unique.

“People were interested in my culture and it made me more proud to be able to share it with others,” she said.

Victoria Nguyen, director of Diversity Development at OSU, said the building of new cultural centers on campus demonstrates the dedication the campus has to supporting students of color.

“Diversity is a core initiative for OSU,” Nguyen said, “and in a time of budget constraints where some diversity programs (on other campuses) are being eliminated, we’re stating that we’re investing in diversity, and telling our community how important that is.”

The Longhouse has been decorated with donated artwork from Pacific Northwest Native artists, including the centerpiece, a one-of-a-kind, 360-degree totem created by master carver Clarence Mills of Vancouver, B.C., and two assistant carvers. Mills is a member of the Haida Nation, an indigenous people located in Canada and Alaska. The work was commissioned by Oregon State University alumni Luana (’72) and Jim Whyte (’70, MS ’72), who reside in Vancouver, B.C., and have a long-standing admiration for Native American artwork. (For a full story on the totem: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/lifeatosu/2012/800-year-old-fallen-cedar-tree-transformed-into-totem-pole-for-osu-longhouse/)

Daniel Cardenas, a graduate teaching assistant working with the Longhouse staff, said the new facility provides a home away from home for students, and a sense of community that helps them as students and individuals.

“For some Native students, the deck is stacked against them,” Cardenas said. “Here at the Longhouse we’re able to cover many forms of wellness (spiritual, social, etc). That has a long-term benefit to OSU in terms of student retention.”

Nguyen agreed.

“We have students provide testimony that says if not for the cultural centers I would not have had as full or rich an experience,” Nguyen said. “Students are choosing OSU because of our cultural centers and because they can find a place where they can make a connection with other students who share their culture.”

In addition to the opening ceremony, there will be several other events taking place that week on campus. On Wednesday, May 15, the 15th annual Salmon Bake will be held in the MU Quad from noon to 3 p.m. And during the weekend, May 18-19, the annual OSU Klatow Eena (Go Beavers) Powwow takes place in McAlexander Fieldhouse.

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Editor’s note: For photos, see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oregonstateuniversity/sets/72157633443594647/

The Functional Orthopedic Research Center of Excellence, or FORCE Laboratory, is led by researchers at Oregon State University-Cascades, in partnership with Therapeutic Associates-Bend Physical Therapy and The Center Orthopedic & Neurological Care & Research and The Center Foundation.

It is one of the few such partnerships of its kind in the country, organizers say.

“What makes this lab unique is that it is a partnership between a university, orthopedic surgeons, sports medicine physicians and physical therapists,” said Christine Pollard, an associate professor of exercise and sports science at OSU-Cascades, and director of the FORCE Lab. “The best place to do research is in a clinical setting with a multi-disciplinary team, which we will have.

“Most cutting edge biomechanics labs are located on a university campus – not in a clinical setting,” she added. “The potential for clinically applied research is tremendous.”

Pollard said research at the FORCE Lab will include analyzing and creating effective injury prevention strategies and rehabilitation practices; and improving the efficiency and performance of human movement. One planned research project, for example, is to assess potential differences in the recovery and performance of patients with reconstructed anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs), comparing allografts from cadavers with those from patients’ own bodies – usually their hamstring or patellar tendons.

Other areas of research will range from examining recovery from complex injuries to metabolic testing of running and movement efficiency related to biomechanics. FORCE Lab partners already are in discussions with footwear companies about collaborative research.

“Central Oregon has a highly active population of ages across the lifespan,” Pollard said. “Because of that activity, they have acute injuries from skiing or climbing, as well as repetitive injuries from long-term running or cycling. That is one reason Bend is such an ideal location for this kind of collaborative research laboratory.”

The lab will offer sports performance analysis, medical intervention and injury prevention and rehabilitation guidance in addition to its research mission.  The lab has a suite of sophisticated equipment, including an eight-camera motion analysis system, two “force plates,” a treadmill with a metabolic cart, ultrasound equipment, and video cameras.

OSU-Cascades students will have an opportunity to participate in lab activities, Pollard noted, creating a rich environment for experiential learning.

“In addition to helping conduct state-of-the-art research, our students will get to work with orthopedists, sports medicine doctors, physical therapists, athletic trainers and others,” she pointed out.

Other opportunities will emerge as the FORCE Lab grows over time, she said.

“A number of our studies will be driven by physician interest,” Pollard said. “We’ve already been asked to participate in a study on concussions that involves Oregon Health & Sciences University and the University of Oregon, as well as local schools and their athletic trainers.

“The future is very, very bright.”

More information on the FORCE Laboratory is available at: http://www.osucascades.edu/force-lab

"All indications estimate this season will be similar or worse than 2012, which was the worst on record," said Vaughn Walton, an entomologist with the OSU Extension Service. “Winter and spring temperatures in the Pacific Northwest have been warmer than last year, and heat equals larger populations of spotted wing drosophila.”

Originally from Asia, the spotted wing drosophila was first found stateside in California in 2008 and has since spread across the continent. The insect lays its eggs in ripe and ripening small and stone fruits, and its developing larvae eat the fruit. The cosmetic imperfections caused by the larvae make the fruit undesirable to most consumers.

The fly's favorite fruits include blueberries, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, peaches and plums. The pest has not impacted wine grapes so far, Walton added.

Walton expects spotted wing drosophila populations in the Pacific Northwest to rapidly build through July and August when most susceptible fruits ripen.

The economic stakes are high. In Oregon alone, farmers grew $198 million of berries in 2012, with blueberries accounting for $108 million of that, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Growers also sold $74 million of sweet cherries that year, the report said.

In the absence of detection and control measures, Oregon's small and stone fruit industry could lose $31 million per year, according to a report by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California.

Since the discovery of the pest in Oregon, OSU has been collaborating with scientists in California and Washington to better understand it and help growers deal with it. For example, researchers at OSU are seeing if a parasitic wasp that is native to the United States, known as Pachycrepoides vindemmiae, can be used to control the spotted wing drosophila. It lays its eggs in the fly's pupae, thus killing them.

OSU will also lead a trip to South Korea in August to search for and collect other similar wasps, including one known as Asobara japonica that lays its eggs in the spotted wing drosophila's larvae. Over the next few years, researchers will study these wasps in quarantine to determine if it attacks only the fly's larvae. If tests show the wasp does not harm other insects, Asobara japonica and others could be released in the U.S. in three to five years.

For now, OSU has found that insecticides are the best way to control the pest. OSU pesticide evaluator Joe DeFrancesco tested various compounds for use on strawberries, blueberries and caneberries to see which are most effective. OSU entomologist Peter Shearer has conducted similar work on cherries. The top-performing pesticides are on OSU's website at http://bit.ly/SWD_GrowerInfoOSU.

"To protect against severe economic damage, we've seen farmers spraying more than usual – and this year will probably be no exception," said Shearer. "If farmers use proper sprays at proper times, they should be able to prevent the flies from damaging fruit."

Last year, farmers in the Willamette Valley and Oregon's Mid-Columbia Basin sprayed an average of five to nine times to control spotted wing drosophila at an average cost of $169 an acre, said Walton. Before the fly landed in Oregon, the state's small fruit growers typically sprayed only twice a year to manage other pests, Shearer said. Oregon's blueberry growers alone spent $6 million last year to manage the spotted wing drosophila, Walton estimates.

OSU is also investigating the impact of cold weather on the insect's survival. Early data suggest that some adults can survive fluctuating conditions and can live for 150 days in the winter. Low humidity appears to negatively impact the fly's survival and reproduction, but tests are still ongoing to confirm these findings.

Additionally, OSU researchers have also helped develop an interactive map that estimates the fly's population throughout the U.S. based on temperature and weather conditions. In the mid-Willamette Valley, data suggest that three to five generations of the pest emerge during each growing season.

OSU is also advising growers to monitor for the fly by hanging homemade traps containing apple cider vinegar in plastic cups punctured with small holes that lure in the insect. Amy Dreves, an entomologist with OSU Extension, explains how to make them in a video at http://bit.ly/OSU_SWDtrap. Researchers are working to develop better baits and traps that catch the spotted wing drosophila earlier in the ripening season to help growers determine when to treat for the pest.

In addition, Bernadine Strik, a berry crops specialist with the OSU Extension Service, is monitoring the presence of the pest in an organic research plot and using organically-approved methods to control the fly.

More information on the fly is on OSU's website at www.spottedwing.org. The site features guides to identify the fly, advice for gardeners and commercial growers, and updates on OSU's research. It also contains links to the following guides published by the OSU Extension Service:

• Recognize Fruit Damage from Spotted Wing Drosophila (http://bit.ly/SWD_Bulletin1)
• A New Pest Attacking Healthy Ripening Fruit in Oregon (http://bit.ly/SWD_Bulletin2)
• Protecting Garden Fruits from Spotted Wing Drosophila (http://bit.ly/SWD_Bulletin3)

OSU's partners in the spotted wing drosophila project include the Oregon Department of Agriculture, Washington State University and the University of California, Davis. The work is funded by a $5.8 million grant from the USDA.

No level of vitamin E in the diet or from any normal use of supplements should be a concern, according to an expert from the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University. The review was just published in the Journal of Lipid Research.

“I believe that past studies which have alleged adverse consequences from vitamin E have misinterpreted the data,” said Maret Traber, an internationally recognized expert on this micronutrient and professor in the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences.

“Taking too much vitamin E is not the real concern,” Traber said. “A much more important issue is that more than 90 percent of people in the U.S. have inadequate levels of vitamin E in their diet.”

Vitamin E is an antioxidant and a very important nutrient for proper function of many organs, nerves and muscles, and is also an anticoagulant that can reduce blood clotting. It can be found in oils, meat and some other foods, but is often consumed at inadequate dietary levels, especially with increasing emphasis on low-fat diets.

In the review of how vitamin E is metabolized, researchers have found that two major systems in the liver work to control the level of vitamin E in the body, and they routinely excrete excessive amounts. Very high intakes achieved with supplementation only succeed in doubling the tissue levels of vitamin E, which is not harmful.

“Toxic levels of vitamin E in the body simply do not occur,” Traber said. “Unlike some other fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamins A and D, it’s not possible for toxic levels of vitamin E to accumulate in the liver or other tissues.”

Vitamin E, because of its interaction with vitamin K, can cause some increase in bleeding, research has shown. But no research has found this poses a health risk.

On the other hand, vitamin E performs many critical roles in optimum health. It protects polyunsaturated fatty acids from oxidizing, may help protect other essential lipids, and has been studied for possible value in many degenerative diseases. Higher than normal intake levels may be needed for some people who have certain health problems, and smoking has also been shown to deplete vitamin E levels.

Traber said she recommends taking a daily multivitamin that has the full RDA of vitamin E, along with consuming a healthy and balanced diet.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A study to examine driver behavior in permitted left turns has identified what researchers call an “alarming” level of risk to pedestrians crossing the street – about 4-9 percent of the time, drivers don’t even bother to look and see if there are pedestrians in their way.

As opposed to a “protected” left turn, in which a solid green arrow gives a driver the complete right of way in a left-turn lane, a “permitted” left turn is often allowed by a confusing hodgepodge of signals, and drivers may have to pick their way through narrow windows of oncoming traffic.

This difficult driving maneuver, which is played out millions of times a day around the world, is fraught with risk for unwary pedestrians, who too often appear to be an afterthought.

 The danger is much higher than had been realized, experts say.

“There are far more pedestrian crashes in marked crosswalks than anywhere else on roads, and pedestrians already have a false sense of security,” said David Hurwitz, an assistant professor of transportation engineering at Oregon State University. “This study found that one key concern is permitted left turns.”

As they wait to turn left, sometimes taking a narrow opportunity to lunge into a stream of oncoming traffic, drivers focus most of their attention on the vehicular traffic and the traffic signal, rather than any pedestrians crossing the street, the research showed. The heavier the traffic, the less attention paid to pedestrians.

In a controlled analysis in a full-scale driving simulator that monitored specific eye movements, the engineers found that about one time in 10 or 20, the driver didn’t even look to see if a pedestrian was there before moving into the intersection. This suggests a major level of risk to pedestrians, researchers said, if they assume that drivers not only will look for them, but will allow them to cross the street.

The problem is aggravated by “permitted” left turn signals that vary widely, from state to state and sometimes even from one city to the next. Such turns might be allowed by a circular green light, a flashing circular yellow light, a flashing circular red light, or even a flashing yellow arrow. More consistent national standards regarding the flashing yellow arrow were recommended as recently as 2009, but the process of upgrading signals across the nation takes time.

The danger is sufficiently high, the researchers concluded, that more states and cities should consider prohibiting permitted left turns while pedestrians are allowed to be in the crosswalk. In Washington County, Ore., traffic managers recently did just that, after receiving a high number of complaints about pedestrian-vehicle conflicts.

“In traffic management you always have multiple goals, which sometimes conflict,” Hurwitz said. “You want to move traffic as efficiently as possible, because there’s a cost to making vehicles wait. You use more fuel, increase emissions and waste people’s time. The permitted left turn can help with efficiency.

“But the safety of the traveling public is also critical,” he said. “Sometimes the goal of safety has to override the goal of efficiency, and we think this is one of those times.”

Also of some interest, the study found preliminary evidence to suggest that the currently-mandated type of signal, which uses four heads instead of three, offers no change in driver behavior. However, the cost to implement a four-head signal is about $800 more than retrofitting the three-head version, which is widely used around the nation. Many millions of dollars might be saved nationally by using the simpler signal.

The findings of these studies have been compiled in a report by OSU and Portland State University researchers to the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, which funded the research. They will also be presented this year at the Driving Assessment Conference in New York and the Western District ITE meeting in Arizona.

OSU has a sophisticated driving simulator research facility, which allows test subjects to see, experience and react to realistic driving experiences while scientists study their reactions and behavior. This study was done with 27 subjects experiencing 620 permitted left turn maneuvers.

Bentz, director of strategic capabilities policy on the National Security Staff, is a 1986 graduate of OSU, where she received an ROTC commission and earned a degree in radiological health. She is the first female officer from the Oregon Army National Guard to achieve the rank of general.

“Gen. Bentz has played an integral role in advising the United States about security matters – and especially nuclear defense strategies and implications – since Sept. 11, 2001,” said OSU President Edward J. Ray. “Her journey from a small town in Oregon, to Oregon State University, and on to national prominence will provide a compelling message for our graduates.”

Bentz grew up in the tiny, unincorporated town of Jordan, Ore., which is near Stayton, and earned a national ROTC scholarship that would have allowed her to attend any of more than 200 universities in the country. She chose Oregon State, and earned her bachelor of science and bachelor of arts degrees in radiological health. She accepted her ROTC commission and was stationed in Landstuhl, Germany.

She later was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, where she worked as a nuclear, biological and chemical officer, training U.S. medical forces during the first Gulf War.

Then she became a missionary, and spent four years in Europe and Africa, while still working as an Army reserve officer.

“The pay I received from my service time was enough to pay for my missionary lifestyle,” she told the Oregon Stater magazine in a recent interview.

Bentz earned master’s (health physics) and doctoral (nuclear engineering) degrees from the University of Missouri, and another master’s degree in national security strategy from the National War College in Washington, D.C. She worked at the Pentagon during the 9-11 attacks, received a Legion of Merit medal for her work on the Homeland Security Council, and recently helped coordinate the U.S. response to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

OSU’s 144th commencement ceremony will take place on Saturday, June 15, in Reser Stadium.

Using genetic samples from individuals in large strandings, scientists have determined that both related and unrelated individuals were scattered along the beaches – and that the bodies of mothers and young calves were often separated by large distances.

Results of the study are being published this week in the Journal of Heredity.

Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, said genetic identification showed that, in many cases, the mothers of calves were missing entirely from groups of whales that died in the stranding. This separation of mothers and calves suggests that strong kinship bonds are being disrupted prior to the actual stranding – potentially playing a role in causing the event.

“Observations of unusual social behavior by groups of whales prior to stranding support this explanation,” said Baker, who frequently advises the International Whaling Commission and is co-author of the Journal of Heredity article. The OSU cetacean expert is a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at the university’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore.

The mass stranding of pilot whales is common in New Zealand and Australia, involving several thousand deaths over the last few decades, according to Marc Oremus of the University of Auckland, who is lead author on the study. The researchers say their genetic analysis of 490 individual pilot whales from 12 different stranding events showed multiple maternal lineages among the victims in each stranding, and thus no correlation between kinship and the grouping of whales on the beach.

This challenges another popular hypothesis – that “care-giving behavior” directed at close maternal relatives may be responsible for the stranding of otherwise healthy whales, Oremus said.

“If kinship-based behavior was playing a causal role in strandings, we would expect that whales in a stranding event would be related to one another through descent from a common maternal ancestor, such as a grandmother or great-grandmother – and that close kin would be clustered on the beach,” Oremus said. “Neither of these was the case.”

Because of the separation of mothers and calves, or in some cases, the outright absence of mothers among the victims, the study has important implications for agencies and volunteers who work to save the stranded whales, Baker said.

“Rescue efforts aimed at ‘refloating’ stranded whales often focus on placing stranded calves with the nearest mature females, on the assumption that the closest adult female is the mother,” Baker pointed out.  “Our results suggest that rescuers should be cautious when making difficult welfare decisions – such as the choice to rescue or euthanize a calf – based on this assumption alone.”

Long-finned pilot whales are the most common species to strand en masse worldwide, the researchers noted, and most of their beaching events are thought to be unrelated to human activity – unlike strandings of some other species. Both naval sonar and the noise of seismic exploration have been linked to the stranding of other species.

The phenomenon is not new. In fact, mass strandings of whales or dolphins were described by Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago and were thought to have some kind of natural cause, Baker said, although it is unclear what that may be.

“It is usually assumed that environmental factors, such as weather or the pursuit of prey, brings pilot whales into shallow water where they become disoriented,” Baker said. “Our results suggest that some form of social disruption also contributes to the tendency to strand.”

“It could be mating interaction or competition with other pods of whales,” Baker said. “We just don’t know. But it is certainly something that warrants further investigation.”

The researchers hope their study will lead to better genetic sampling of more pilot whales and other stranded whale species, as well as the use of satellite tags to monitor the survival and behavior of whales that are helped back into the ocean.

“The causal mechanisms of these strandings remain an enigma,” Oremus said, “so the more avenues of research we can pursue before and after the whales beach themselves, the more likely we are to discover why it happens.”

The study was funded by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Australian Marine Mammal Centre, with support from the New Zealand Department of Conservation and the Australian Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment. Baker’s work is supported by a Pew Marine Conservation Fellowship for the study of dolphins around islands of the South Pacific.

The United States wine industry creates a tremendous amount of waste from processing more than 4 million tons of grapes each year, mostly in the Pacific Northwest and California, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wineries typically pay for the pulp to be hauled away, but a small percentage is used in low-value products such as fertilizer and cow feed.

"We now know pomace can be a sustainable source of material for a wide range of goods," said researcher Yanyun Zhao, a professor and value-added food products specialist with the OSU Extension Service. "We foresee wineries selling their pomace rather than paying others to dispose of it. One industry's trash can become another industry's treasure."

The pulp, which consists of stems, skins and seeds, is known as pomace and is packed with dietary fiber and phenolics, which have antioxidant effects. OSU researchers have dried and ground it to create edible and non-edible products.

For example, they extracted dietary fiber from pomace and turned it into powders that can be added to foods. Because the phenolics in pomace also control microbial growth and keep fats from deteriorating, OSU researchers also added the powdery fiber to yogurts and salad dressings to extend their shelf life by up to a week without changing taste and texture.

The researchers also used pomace to make colorful, edible coatings and films that can be stretched over fruits, vegetables and other food products. They contain antioxidants, seal in moisture and control the growth of some bacteria.

Additionally, the scientists added pomace powders, which are gluten-free, to muffins and brownies. They replaced up to 15 percent of the flour in the recipes with it and thus increased the fiber and antioxidants in the baked goods. The research continues as scientists are also adding pomace to yeast breads.

"Adding fiber-rich ingredients can change a dough's absorption qualities and stiffness," said OSU cereal chemist Andrew Ross. "We're trying to find the right balance of pomace in dough while measuring the bread for its density, volume, color and taste. Commercial bakeries need this information before using pomace flour for large-scale production."

OSU has also made pomace into biodegradable boards, which can further be molded into containers, serving trays and flowerpots. After burial in soil for 30 days, the products degraded by 50 percent to 80 percent.

Researchers found that the methods for making products from pomace vary depending on if the pulp is from red or white grapes. That's because winemaking processes differ for each varietal and they produce pulp with different levels of sugar, nitrogen, phenolics and other compounds. In their experiments, researchers used pomace from grapes that included Pinot Noir, Merlot, Morio Muscat and M�ller Thurgau.

Now, OSU is seeking to establish partnerships with companies interested in marketing the products it developed.

The research has been published in various journals, including the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, Food Chemistry, and the Journal of Food Science.

Editor’s Note: In light of the many questions the authors of this study have received about their work, they have posted an FAQ that lays out how they gathered and analyzed data and reached conclusions. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Using data from 73 sites around the world, scientists have been able to reconstruct Earth’s temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age, revealing that the planet today is warmer than it has been during 70 to 80 percent of the time over the last 11,300 years.

Of even more concern are projections of global temperature for the year 2100, when virtually every climate model evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that temperatures will exceed the warmest temperatures during that 11,300-year period known as the Holocene – under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

Results of the study, by researchers at Oregon State University and Harvard University, were published this week in the journal Science. It was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program.

Lead author Shaun Marcott, a post-doctoral researcher in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, noted that previous research on past global temperature change has largely focused on the last 2,000 years. Extending the reconstruction of global temperatures back to the end of the last Ice Age puts today’s climate into a larger context.

“We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years,” Marcott said. “Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years. This is of particular interest because the Holocene spans the entire period of human civilization.”

Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author on the Science article, said many previous temperature reconstructions were regional in nature and were not placed in a global context. Marcott led the effort to combine data from 73 sites around the world, providing a much broader perspective.

“When you just look at one part of the world, the temperature history can be affected by regional climate processes like El Niño or monsoon variations,” noted Clark. “But when you combine the data from sites all around the world, you can average out those regional anomalies and get a clear sense of the Earth’s global temperature history.”

What that history shows, the researchers say, is that over the past 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees (Fahrenheit) – until the past 100 years, when it warmed ̴ 1.3 degrees (F). The largest changes were in the northern hemisphere, where there are more land masses and greater human populations.

Climate models project that global temperature will rise another 2.0 to 11.5 degrees (F) by the end of this century, largely dependent on the magnitude of carbon emissions. “What is most troubling,” Clark said, “is that this warming will be significantly greater than at any time during the past 11,300 years.”

Marcott said that one of the natural factors affecting global temperatures over the past 11,300 years is gradual change in the distribution of solar insolation associated with Earth’s position relative to the sun.

“During the warmest period of the Holocene, the Earth was positioned such that Northern Hemisphere summers warmed more,” Marcott said. “As the Earth’s orientation changed, Northern Hemisphere summers became cooler, and we should now be near the bottom of this long-term cooling trend – but obviously, we are not.”

Clark said that other studies, including those outlined in past IPCC reports, have attributed the warming of the planet over the past 50 years to anthropogenic, or human-caused activities – and not solar variability or other natural causes.

“The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,” said Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which co-funded the research with NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences. “This research shows that we’ve experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the beginning of the industrial revolution as over the previous 11,000 years of Earth history – but this change happened a lot more quickly.”

The research team, which included Jeremy Shakun of Harvard University and Alan Mix of Oregon State, primarily used fossils from ocean sediment cores and terrestrial archives to reconstruct the temperature history. The chemical and physical characteristics of the fossils – including the species as well as their chemical composition and isotopic ratios – provide reliable proxy records for past temperatures by calibrating them to modern temperature records.

Using data from 73 sites around the world allows a global picture of the Earth’s history and provides new context for climate change analysis.

“The Earth’s climate is complex and responds to multiple forcings, including CO2 and solar insolation,” Marcott said. “Both of those changed very slowly over the past 11,000 years. But in the last 100 years, the increase in CO2 through increased emissions from human activities has been significant. It is the only variable that can best explain the rapid increase in global temperatures.”

Marcott received his Ph.D. in geology in 2011 from OSU.

Researchers at Oregon State University conducted interviews with young Latino men from rural backgrounds and asked them questions related to sexual health and use of sexual health services. The results are published in the March issue of the American Journal of Men’s Health.

Marie Harvey, the study’s lead author, and associate dean of research in OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences, has studied women’s reproductive health issues for more than 25 years. Recently, she has focused on the role of partners in sexual and reproductive health, or what she likes to call the “it takes two to tango” angle.

“We put women in the awkward position of trying to convince their partners to be active participants in pregnancy prevention and contraceptive planning,” Harvey said. “Increasingly, I think it’s crucial to talk to men and engage them on these issues.”

Latinos in the United State experience disproportionately high rates of unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS. These sexual health disparities have the potential to grow as Latinos continue to be the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States.

Harvey’s research team interviewed 49 Latino men who have immigrated to the United States within the last 10 years. The average age was 24. The majority of the men came from rural areas of Mexico. More than half had never seen a health care provider, and 88 percent had never seen a provider specifically for sexual and reproductive health services.

Harvey said this research is important because the men not only gave reasons why they did, or did not, utilize sexual health services, but they gave context linked to their cultural background, beliefs, and experiences. Almost half of the men reported they never discussed sexual and reproductive health topics with their parents. As one man explained, “Unfortunately, we come from a country that, I don’t know, they never want to talk about that. They keep it quiet and one grows up ignorant about that subject.”

“Almost every man we talked with stated they didn’t have enough information or knowledge about how to prevent unintended pregnancies and STIs,” Harvey said. “But they very clearly stated that they wanted this information and would like to be better informed.”

Many of the men suggested making informational pamphlets about sexual health services and clinics available in places they frequent, such as local laundromats or Latino grocery stores, as well as airing public service announcements on Latino radio or television stations. Men also emphasized the importance of providing information in Spanish.

In addition, terminology sometimes was confusing. In the United States, the term “family planning” is often used, but many of these single men said they had no need for such a service since they weren’t planning to have a family right now.

“It's important to define terminology because we have cultural assumptions around ‘family planning’ that not everyone shares,” Harvey said. “When we used terms like birth control, or HIV testing, it became much clearer.”

Harvey said that “confianza,” a Spanish word that means trust, confidence and respect, came up frequently as a need for all the men in the study.

“Privacy was very important to them, but it goes beyond that,” she said. “This ability to trust their provider, and know that their information won’t be shared and they would not be judged when they talk openly about their sexual behavior, all of this was crucial.”

In addition, the men expressed a preference for male providers and a need for bilingual providers.  Language can be a barrier. At many community clinics, the study participants said the providers did not speak Spanish and translators were sometimes offered.

“Having a third party in the room can be a barrier to trust and honesty,” Harvey said. “In addition, the translators were often women, making it even more difficult to discuss sexual topics.  And because these are smaller communities, the translators could even be someone they knew. ”

Clinic-related factors also affected access to services. Men reported that having convenient clinic hours, reduced waiting time and living or working in close proximity to a clinic would make it easier to receive services. 

Harvey said as the Latino population grows in places like Oregon, understanding factors that affect their use of the health care system will become even more critical.  It is essential to begin overcoming these cultural and structural barriers, Harvey said. Communities need to come together to help prevent STIs and HIV, as well as have a better informed public.

OSU research assistants Meredith Branch and Deanne Hudson, and OSU alumnus Antonio Torres, assisted on this study, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs.

The technology, called acoustic-assisted magnetic recording, has been presented at a professional conference, and a patent application was filed this week.

Magnetic storage of data is one of the most inexpensive and widespread technologies known, found in everything from computer hard drives to the magnetic strip on a credit card. It’s permanent, dependable and cheap. However, long-term reliability of stored data becomes an increasing concern as the need grows to pack more and more information in storage devices, experts say.

“We’re near the peak of what we can do with the technology we now use for magnetic storage,” said Pallavi Dhagat, an associate professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “There’s always a need for approaches that could store even more information in a smaller space, cost less and use less power.”

That can be possible, scientists say, if the magnetic materials are temporarily heated, even for an instant, so they can become momentarily less stiff and more data can be stored at a particular spot. This has proven difficult to do, because the heating tends to spread beyond where it is wanted and the technology involves complex integration of optics, electronics and magnetics.

With the new approach, ultrasound is directed at a highly specific location while data is being stored, creating elasticity that literally allows a tiny portion of the material to bend or stretch. It immediately resumes its shape when the ultrasound waves stop. The data can be stored reliably without the concerns around heating.

It should also be possible to create a solid state memory device with no moving parts to implement this technology, researchers said. Unlike conventional hard-disk drive storage, solid state memory would offer durability.

These advances were recently reported at the 12th Joint MMM/Intermag Conference in Chicago.

“This technology should allow us to marry the benefits of solid state electronics with magnetic recording, and create non-volatile memory systems that store more data in less space, using less power,” said Albrecht Jander, also an associate professor of electrical engineering and collaborator on the research.

This approach might work with materials already being used in magnetic recordings, or variations on them, the investigators said. Continued research will explore performance, materials and cost issues.

Advances in data storage are part of what has enabled the enormous advance in high technology systems in recent decades.

A disk drive at the dawn of this era in the 1950s had five megabyte capacity, cost today’s equivalent of $160,000, weighed about a ton, had to be moved with a forklift and was so big it had to be shipped on a large cargo aircraft. Experts at the time said they could have built something with more storage capacity, but they could not envision why anyone would want it, or buy it.

A system today that stores 500 gigabytes, or 100,000 times as much information, is found routinely in laptop computers that cost a few hundred dollars.

OSU initially will receive nearly $3 million to coordinate the design phase of the project – and if funds are appropriated for all three vessels, the total grant is projected to reach $290 million over 10 years. The final number constructed, and the geographic positioning of these vessels, will be determined by the National Science Foundation based on geographic scientific requirements and availability of funding.

If all three vessels are built, it is likely that one would be positioned on the East Coast, West Coast and Gulf Coast, officials say.

A project team led by Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences will finalize the design for the 175-foot long, technically enhanced Regional Class ships, select a shipyard, oversee construction, and coordinate the system integration, testing, commissioning and acceptance, and transition to operations.

“These will be floating, multi-use laboratories that are flexible and can be adapted for different scientific purposes, yet are more seaworthy and environmentally ‘green’ than previous research vessels,” said Mark Abbott, dean of the OSU College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “These ships will be used to address critical issues related to climate change, ocean circulation, natural hazards, human health, and marine ecosystems.”

OSU vice president for research Rick Spinrad, who previously directed research programs for the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said the new vessels would “revitalize and transform” coastal ocean science in the United States.

“Many of the most pressing issues facing our oceans are in these coastal regions, including acidification, hypoxia, tsunami prediction, declining fisheries, and harmful algal blooms,” Spinrad said. “Because of their flexibility, these new vessels will attract a broad range of users and will become ideal platforms to training early-career scientists and mariners.”

The project had the support of Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s Office, noted OSU President Ed Ray, who said the university will benefit from the process long before the first ship hits the water in 2019 or 2020.

“What is really unique about this project is that it will involve faculty from engineering and business, who will join their oceanography colleagues on the design and construction elements – and provide unbelievable training opportunities for OSU undergraduate and graduate students interested in project management, marine technology and marine science,” Ray pointed out.

The successful OSU proposal was submitted to the National Science Foundation by Clare Reimers, an oceanography professor, and Demian Bailey, the university’s marine superintendent. As part of that submission, OSU proposed to be the operator of the first vessel. Additional operating institutions will be determined once the total number of vessels to be built is known.

The university now operates the R/V Oceanus, an older research vessel scheduled for retirement about the time the new research vessels will become available.

“The National Science Foundation hasn’t authorized a multi-ship project since the 1970s,” Bailey said, “and these are likely the only ships scheduled by NSF to be built during the next decade – so this is a big deal. The endurance and size of the new ships will be similar to that of Oceanus and (former OSU vessel) Wecoma but they will be much more efficient and have far greater scientific capacity and flexibility.”

Bailey said the new vessels will have advanced dynamic positioning that will help them stay in place in the rugged Pacific Ocean. That is a benefit for launching and retrieving gliders and other autonomous or remotely operated vehicles, conducting precise seafloor mapping, and retrieving moorings and other instrumentation. They also will be much quieter, which will help researchers who use acoustics to study everything from endangered whales to undersea earthquakes and volcanoes.

Reimers said the first phase of the 10-year project will begin in early 2013 with the finalization of the vessel design. A concept design is already in place and the OSU project team will partner with two regional firms – The Glosten Associates in Seattle, Wash., and Science Applications International Corporation in Oregon City – to meet naval architecture, marine design and systems engineering requirements.

“These new vessels will allow scientists at sea to conduct state-of-the-art scientific research from the atmosphere above into the seafloor below our coastal oceans,” Reimers said. “Broader impacts will also be possible because these ships will be equipped with modern telecommunications technologies and sensors to be able to transmit a rich variety of observations to scientists, educators and the public ashore.”

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) praised the project and selection of OSU.

“These research ships will keep the United States in the forefront of coastal ocean science,” Wyden said. “The selection of Oregon State University to design these vessels represents an important investment in our nation’s research infrastructure and adds to the state’s already-growing reputation as a center for marine research and the place that will train the next generation of ocean scientists.”

Fellow Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) described the announcement as “great news for both Oregon State University and the state of Oregon.”

“Oregon State is on the cutting edge for marine research and it is only fitting that they have received the honor of designing these new research ships,” Merkley said. “I am excited that we will be developing top-notch research into the health of our oceans and the effects of climate change through this targeted investment right here in Oregon.”

History of OSU Research Vessels

1964 – The Department of Oceanography commissions the 180-foot Yaquina

1968 – The Department of Oceanography commissions the 80-foot Cayuse

1975 – The School of Oceanography commissions the 184-foot Wecoma

2000 – The 54-foot Elakha was funded by a Packard Foundation grant to College of Science researchers, and after construction operated by the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences

2012 – The College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences takes over operation of the 177-foot Oceanus, formerly operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

OSU will be the first school in the university system to complete the installations.

The two ground-mounted OSU solar arrays in Corvallis, which cover a combined four acres, are scheduled to go online in January. The larger site, with a capacity of 450 kilowatts, is located adjacent to Trysting Tree golf course just east of the Willamette River; a second site, of about 300 kilowatts, is located adjacent to the bike path just east of the Benton County Fairgrounds near 53rd Street.

“With Solar by Degrees, one of OUS’s five renewable energy demonstration projects, we have already come further down the path of climate neutrality than most other university systems in the country,” said Alice Wiewel, director of capital planning and construction for the Oregon University System.

Brandon Trelstad, OSU’s sustainability coordinator, has worked for several years to help set up these projects. He said the Solar by Degrees initiative will offer electricity rates that are lower than the university’s utility rates, allowing “meaningful long-term energy cost savings.”

“For Oregon State University, energy efficiency is still a top priority but solar power will play an increasingly key role in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” Trelstad said. “There is no way OSU can invest in renewable energy infrastructure at this scale without developing public-private partnerships. A power purchase agreement structure enables us to utilize renewable energy without the upfront cost – and in fact, we save money over time.”

Under a power purchase agreement, OSU is leasing land to SolarCity, which installs, owns, maintains and operates solar equipment tied to the electric grid “downstream” from OSU electric meters. OSU purchases renewable electricity generated by the solar equipment at a rate lower than from the local utility, Trelstad said, but still relies on the utility to provide whatever power is needed beyond what the solar system can produce.

There is no capital cost to OSU; only incidental expenses during construction associated with project management.

“SolarCity is proud to play a part in Oregon State’s ambitious efforts to produce and consume cleaner energy,” said Rob Lavigne, SolarCity regional vice president. “The university is also showing its students how institutions can rise above the status quo and take a leadership role in addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.”

SolarWorld, the largest United States solar manufacturer, supplied more than 3,000 high-performance solar panels for the installations. SolarWorld manufactures solar technology, from raw material silicon to finished solar panels, in Hillsboro, Ore., at its 97-acre U.S. manufacturing headquarters.

Trelstad said OSU hopes to add more solar panels on other sites for a total of 10 acres, including the two sites now under construction.

“It was a challenge to meet the major logistical requirements of a project like this, which include setting aside available land, proximity to an electrical load and ability to connect to the electric utility,” Trelstad said. “Luckily, we have great support from the College of Agricultural Sciences and are working out ways in which the land around the solar arrays can continue to be productive.”

When operational, the two OSU solar arrays should produce more than 860,000 kilowatt hours annually at the combined sites, according to Trelstad. That is equivalent to reducing carbon dioxide emissions from 66,675 gallons of gasoline, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from 117 passenger vehicles, or offsetting CO2 emissions from the energy use of 51 homes for a year.

Trelstad said the Oregon University System’s Solar by Degrees program aligns with the carbon reduction goals of the State of Oregon and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, as well as the American Colleges and Universities Presidents’ Climate Commitment to reduce carbon footprints, for which nearly 700 campuses have signed up.  OSU is a charter signatory of the Climate Commitment, and this project directly supports the university’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions and move toward climate neutrality. 

As part of the Solar By Degrees program, SolarCity will provide student internships and work with university faculty and staff to foster research opportunities and curricular connections.

Two other partners played key roles in making the project a reality: the Oregon Department of Energy, and U.S. Bank. The Department of Energy, which has assisted throughout the project development, made certain that Oregon industry and local jobs were supported, Trelstad said. Oregon’s U.S. Bank provided critically important project financing support through its investments in renewable energy projects benefitting OSU and the Oregon University System.

In this analysis, eight out of 18, or 44 percent of surgical residents made serious errors, particularly when they were being tested in the afternoon. By comparison, only one surgeon made a mistake when there were no distractions.

Exercises such as this in what scientists call “human factors engineering” show not just that humans are fallible – we already know that - but work to identify why they make mistakes, what approaches or systems can contribute to the errors, and hopefully find ways to improve performance.

The analysis is especially important when the major mistake can be fatal.

This study, published in Archives of Surgery, was done by researchers from Oregon State University and the Oregon Health and Science University, in the first collaboration between their respective industrial engineering and general surgery faculty.

“This research clearly shows that at least with younger surgeons, distractions in the operating room can hurt you,” said Robin Feuerbacher, an assistant professor in Energy Systems Engineering at OSU-Cascades and lead author on the study. “The problem appears significant, but it may be that we can develop better ways to address the concern and help train surgeons how to deal with distractions.”

The findings do not necessarily apply to older surgeons, Feuerbacher said, and human factors research suggests that more experienced people can better perform tasks despite interruptions. But if surgery is similar to other fields of human performance, he said, older and more experienced surgeons are probably not immune to distractions and interruptions, especially under conditions of high workload or fatigue. Some of those issues will be analyzed in continued research, he said.

This study was done with second-, third- and research-year surgical residents, who are still working to perfect their surgical skills. Months were spent observing real operating room conditions so that the nature of interruptions would be realistic, although in this study the distractions were a little more frequent than usually found.

Based on these real-life scenarios, the researchers used a virtual reality simulator of a laparoscopic cholecystectomy – removing a gall bladder with minimally invasive instruments and techniques. It’s not easy, and takes significant skill and concentration.

While the young surgeons, ages 27 to 35, were trying to perform this delicate task, a cell phone would ring, followed later by a metal tray clanging to the floor. Questions would be posed about problems developing with a previous surgical patient – a necessary conversation – and someone off to the side would decide this was a great time to talk about politics, a not-so-necessary, but fairly realistic distraction.

When all this happened, the results weren’t good. Major errors, defined as things like damage to internal organs, ducts and arteries, some of which could lead to fatality, happened with regularity.

Interrupting questions caused the most problems, followed by sidebar conversations. And for some reason, participants facing disruptions did much worse in the afternoons, even though conventional fatigue did not appear to be an issue.

“We’ve presented these findings at a surgical conference and many experienced surgeons didn’t seem too surprised by the results,” Feuerbacher said. “It appears working through interruptions is something you learn how to deal with, and in the beginning you might not deal with them very well.”

This industry, that produces metal castings used in everything from water pumps and jet engines to railroad and automobile parts, dates back thousands of years to before Greek and Roman times. It was important in the advance of human civilization, but still continues to evolve.

Some modern technologies use various types of “binders” to essentially glue together sands and other materials to form sophisticated molds, into which molten metals are injected to create products with complex shapes. Existing approaches work, but some materials used today, such as furan resins and phenol formaldehyde resins, can emit toxic fumes during the process.

However, experts in adhesion science in the OSU College of Forestry have discovered and applied for a patent on a new use of a compound that appears to also work surprisingly well for this purpose. They say it should cost less than existing binders, is completely renewable and should be environmentally benign.

It’s called sugar.

“We were surprised that simple sugar could bind sand together so strongly,” said Kaichang Li, an OSU professor of wood science and engineering. “Sugar and other carbohydrates are abundant, inexpensive, food-grade materials.

“The binder systems we’ve developed should be much less expensive than existing sand binders and not have toxicity concerns,” Li added.

Sugar is a highly water-soluble food ingredient, as anyone knows who has ever put a teaspoon of it in a cup of coffee. The OSU researchers discovered a novel way to make strong and moisture-resistant sand molds with sugar. An inaccurate reading of temperature in a baking oven helped lead to the important discovery, they said.

Li and an OSU faculty research assistant, Jian Huang, identified combinations of sugar, soy flour and hydrolyzed starch – or even just sugar by itself – that should work effectively as a binder in sand molds for making various types of metal parts.

This novel sand binder technology is ready for more applied research and testing, they said, and the university is seeking investors and industrial partners to commercialize it. Private sector financing of OSU research has increased 42 percent in the past two years, to $35 million, as part of its increasing emphasis on university/industry partnerships.

Sand-based moldings, which comprise about 70 percent of all metal castings, are used to make many metal products, often from aluminum or cast iron, but also from bronze, copper, tin and steel. They are a major part of the automobile industry, along with applications in plumbing materials, mining, railroad applications and many other areas.

Sugar and the other agricultural products used for this purpose should have no environmental drawbacks, since they largely decompose into just carbon dioxide and water. With the techniques developed at OSU, the use of sugar as a binder allows the creation of sand molds that gain strength rapidly and remain strong in high humidity environments, which is necessary for their effective use in industrial applications.

Li’s laboratory at OSU has developed other related products in recent years, such as a natural resin made from soy flour that is already being used commercially to replace the use of formaldehyde-based adhesives in the manufacture of some wood products.

For that achievement, five years ago he was given the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award by the Environmental Protection Agency, which recognizes innovators who have helped reduce waste or toxins in manufacturing processes.

A robust online enrollment pushed the university’s overall growth to a record total of 26,393 students, a 5.7 percent increase over OSU’s overall enrollment last year.

OSU continued to experience modest growth in the number of students from Oregon, reaffirming President Ed Ray’s commitment to the university’s Land Grant mission of access.

Some of the growth in OSU’s enrollment can be attributed to its ECampus program, which enrolled a record 3,175 students from around the state and beyond who only took courses from the university online. ECampus has been ranked among the top 10 online programs in the country.

“Our enrollment growth is a reflection of interest in the university’s academic programs, our success in recruiting high-achieving students, and our efforts to increase minority and international enrollments,” said Sabah Randhawa, OSU’s provost and executive vice president. “We are managing our growth in alignment with our strategic goals and with our commitments to the Oregon University System to contribute to the educational goals outlined in the 40/40/20 aspiration for the state.”

OSU’s enrollment total does not include that of the state’s first branch campus, OSU-Cascades in Bend, which has an additional 801 students – an increase of 4.8 percent over last year. The growth rates of OSU and OSU-Cascades were the highest in the Oregon University System, which posted an overall record.

Some of the highlights of the university’s enrollment:

• The number of U.S. minorities increased 10.7 percent over 2011 to a total of 5,224 students. U.S. minority students now comprise 19.8 percent of the university’s enrollment.

• OSU’s international student enrollment increased 27.5 percent over last year, a reflection in part of the successful collaboration with INTO University Partnerships. OSU’s international student enrollment this term is 2,362, which is 8.9 percent of the overall enrollment.

• The number of Oregon resident students increased from 17,360 to 17,487.

• OSU continues to attract high-achieving students, and the mean grade point average of entering freshmen this fall was 3.56. More than 40 percent of incoming freshmen from Oregon high schools had a GPA of 3.75 or higher.

“We also continue to attract more high school valedictorians and salutatorians than any other institution in the state,” pointed out Kate Peterson, OSU’s associate provost for enrollment management. “The university also has made major efforts to retain students and we’re beginning to see some of the results.”

Peterson said the number of new students on campus grew by 241 students over 2011 while the number of continuing students jumped by 1,191 over last year.

University officials note that OSU has hired more than 100 new faculty members over the past two years – from throughout the United States and beyond – to help accommodate the enrollment growth.

Students enrolled this fall at OSU come from every county in Oregon, from every state in the United States, and from 98 other countries. The university saw enrollment growth that was roughly the same among undergraduate and graduate students, totaling 5.7 percent.

The largest student enrollment by discipline belongs to the College of Engineering, which has 5,907 students this fall. Next in order were the College of Liberal Arts, 3,680 students; College of Science, 3,406; College of Business, 3,302; College of Public Health and Human Sciences, 3,267; and College of Agricultural Sciences, 2,284.

OSU’s minority enrollment has more than doubled in the last decade, from 2,591 students in 2003 to 5,224 this fall. Likewise, Oregon State’s international student enrollment has increased from 1,061 students in 2003 to 2,362 students this fall.

The nationally representative study of more than 4,700 adults older than age 60 in the United States uses data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The results are online today in the British Journal of Nutrition.

Lead author Ellen Smit, an epidemiologist at Oregon State University, said food insufficiency occurs when people report that they sometimes or often do not have enough food to eat. Food-insufficient older adults have been shown to have poor dietary intake, nutritional status and health status.

“Although little is known about food insufficiency as it relates to frailty, conceivably we thought if food insufficiency is associated with poorer nutritional status, it may also be associated with physical functioning and frailty,” she said.

Frailty is a state of decreased physical functioning and a significant complication of aging that increases the risk for incident falls, fractures, disability, health care expenditures, and premature mortality. People in this study are diagnosed as frail when they meet two of the following criteria: slow walking, muscular weakness, exhaustion and low physical activity.

Smit said as the population ages, with more than 20 percent of Americans expected to be older than 65 by 2030, the need for identifying clinical and population-based strategies to decrease the prevalence and consequences of frailty are needed. In her study, almost 50 percent of people were either frail, or “pre-frail,” meaning that they were at risk for decreased physical functioning.

Frail people were older, less educated, at lower income levels, more likely to be female, more likely to be smokers, and less likely to be white than adults who were not frail. Frail people were also more likely to be either underweight or obese, while at the same time eating fewer calories than people who were not frail.

“We need to target interventions on promoting availability and access to nutritious foods among frail older adults,” Smit said. “It is also important to improve nutritional status while not necessarily increasing body weight.”

Frail adults may have difficulty leaving the house, for instance, and accessing fresh fruits and vegetables. Smit said communities could work on identifying programs or nonprofit organizations that can deliver nutritious meals or fresh produce to older frail adults.

Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University, Bellarmine University, Tufts School of Medicine and Portland State University contributed to this study, which was partially supported by grants from the General Research Fund Award at Oregon State University and the National Institutes of Health.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Some high mountain meadows in the Pacific Northwest are declining rapidly due to climate change, a study suggests, as reduced snowpacks, longer growing seasons and other factors allow trees to invade these unique ecosystems that once were carpeted with grasses, shrubs and wildflowers.

The process appears to have been going on for decades, but was highlighted in one recent analysis of Jefferson Park, a subalpine meadow complex in the central Oregon Cascade Range, in which tree occupation rose from 8 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2007.

The findings of that research, which was funded by the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the USDA Forest Service, were published in the journal Landscape Ecology.

The changes in Jefferson Park are representative of a larger force that is affecting not only this beautiful meadow at the base of Mount Jefferson, scientists say, but many areas of the American West.

“We worry a lot about the loss of old-growth forests, but have overlooked declines in our meadows, which are also areas of conservation concern,” said Harold Zald, a research associate in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and lead author of this study.

“The first awareness of declining meadows dates back to the 1970s, and we’ve seen meadow reduction at both high and low elevations,” Zald said. “Between climate change, fire suppression and invasive species, these meadows and all of the plant, animal and insect life that depend on them are being threatened.

“Once trees become fully established, they tend to persist, and seed banks of native grass species disappear fairly quickly,” he said. “The meadows form an important part of forest biodiversity, and when they are gone, they may be gone forever.”

The meadow decline takes place over several decades, like the melting of glaciers. This also provides a way to gauge long-term climate change, Zald said, since the forces at work persist through seasonal, annual and longer patterns that are variably more wet, dry, hot or cold than average.

“It takes a long time to melt a glacier or fill in a meadow,” he said. “It’s a useful barometer of climate change over decadal time periods.”

In this study, it appears that snowpack was a bigger factor than temperature in allowing mountain hemlock tree invasion of Jefferson Park, a 333-acre meadow which sits at the northern base of Mount Jefferson, a towering 10,497-foot volcano northwest of Bend, Ore. Seedlings that can be buried by snow many months every year need only a few more weeks or months of growing season to hugely increase their chance of survival.

The study also found surprising variability of tree invasion even within the meadow, based on minor dips, debris flows or bumps in the terrain that caused changes in snowpack and also left some soils wetter or drier in ways that facilitated tree seedling survival.

“The process of tree invasion is usually slow and uneven,” Zald said. “But if you get all the conditions just right, some tree species can invade these meadows quite rapidly.”

There’s some suggestion that alpine meadows may simply move higher up on the mountain in the face of a changing climate, Zald said, but in many cases slopes become too steep, and poor-quality, unstable soils are unable to harbor much plant life.

In other research in recent years, Zald said, he looked at meadows on lower-elevation mountains in the Oregon Coast Range – what are called “grass balds” on the tops of some of the higher peaks, such as Mary’s Peak, the highest point in that range west of Corvallis, Ore. In a study of five Coast Range sites, Zald found that these “bald spots” had declined by an average of 50 percent between 1950 and 2000.

The study, published in the professional journal Hydrobiologia, was funded and coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey and the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service. It points to climate change as the primary reason for the extreme conditions.

“The highest temperatures for streams generally occur in August, while lowest flows take place in the early fall,” said Ivan Arismendi, a research professor in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. “Each period is important because it is a time of potentially high stress on the organisms that live in the stream. If they occur closer in time – or together – they could create double trouble that may be greater than their combined singular effects.”

Arismendi, who was lead author on the paper, said climate change appears to play a role as snowpack levels lessen and snow begins melting earlier in the spring. Peak stream flows are coming earlier in the year, stretching out the amount of time when river flows are low.

“What results is that low flows are moving closer and closer to the time of the year when stream temperatures are highest,” Arismendi said, “and that is not good.”

The study looked at 22 “minimally human-influenced” streams from the period of 1950 to 2010, located in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Montana and Idaho. The researchers found the hydrology of the streams was complex and differed among streams; while weather extremes affected all of the streams, the impact seems to be mediated by the influence of groundwater.

“Other studies have shown that high temperatures in streams lead to less oxygen and more thermal stress,” said co-author Jason Dunham, an aquatic ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Low flows reduce the amount of suitable habitat and may lead to high density and overcrowding, more predation, changes in predator-prey relationships, and more competition – at least, among salmonids.”

This study focused on the physical processes on the streams, Arismendi emphasized, and needs to be followed by biological studies.

“Coupling of low flow with high temperatures can have significant hydrologic implications in maintaining stream water quality,” said Mohammad Safeeq, an OSU post-doctoral researcher in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a co-author on the paper.

Arismendi said that over the years, weather and stream flow can be influenced by climate drivers like El Ni�o, La Ni�a, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and other phenomena. But over the 60-year time frame covered by the study, the climate warmed appreciably, leading to lower flows and earlier peak flows.

“These streams have high natural variability,” Arismendi said, “but the general pattern holds true.”

Interestingly, Arismendi said that stream temperatures are not always higher on an annual scale despite a regional trend that has shown warming air temperatures. This could be because of increased snowmelt, he pointed out, or complex hydrological cycles.

“Even though our studies are showing that stream processes are much more complex than initially thought we are able to identify trends toward increasing synchrony in timing of low flows and high temperatures,” Arismendi said.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University for the first time have confirmed some of the mechanisms by which overfishing and nitrate pollution can help destroy coral reefs – it appears they allow an overgrowth of algae that can bring with it unwanted pathogens, choke off oxygen and disrupt helpful bacteria.

These “macroalgae,” or large algal species, are big enough to essentially smother corals. They can get out of control when sewage increases nitrate levels, feeds the algae, and some of the large fish that are most effective at reducing the algal buildup are removed by fishing.

Scientists found that macroalgal competition decreased coral growth rates by about 37 percent and had other detrimental effects. Other research has documented some persistent states of hypoxia.

Researchers call this process “the slippery slope to slime.”

Findings on the research were just published in PLoS One, a professional journal. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

“There is evidence that coral reefs around the world are becoming more and more dominated by algae,” said Rebecca Vega-Thurber, an OSU assistant professor of microbiology. “Some reefs are literally covered up in green slime, and we wanted to determine more precisely how this can affect coral health.”

The new study found that higher levels of algae cause both a decrease in coral growth rate and an altered bacterial community. The algae can introduce some detrimental pathogens to the coral and at the same time reduce levels of helpful bacteria. The useful bacteria are needed to feed the corals in a symbiotic relationship, and also produce antibiotics that can help protect the corals from other pathogens.

One algae in particular, Sargassum, was found to vector, or introduce a microbe to corals, a direct mechanism that might allow introduction of foreign pathogens.

There are thousands of species of algae, and coral reefs have evolved with them in a relationship that often benefits the entire tropical marine ecosystem. When in balance, some algae grow on the reefs, providing food to both small and large fish that nibble at the algal growth. But the algal growth is normally limited by the availability of certain nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, and some large fish such as parrot fish help eat substantial amounts of algae and keep it under control.

All of those processes can be disrupted when algal growth is significantly increased by the nutrients and pollution from coastal waste water, and overfishing reduces algae consumption at the same time.

“This shows that some human actions, such as terrestrial pollution or overfishing, can affect everything in marine ecosystems right down to the microbes found on corals,” Vega-Thurber said. “We’ve suspected before that increased algal growth can bring new diseases to corals, and now for the first time have demonstrated in experiments these shifts in microbial communities.”

Some mitigation of the problem is already being done on high-value coral reefs by mechanically removing algae, Vega-Thurber said, but the best long-term solution is to reduce pollution and overfishing so that a natural balance can restore itself.

Corals are one of Earth’s oldest animal life forms, evolving around 500 million years ago. They host thousands of species of fish and other animals, are a major component of marine biodiversity in the tropics, and are now in decline around the world. Reefs in the Caribbean Sea have declined more than 80 percent in recent decades.

Officials at the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC) at Oregon State University said these locations offer advantages in cost, distance to shore and other factors over the two other sites that had also been considered, at Coos Bay and Camp Rilea near Warrenton.

Committees will now be formed in Newport and Reedsport to conduct more detailed local site analysis before a final decision is made.

After funding is complete and the site is established, this research facility will feature four test berths connected to a regional electrical grid, able to test individual, utility-scale or small arrays of wave energy devices. Completion is not expected for several years after funding is finalized. But when done, officials said it will provide jobs and economic growth while attracting researchers from all over the world who will use it to test their wave energy technologies.

“We’ve carefully weighed a number of factors and decided that Newport and Reedsport have the most advantages for this project,” said Belinda Batten, a professor at OSU and director of NNMREC.

Among the factors involved in the decision, Batten said, were distance to the ocean depth from shore, access to support services and onshore infrastructure, community support and overall costs.

Newport has some level of supporting infrastructure already in place, good transportation, a nearby electrical substation and strong community support, officials said. Reedsport has less existing infrastructure but deeper water nearer to shore than other sites, supportive community leaders and other advantages.

Alternate locations that were considered either lacked sufficient onshore infrastructure or the distance to offshore sites with sufficient depth were too distant.

The Oregon Wave Energy Trust collaborated with NNMREC in this selection process, which has included community forums and public outreach.

Those involved with the project anticipate that Oregon will be the leader of wave energy development in the United States, and the site of the first commercial generation of wave-produced electricity. Test facilities such as this will be a key factor in helping this evolving industry to move forward and develop optimum technologies for producing electricity from the largely untapped power of ocean waves.

In August, OSU Libraries hosted the Oregon Tribal Archives Institute, a project created through a two-year grant from the Oregon State Library that focused on providing in-depth archives and records management training for Oregon’s tribal nations.

The Institute was designed to help the tribes establish an archives and records management program, or further an existing program. It also provided tribal representatives with a chance to collaborate and identify ways to work together as they move to organize, preserve, and make accessible to their tribal communities key parts of their history.

David Lewis, tribal museum curator for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, was one of the participants in the five-day workshop. He said the Grand Ronde community is intimately involved in preserving their history, and many tribal elders assist by identify people in archival photographs, or donate family papers for archiving. The archives are maintained by tribal employees who are motivated by an interest in maintaining the history of the tribe.

“The training was a way that we at Grand Ronde could increase the skills of the staff and help them do their work better and more efficiently,” Lewis said. “The institute gave them ideas and introduced them to a network of similar people and we will need these as we move into developing a museum at the tribe. The training was amazing, better than I had hoped.”

OSU already has a history of working with the preservation of multicultural archives from around the state. OSU Libraries houses the Oregon Multicultural Archives, which assists in preserving the histories and sharing the stories that document Oregon’s African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American communities, as well as advancing scholarship in ethnic studies and racial diversity both on the OSU campus as well as statewide and regionally.

“This institute was a unique opportunity to bring together tribal culture keepers from both records management and archival programs,” said Natalia Fernandez, Oregon Multicultural Librarian with OSU Libraries. “While one of the main goals of the institute was to provide an opportunity for professional development, our other, and perhaps more important goal was to provide an opportunity for networking and community building.”

The training included archival facility planning; disaster preparedness planning and recovery; best practices for proper care and storage of archival materials; audio / visual collections; electronic records management; records retention and collection development policies, access levels to tribal records available online; grant writing; social media; professional development networks, and project collaboration.

The group also took field trips to the Siletz and Grand Ronde tribal communities and the Benton County Museum to look at their archival and museum facilities.

“To have participants from all nine tribes in Oregon really tells me that there is a need,” Lewis said, “and we have done the right thing to pursue this project.”

MaryKay Dahlgreen, Oregon State Librarian, said she appreciated the collaborative effort of the institute. “I was delighted with the level of excitement and commitment I got from the group after a very full week of intense work.”

The institute attendees included members from all nine tribal nations. Institute coordinators and facilitators were from the OSU Libraries, the University of Oregon Libraries, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, Benton County Historical Society and the Oregon Folklife Network.

The research found that high doses of this vitamin increased by 1,000 times the ability of immune cells to kill staph bacteria. The work was done both in laboratory animals and with human blood.

The findings were published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, UCLA, and other institutions. The research was supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The work may offer a new avenue of attack against the growing number of “superbugs.”

“This is potentially very significant, although we still need to do human studies,” said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor in OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute. “Antibiotics are wonder drugs, but they face increasing problems with resistance by various types of bacteria, especially Staphylococcus aureus.

“This could give us a new way to treat staph infections that can be deadly, and might be used in combination with current antibiotics,” Gombart said. “It’s a way to tap into the power of the innate immune system and stimulate it to provide a more powerful and natural immune response.”

The scientists found that clinical doses of nicotinamide increased the numbers and efficacy of “neutrophils,” a specialized type of white blood cell that can kill and eat harmful bacteria.

The nicotinamide was given at megadose, or therapeutic levels, far beyond what any normal diet would provide - but nonetheless in amounts that have already been used safely in humans, as a drug, for other medical purposes.

However, there is no evidence yet that normal diets or conventional-strength supplements of vitamin B3 would have any beneficial effect in preventing or treating bacterial infection, Gombart said, and people should not start taking high doses of the vitamin.

Gombart has been studying some of these issues for more than a decade, and discovered 10 years ago a human genetic mutation that makes people more vulnerable to bacterial infections. In continued work on the genetic underpinnings of this problem, researchers found that nicotinamide had the ability to “turn on” certain antimicrobial genes that greatly increase the ability of immune cells to kill bacteria.

One of the most common and serious of the staph infections, called methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA, was part of this study. It can cause serious and life-threatening illness, and researchers say the widespread use of antibiotics has helped increase the emergence and spread of this bacterial pathogen.

Dr. George Liu, an infectious disease expert at Cedars-Sinai and co-senior author on the study, said that “this vitamin is surprisingly effective in fighting off and protecting against one of today’s most concerning public health threats.” Such approaches could help reduce dependence on antibiotics, he said.

Co-first authors Pierre Kyme and Nils Thoennissen found that when used in human blood, clinical doses of vitamin B3 appeared to wipe out the staph infection in only a few hours.

Serious staph infections, such as those caused by MRSA, are increasingly prevalent in hospitals and nursing homes, but are also on the rise in prisons, the military, among athletes, and in other settings where many people come into close contact.

Engineers at Oregon State University have for the first time developed a way to use microwave heating in the synthesis of copper zinc tin sulfide, a promising solar cell compound that is less costly and toxic than some solar energy alternatives.

The findings were published in Physica Status Solidi A, a professional journal.

“All of the elements used in this new compound are benign and inexpensive, and should have good solar cell performance,” said Greg Herman, an associate professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering at OSU.

“Several companies are already moving in this direction as prices continue to rise for some alternative compounds that contain more expensive elements like indium,” he said. “With some improvements in its solar efficiency this new compound should become very commercially attractive.”

These thin-film photovoltaic technologies offer a low cost, high volume approach to manufacturing solar cells. A new approach is to create them as an ink composed of nanoparticles, which could be rolled or sprayed – by approaches such as old-fashioned inkjet printing – to create solar cells.

To further streamline that process, researchers have now succeeded in using microwave heating, instead of conventional heating, to reduce reaction times to minutes or seconds, and allow for great control over the production process. This “one-pot” synthesis is fast, cheap and uses less energy, researchers say, and has been utilized to successfully create nanoparticle inks that were used to fabricate a photovoltaic device.

“This approach should save money, work well and be easier to scale up at commercial levels, compared to traditional synthetic methods,” Herman said. “Microwave technology offers more precise control over heat and energy to achieve the desired reactions.”

Funding and support for this research was provided by Sharp Laboratories of America, the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute, and the Oregon Process Innovation Center for Sustainable Solar Cell Manufacturing, an Oregon BEST signature research facility.

The Ocean Sentinel is a $1.5 million device developed by the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, or NNMREC, at Oregon State University. It’s a major step forward for the future of wave energy, and should do its first testing within days – a “WetNZ” device developed by private industry.

The creation of this mobile wave energy test facility has been needed for years, experts say, and it will be used by many companies and academic researchers in the quest to develop wave energy technology, measure and understand the wave resource, and study the energy output and other important issues.

“The Ocean Sentinel will provide a standardized, accurate system to compare various wave energy technologies, including systems that may be better for one type of wave situation or another,” said Sean Moran, ocean test facilities manager with NNMREC.

“We have to find out more about which technologies work best, in what conditions, and what environmental impacts there may be,” Moran said. “We’re not assuming anything. We’re first trying to answer the question, ‘Is this a good idea or not?’ And if some technology doesn’t work as well, we want to find that out quickly, and cheaply, and the Ocean Sentinel will help us do that.”

Experts say that, unlike some alternative energy forms such as wind energy, it’s probable that no one technology will dominate the wave energy field. Some systems may work better in low wave settings, others with a more powerful resource. The Ocean Sentinel will be able to measure wave amplitude, device energy output, ocean currents, wind speeds, extremes of wave height and other data.

This initiative was made possible by support from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Oregon Department of Energy, and the Oregon Wave Energy Trust.

The challenges at hand, Moran said, are enormous.

“We’re still trying to figure out what will happen when some of these devices have to stand up to 50-foot waves,” Moran said. “The ocean environment is very challenging, especially off Oregon where we have such a powerful wave energy resource.”

The one-square-mile site where the Ocean Sentinel will operate, about two miles northwest of Yaquina Head, has been carefully studied, both for its physical and biological characteristics. A large part of the NNMREC program is studying potential environmental impacts, whether they might come from electromagnetic fields, changes in acoustics, or other factors. Any changes in sediments, invertebrates or fish will be monitored closely.

And a third part of the program is human dimensions research and public outreach, engagement and education. Toward that goal, three public hearings are being planned in August to discuss the possibility of siting a different test facility – the Pacific Marine Energy Center – in one of four possible locations: Newport, Reedsport, Coos Bay, or Camp Rilea near Warrenton. That $8 million grid-connected center would be a continuation and expansion of the work made possible today by the Ocean Sentinel.

Wave energy is a technology still in its infancy. It can use large buoys that move up and down in ocean swells, or other technologies, to produce large and sustainable supplies of electricity.

A task force of OSU faculty, staff and students has been working on ways to help students thrive academically and personally during the first year. It concurs with what many national studies have found: The best way to ensure that students return for their sophomore year is to help them “connect” to campus in a meaningful way, said Susie Brubaker-Cole, associate provost for academic success at OSU and co-chair of the task force.

“What we’re seeking is a ‘high-touch’ experience for students during that first year when it becomes critical for them to interact in meaningful ways with other students, with faculty and with campus programs,” Brubaker-Cole said. “A lot of this happens in the classroom, but much of it is an extension of classroom learning that reaches into life on campus and the experiences you have as a member of campus communities.”

As an integral part of OSU’s initiative, first-year students will be required to live on campus for their first academic year beginning fall term of 2013.

“If you look at top universities in the country in terms of academic success and student retention, almost all of them require students to live on campus their first year,” Brubaker-Cole said. “The learning and community-building that occur in campus residences are focal points of the first-year experience.”

Tom Scheuermann, director of University Housing and Dining Services at OSU, says his office has assessed its overall on-campus housing capacity and will have adequate space for the live-on-campus requirement. In addition to the International Living-Learning Center that opened last year and houses 320 students, OSU’s on-campus capacity will get a boost from a new residence hall that is in design with a planned opening of fall 2014.

Scheuermann said on-campus capacity this fall (2012) should be about 4,300 spaces, which will grow by another 300 in 2014 with the new hall. And some floors in Finley Hall that will be off-line in the coming academic year, or used for office space, will reopen in fall of 2013.

In recent years, about 80 percent of the new-to-OSU freshmen have lived on campus.

There will be some exceptions granted to the new requirement, OSU officials say, though specifics have yet to be determined.

Brubaker-Cole and her colleagues are focused on the importance of boosting OSU’s First Year Experience efforts to broaden student success and deepen student learning. OSU’s retention rate for freshman-to-sophomore year is 81.4 percent, which “is actually good when compared overall nationally,” she said, “but it hasn’t improved over the past few years in ways that fulfill our aspirations.”

“We want more of our students to flourish here, earn their degrees, and benefit from the career paths that a college education brings,” Brubaker-Cole said.

OSU’s retention rate is comparable to its institutional peers, according to Brubaker-Cole, but not as good as some of its aspirational peers.

“It is important to actively build programs and support services that foster broad student success, and we know that the stakes are high for our students, their families and Oregon communities,” she said. “An Oregon state employment projection showed that by 2016, nearly 74 percent of high-wage job openings in Oregon will require a bachelor’s degree. We also know that college degree-holders are more active in civic life and are more likely to vote.”

Mark Hoffman, co-chair of the task force and associate dean of OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences, said the university is also working on ways to better connect students to campus resources, including the library, academic advisers, faculty mentors, Counseling and Psychological Services, and other resources.

“There are summer bridge programs to help students get their feet wet before they become full-time students,” Hoffman said, “and then we have U-Engage classes for first year students to help them learn how to navigate on campus and connect to all of the things it offers. Our next step is to evaluate all of the orientation programs and see what is working and how we can better coordinate the university’s efforts.”

Brubaker-Cole said students typically drop out for a variety of reasons, including homesickness, academic difficulties, finances, and psychological pressures. Friendships, mentoring relations with faculty members, connecting to programs that motivate and inspire, and campus support services can help offset the pressures that compel some students to not return after their first year.

“Retention is an issue that almost all universities around the country face,” Brubaker-Cole said, “and fostering a deep sense of belonging for all students in the university community is the critical foundation for college success.”

The analysis, published in the journal Nature, scored each nation on a 0-100 scale in 10 separate categories such as clean water, biodiversity, food provision, carbon storage, coastal protection, coastal economies and others.

In this “Ocean Health Index,” the world received an average score of 60. The U.S. was at 63.

This is one of the first comprehensive analyses to evaluate the global oceans in so many critical aspects, including natural health and the human dimensions of sustainability. But it’s meant less to be a conclusion, the authors said, and more a baseline that can help track either improvements or declines in ocean health going into the future.

“When we conclude that the health of the oceans is 60 on a scale of 100, that doesn’t mean we’re failing,” said Karen McLeod, an ecologist at Oregon State University, director of science at COMPASS, and one of several lead authors on the study.

“Instead, it shows there’s room for improvement, suggests where strategic actions can make the biggest difference, and gives us a benchmark against which to evaluate progress over time,” she said. “The index allows us to track what’s happening to the whole of ocean health instead of just the parts.”

The scores ranged from 36 to 86, with the highest ratings going to Jarvis Island, an uninhabited and relatively pristine coral atoll in the South Pacific Ocean. Many countries in West Africa, the Middle East and Central America scored poorly, while higher ratings went to parts of Northern Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.

Human activities such as overfishing, coastal development and pollution have altered marine ecosystems and eroded their capacity to provide benefits, the researchers noted in their report.

Among the findings of the study:

• Developed countries generally, but not always, scored higher than developing countries, usually due to better economies and regulation.

• Only 5 percent of countries scored higher than 70, and 32 percent were below 50.

• Biodiversity scores were surprisingly high, in part because few known marine species face outright extinction.

• The U.S. received some of its best ratings for coastal protection and strong coastal livelihoods and economies.

• Global food provision is far below its potential, and could be improved if wild-caught fisheries were more sustainably harvested, and sustainable marine aquaculture was increased.

• Restoration of mangroves, salt marshes, coral reefs and seagrass beds could significantly improve ocean health by addressing multiple goals at once.

• About half of the goals are getting worse, and this assessment could be overly optimistic if existing regulations are not effectively implemented.

Other primary authors of the report were from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Conservation International, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. The work was led by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and Conservation International.

The researchers said they hope the analysis will help inform public policy and management.

The study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s (JAMA) Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at a nationally representative group of 2,340 adults ages 65 and older. The researchers found that lower blood pressure protected healthier, robust older adults but the same may not be true for their more frail counterparts.

Lead author Michelle Odden, a public health epidemiologist at Oregon State University, said blood pressure rises naturally as people age. Her study used walking speed as a measure of frailty. Participants were asked to walk a distance of about 20 feet at their normal rate. Those who walked less than 0.8 meters per second were defined as slower walkers. Those who walked faster than 0.8 meters per second were in the second group of more robust adults, who also had a lower prevalence of diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure.

The third group included those who were not able to complete the walking test for various reasons, including inability to walk 20 feet.

“As we age, our blood vessels lose elasticity and becomes stiff,” Odden said. “Higher blood pressure could be a compensatory mechanism to overcome this loss of vascular elasticity and keep fresh blood pumping to the brain and heart.”

Odden said the mortality differences between the fast walkers and slow walkers or non-completers can be explained simply – everyone ages differently.

“There is a profound difference in the physiological age of an 80-year-old man who golfs every day, and someone who needs a walker to get around,” she said. “So in the fast walkers, high blood pressure may be more indicative of underlying disease, not just a symptom of the aging process.”

Among the faster walkers, those with high blood pressure had a 35 percent greater risk of dying compared with those with normal blood pressure.

In contrast, there was no association between high blood pressure and mortality in the slow walking group. Strikingly, those who were unable to complete the walking test had the opposite results – those with higher blood pressure had a 62 percent lower mortality rate.

Since this is one of the first studies to examine walking speed, mortality and blood pressure, Odden cautioned against people making health decisions based on these early findings.

“Any sort of decision regarding medication use should be done in consultation with a physician,” she said. “Our study supports treating high blood pressure in healthy, active older adults. But in frail older adults, with multiple chronic health conditions, we need to take a closer look at what sorts of effects high blood pressure could serve and whether having a higher blood pressure could be protective.”

Odden is an expert on chronic disease and disease prevention in aging populations, particularly in regard to cardiovascular health and kidney disease. Her work is funded by the National Institute on Aging and the American Heart Association Western States Affiliate.

The study, published this week in the journal Science, could have a major impact on theories of how the Western Hemisphere was populated. The research was funded by multiple organizations, including the Keystone Archaeological Research Fund, the Bernice Peltier Huber Charitable Trust, and the National Science Foundation.

Lead author Dennis Jenkins, from the University of Oregon, and second author Loren Davis, from Oregon State University, were part of a large multidisciplinary team that spent much of the past two years combing through deposits and collecting more than 100 high-precision radiocarbon dates from Paisley Caves, located in south-central Oregon’s Summer Lake basin.

What cemented the authors’ findings was a thorough examination of the stratigraphy in the caves, which confirmed that coprolites containing human DNA were definitely associated with layers of sediment ranging in age from 2,295 to 12,450 radiocarbon years ago (which is roughly 2,340 to 14,700 calendar years ago) – and were not contaminated by humans or animals at later dates. The researchers last year also found additional Western Stemmed projectile points.

“The Western Stemmed and Clovis traditions include different technological strategies,” said Davis, an associate professor of anthropology in OSU’s School of Language, Culture and Society. “The Western Stemmed artifacts from Paisley Caves are at least as old – and may predate – the oldest confirmed Clovis sites, indicating that the peopling of the Americas was at least technologically divergent, if not genetically divergent.”

The projectile points were found in deposits dating back 12,960 to 13,230 calendar years ago, and thus were not quite as old as the oldest coprolites. But DNA from coprolites of that era was similar to that found in the oldest coprolites, Davis pointed out. “They were from the same genetic group,” he said.

The difference in technology between Clovis and Western Stemmed projectile points revolves around how they were attached to spears, which relates to the strategy of finding and shaping pieces of rock in the first place. Clovis artifacts have a distinct notch at the base, where a piece has been removed. The tool builder starts with a large rock and reduces it considerably.

Western Stemmed points and Clovis points primarily differ in the construction of their hafting portions, Davis said. Stemmed points bear constricted bases, while the hafting element of a Clovis point is thinned through the removal of a large flake from the base. Western Stemmed points are also often made by modifying smaller flakes in a different way than Clovis peoples manufactured their spear points.

“These two approaches to making projectile points were really quite different,” Davis said, “and the fact that Western Stemmed point-makers fully overlap, or even pre-date Clovis point makers likely means that Clovis peoples were not the sole founding population of the Americas.”

Clovis technology has only been found in the New World, while Western Stemmed technology can be related to archaeological patterns seen in northeastern Asia.

“We seem to have two different traditions co-existing in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” said the University of Oregon’s Jenkins.

Past studies of Paisley Caves also have reported on human coprolites with ancient DNA, but questions arose about whether those samples could have been contaminated, and whether they were found in context with artifacts from the same era. So the researchers did an exhaustive examination of the stratigraphy, which is one of Davis’ specialties.

Davis conducted microscopic analysis of the soil structure using a petrographic microscope to eliminate signs of liquid – such as water or urine from humans or animals – moving downward through the soil. The team also carefully analyzed the silt lens where the stem points were found and bracketed above and below those layers to see if radiocarbon dates synchronized.

“The stemmed points were in great context,” Davis said. “There is no doubt that they were in primary context, associated with excellent radiocarbon dates.”

The earliest models for peopling of the Americas suggest that the first inhabitants arrived from Asia via a land bridge at the end of the last Ice Age and fanned out across the continent. However, those models can’t explain the presence of two separate and distinct stone tool technologies at the end of the last glacial period.

“Given these recent results from Paisley Caves, it’s clear that we need to come up with some better models,” Davis said.

Woods replaces Ron Adams, who stepped down as dean to lead a new initiative at OSU on industry relations as executive associate vice president for research. She will begin her new duties as dean of OSU’s College of Engineering on July 30.

Woods has been dean of Colorado State’s College of Engineering since July 1, 2006, after a one-year appointment as interim dean. She previously was on the engineering faculty at Oregon State, where she also helped launch the university’s distance and continuing education programs. Woods was on the OSU faculty from 1984 to 2001.

“Sandra Woods is an experienced and visionary leader, who directed Colorado State’s engineering program through an impressive period of growth in enrollment, research and impact,” said Sabah Randhawa, OSU’s provost and executive vice president. “She also has led numerous initiatives with distance learning and graduate education and she has been an advocate for women pursuing engineering as a career. We’re delighted to bring her back to our campus.”

After graduating from Michigan State University, Woods earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from the University of Washington and joined the OSU faculty in 1984. She is an environmental engineer who specializes in the bioremediation and biotransformation of environmental contaminants, for which she received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985.

While at OSU, Woods was honored for her teaching and also served in a variety of administrative roles, both in the College of Engineering and throughout the university. She helped launch Oregon State’s distance and continuing education programs and served as interim dean of the program in 1998-99.

In 2001, Woods was appointed head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. She served as department head until her appointment as interim dean in 2005.

As dean, she led a college with more than 2,500 students and annual research expenditures of about $63 million. Under her leadership, the college is building a $71 million interdisciplinary teaching and research facility. Other key projects have included construction of a new residence hall to house an engineering living/learning community, a new co-op program, new interdisciplinary majors, options and minors, and a novel freshman retention program.

The college received the Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network “Women in Engineering Initiative Award” for its success in improving gender diversity within the engineering program. In 2010, the Colorado section of the American Council of Engineering Companies awarded Woods the General Palmer Award as the “Outstanding Engineer in Industry” for her leadership and contributions.

As dean of OSU’s College of Engineering, Woods will take over the leadership of a college with an annual budget of $73 million, a total of 253 faculty and staff, and more than 5,200 students.

Scott Ashford has served as interim dean of OSU’s College of Engineering since Adams’ left the position.

Maness has been a professor and head of the Department of Forest Engineering, Resources and Management at OSU since 2009. He succeeds Hal Salwasser, who earlier this year announced his decision to step down as dean. Maness will begin his new duties as dean on Aug. 1.

As the Cheryl Ramberg and Allyn C. Ford Dean of Forestry – and director of the Oregon Forest Research Laboratory – Maness will assume leadership of one of the world’s leading forestry programs. With nearly a thousand undergraduate and graduate students, an annual budget of some $25 million, and a robust research program, the OSU College of Forestry is a vital resource for managers of forests in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

“Dr. Maness is passionate about the College of Forestry and he has extensive industry and academic experience,” said Sabah Randhawa, OSU provost and executive vice president. “He is a broad thinker and understands sustainable, long-term management of forests and the resulting implications for forestry education, research and outreach.

“His vision and experience will help us further advance the college and its contributions to the university’s signature area of advancing the science of sustainable earth ecosystems,” Randhawa added.

Maness has worked for Weyerhaeuser Company as a forest engineer in the Klamath Falls region, where he developed strategic forest planning models and manufacturing optimization systems for West Coast sawmills. He returned to school and earned his Ph.D. in forest economics from the University of Washington in 1989, and joined the faculty of the University of British Columbia. Maness earned a B.S. in forest management from Western Virginia University and an M.S. in forest operations from Virginia Tech.

In 1994, Maness founded the Canadian National Centre of Excellence in Advanced Wood Processing, and directed the program for five years, then led a $25 million fund-raising campaign for the center. In 2002, the new undergraduate program he helped develop there won the Yves Landry Foundation Award for most innovative Canadian university-level manufacturing technology program.

Maness founded the BC Forum on Forest Economics and Policy in 2004 – a research and outreach center to engage stakeholders in building a strategic vision for the future of British Columbia’s forest sector. During a 2008 sabbatical, he worked as a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, D.C., where he conducted research on climate mitigation and wood energy policy.

In addition to his expertise on Northwest forests, Maness has worked extensively in South America.

The widespread dieback of these tree species is a special concern, scientists say, because they are some of the last trees that can hold together a fragile ecosystem, nourish other plant and animal species, and prevent serious soil erosion.

The major form of soil erosion in this region is wind erosion. Dust blowing from eroded hills can cover snowpacks, cause them to absorb heat from the sun and melt more quickly, and further reduce critically-short water supplies in the Colorado River basin.

The findings were published in the journal Ecohydrology by scientists from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon. NASA supported the work.

“Pinyon pine and juniper are naturally drought-resistant, so when these tree species die from lack of water, it means something pretty serious is happening,” said Wendy Peterman, an OSU doctoral student and soil scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute. “They are the last bastion, the last trees standing and in some cases the only thing still holding soils in place.”

“These areas could ultimately turn from forests to grasslands, and in the meantime people are getting pretty desperate about these soil erosion issues,” she said. “And anything that further reduces flows in the Colorado River is also a significant concern.”

It’s not certain whether or not the recent tree die-offs are related to global warming, Peterman said. However, the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that while most of the United States was getting warmer and wetter, the Southwest will get warmer and drier. Major droughts have in fact occurred there, and the loss of pinyon pine and juniper trees would be consistent with the climate change projections, Peterman said.

Pinyon pine and juniper are the dominant trees species in much of the Southwest, routinely able to withstand a year or two of drought, and able to grow in many mountainous areas at moderate elevation. The trees are common in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and may have expanded their range in the past century during conditions that were somewhat wetter than normal.

In some places up to 90 percent of these trees have now died, many of them during a major drought in 2003 and 2004. The new research concluded that most of the mortality occurred in shallow soils having less than four inches of available water in about the top five feet of the soil column.

Most of the tree mortality, the scientists said, was caused by trees being sufficiently weakened by drought that opportunistic bark beetle epidemics were able to kill the pinyon pine, and the vascular system of the juniper ceased to function.

Traditionally, pinyon pine and juniper were not considered trees of significant value. They were occasionally used for firewood, but otherwise small and not particularly impressive.

They perform key ecosystem functions, however, not the least of which is stabilizing soils and preventing erosion. They also provide some food in the form of pine nuts and juniper berries, and store carbon in their biomass, and in the soils beneath their canopies.

One week later, a magnitude 7 earthquake destroyed Port au Prince, killing many thousand people and devastating the economy of Haiti.

The clock is ticking on many other earthquake faults throughout the world, Yeats says, and though he did not “predict” the Haiti earthquake, he can point to other places that could face the same fate. He outlines some of these areas in a new book called “Active Faults of the World,” published by Cambridge University Press.

“We are not yet to the point where we can predict earthquakes,” said Yeats, a professor emeritus in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “What we can do is tell you where some of the most dangerous faults lie – and where those coincide with crowded cities, few building codes, and a lack of social services, you have a time bomb.

“Unfortunately, we can’t say if an earthquake will strike today, tomorrow or in a hundred years,” he added. “But in all of these locations it will happen someday – and unless something is done to improve conditions, many thousands of people will die.”

In his book, Yeats notes that the greatest migration in human history is of people moving from rural areas to “megacities” in the developing world. People have flocked to these mega-cities where multi-level housing and businesses are rapidly built, and often poorly constructed and poorly inspected. When many of these locations last had a major earthquake, their population was small and a majority of the people was living in one-story dwellings, limiting the loss of life.

Yeats cites as an example Caracas, Venezuela, which has an earthquake plate-boundary fault north of the city. In 1812, a major quake shook Caracas and other Venezuelan cities and killed an estimated 10,000 people - about 10 percent of the population at that time. Today, the population of Caracas is nearly 3 million, but government decision-makers are “not placing earthquake hazards high on their list of priorities,” Yeats said, despite the presence of knowledgeable local experts.

Another city near the top of Yeats’ list of earthquake dangers is Kabul, Afghanistan, which suffered an enormous earthquake in 1505. Because of recent wars, the buildings in Kabul are in poor shape – either poorly constructed, or damaged from bombs. On a visit to Kabul in 2002, Yeats found many families living in the ruins of these buildings.

“If Kabul has a repeat of the 1505 earthquake,” Yeats said, “it could kill more people than have died in all of Afghanistan’s wars in the last 40 years because of the influx of refugees living in crowded, substandard conditions.”

Tehran, Iran, is another heavily populated city situated near a major fault line. Located at the base of the Alborz mountain range, Tehran has some 11 million people in its urban boundaries, and Yeats said they are vulnerable because of poorly constructed housing in many parts of the city – a result of corruption in building construction and building inspection industries.

Other over-populated cities near fault lines with poor building codes on Yeats’ list include Istanbul, Turkey, now under an earthquake hazard warning after a quake of magnitude 7.4 in 1999; Nairobi, Kenya, close to a 7.3 quake in the 1920s; and Guantánamo, Cuba.

“Guantánamo is a bit like Haiti,” Yeats pointed out. “They have a fault just offshore, and yet they have no clue they are at risk because Cuba has not had any catastrophic earthquakes in its 500-year history. The military prison operated by the United States would also be at risk, but as far as I know, the Americans are not contributing their expertise to help Guantånamo prepare for its future earthquake.”

There are many places around the world likely to experience a major earthquake in the future, Yeats says, but the “risk” to human lives may not be as high because of less crowding and better building codes. He points to the 2011 super-quake in Japan, which reached a magnitude of 9.0, yet did not cause nearly as much destruction as the tsunami it triggered.

“The Japanese,” Yeats said, “lead the world in taking earthquake risk seriously.”

Yeats was one of the first geologists to point to the Pacific Northwest as being at risk for a major earthquake, because of its proximity to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Since he and other OSU scientists first raised awareness of that risk in the 1980s, there has been gradual acceptance that an earthquake will strike in the future.

“But will this acceptance lead to concrete action, such as approving a bond issue for seismic upgrades to old school buildings?” Yeats said. “Will it lead to strengthening communities on the West Coast against tsunamis?”

The OSU professor emeritus hopes his book leads to more awareness of the hundreds of faults around the world – some well-known, and some not. This is the first time someone has attempted to summarize the totality of earthquake faults, and Yeats used his own research and observations, as well as exhaustive literature reviews.

“Knowing about the faults is the first step,” Yeats said, “but preparing for the risk is what really needs to happen. It is kind of interesting that Japan has done a lot of work preparing for an earthquake in their Home Islands, and then one bigger than they expected hits northern Japan, accompanied by a devastating tsunami, whose effects have been felt as far away as Oregon.”

A similar thing happened northeast of Beijing, China, in 1976, when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck along a fault line that was not thought to be a major threat, killing more than 200,000 people. And it happened again in 2011 at Christchurch, New Zealand, with an earthquake on a minor fault no one knew about in advance – but still the earthquake produced the greatest losses in New Zealand’s history.

“The lesson there is that you never know which one is going to nail you,” Yeats said, “but it pays to be prepared.”

Yeats’ book, “Active Faults of the World,” is available in print and as an e-book from Cambridge University Press at www.cambridge.org

Those who do leave the illegal drug trade often do so because of a complex mixture of issues including fatherhood, drug use and abuse, and threat of punishment by authorities or fear of retaliation. Researchers concluded that traffickers need ways that allow them to leave the drug business without surrendering their entire identity.

The new article, now online in the International Journal of Drug Policy, is one of the first ethnographic studies to interview former drug traffickers in detail.

Tobin Hansen of Oregon State University and lead author Howard Campbell with the University of Texas-El Paso conducted detailed life history interviews with 30 former drug traffickers from the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border, which has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

They wanted to find out why traffickers quit selling drugs, and also discover more about their perspectives on the lifestyle and reasons why they entered the drug trade.

Hansen, who teaches Spanish at OSU, said very few studies of this kind exist. He said the former traffickers interviewed were primarily young white and Mexican-American males.

“Our primary goal in this study was to look at motivating factors why traffickers may, or may not, choose to get out of the drug game,” Hansen said. “We found they often want to quit, for safety reasons, for family and just as a part of life course as they get older, but that it is very difficult to relinquish the power and status they get from the business.”

Many of the study participants talked about feeling powerless, or being poor as kids, and how joining a gang or starting to sell drugs helped change this.

“In this area, it is also a rite of passage to become part of the drug business,” Hansen said. “Most of the people we talked to knew someone in the business, or had family directly involved. It is very difficult for them to remove themselves from that at a young age.”

Even those traffickers who had quit drug smuggling often spoke fondly of those years looking back, remembering specific moments when they were “on top” and powerful. Hansen pointed out that for young men who are used to having a great deal of wealth and power at their fingertips it is seen as a huge loss of status to become laborers.

In addition, Hansen said media and the glorification of the drug trade entered into the conversations with traffickers. One man they interviewed dropped repeated references to the Al Pacino movie “Scarface,” and the TV series “Gangland.” More than 25 percent of the former traffickers they spoke to were trying to sell their stories to the media or to Hollywood for script development.

“Three of these guys had already written books about their lives,” Hansen said. “The desire for acknowledgement and to maintain some sort of outlaw image is pretty important.”

Hansen and Campbell believe the complex motivating factors for why these traffickers left the drug business points to the fact prison sentences aren’t enough. They recommend policies that directly address the factors that make it difficult for traffickers to quit. Specifically, the researchers have suggested a program structured similarly to Narcotics Anonymous, where traffickers could meet and develop insight into the ways their narco-identities confined and limited their lives.

They added that these meetings could also be a place to share ideas and for them to write their life stories, thus helping them maintain a sense of dignity and excitement without engaging in the drug game.

“Policies need to start addressing that these issues are not created in a vacuum,” Hansen said. “We need to look at the socioeconomic conditions, cultural values and systems that pull people into, and out of, the drug business. We also need to come to terms with the biggest factor of all – the demand for this product from the United States has not dropped at all in four decades.”

OSU’s racing team, which is a collaboration of OSU and Duale Hochschule Baden-Wurttemberg-Ravensburg in Germany, received the first place overall award as well as three first place titles in engineering design, endurance, and the SAE Spirit of Excellence.

There were 120 teams from around the world at this competition, entering 106 vehicles. Participants came from the United States, Canada, Austria, Germany, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

“This is the first time in the history of the Michigan race that a university has won for three consecutive years,” said Robert Stone, professor and interim head of the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at OSU. “It’s a great accomplishment.”

OSU’s team, composed mostly of students from the College of Engineering, has been extraordinarily successful in Formula SAE racing in recent years. This sport is extremely popular in Europe, where almost every university sponsors a team, and OSU has also dominated many universities with strong teams in the Midwest, the historic home of the nation’s automotive industry.

Cars in Formula SAE racing are judged on such factors as cost, innovation, acceleration, design and other aspects. Students spend thousands of hours working on the vehicles and in the process learn skills in aerodynamics, chassis construction and mechanical engineering as well as business development and fund raising.

Formula SAE racing is organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

Now a new study, funded by the National Science Foundation, shows that the residents of that region are at risk from yet another potentially deadly natural phenomenon – major volcanic eruptions.

Researchers from Oregon State University working with colleagues in Indonesia have documented six major volcanic eruptions in Sumatra over the past 35,000 years – most equaling or surpassing in explosive intensity the eruption of Washington’s Mount St. Helens in 1980.

Results of the research have just been published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.

“Sumatra has a number of active and potentially explosive volcanoes and many show evidence of recent activity,” said Morgan Salisbury, lead author on the study, who recently completed his doctoral studies in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “Most of the eruptions are small, so little attention has been paid to the potential for a catastrophic eruption.

“But our study found some of the first evidence that the region has a much more explosive history than perhaps has been appreciated,” he added.

Until this study, little was known about Sumatra’s volcanic history – in part because few western scientists have been allowed access to the region. The most visible evidence of recent volcanic activity among the estimated 33-35 potentially active volcanoes are their steep-sided cones and lack of vegetation, indicating at least some minor eruptive processes.

But in 2007, an expedition led by OSU’s Chris Goldfinger was permitted into the region and the Oregon State researchers and their Indonesian colleagues set out to explore the earthquake history of the region by studying sediment cores from the Indian Ocean. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it was the first research ship from the United States allowed into Indonesia/Sumatran waters in nearly 30 years.

While searching the deep-sea sediment cores for “turbidites” – coarse gravel deposits that can act as a signature for earthquakes – they noticed unmistakable evidence of volcanic ash and began conducting a parallel investigation into the region’s volcanic history.

“The ash was located only in certain cores, so the activity was localized,” said Adam Kent, a professor of geosciences at OSU and an author on the study. “Yet the eruptions still were capable of spreading the ash for 300 kilometers or more, which gave us an indication of how powerful the explosive activity might have been.”

Salisbury and his colleagues found evidence of six major eruptions and estimated them to be at least from 3.0 to 5.0 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Mount St. Helens, by comparison, was 5.0.

The Indian Ocean region is certainly known to have a violent volcanic history. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa between Sumatra and Java is perhaps the most violent volcanic explosion in recorded history, measuring 6.0 on the VEI and generating what many scientists believe to have been one of the loudest noises ever heard on Earth.

Sumatra’s own Toba volcano exploded about 74,000 years ago, generating a major lake – not unlike Oregon’s own Crater Lake, but much larger. “It looks like a giant doughnut in the middle of Sumatra,” said Jason “Jay” Patton, another OSU doctoral student and author on the study.

Sumatra’s volcanoes occasionally belch some ash and smoke, and provide comparatively minor eruptions, but residents there may not be fully aware of the potential catastrophic nature of some of its resident volcanoes, Goldfinger said.

“Prior to 2004, the risk from a major earthquake were not widely appreciated except, perhaps, in some of the more rural areas,” Goldfinger said. “And earthquakes happen more frequently than major volcanic eruptions. If it hasn’t happened in recent memory…”

Kent said the next step in the research is to work with scientists from the region to collect ash and volcanic rock from the island’s volcanoes, and then match their chemical signature to the ash they discovered in the sediment cores.

“Each volcano has a subtly different fingerprint,” Kent said, “so if we can get the terrestrial data, we should be able to link the six major eruptions to individual volcanoes to determine the ones that provide the greatest risk factors.”

In addition to the Oregon State University scientists, two Indonesian researchers were authors on the journal article: Yusuf Djadjadihardja and Udrekh Hanif, of the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology in Jakarta.

Several factors may influence the discrepancy, researchers say, including snowmelt, interaction with groundwater, flow and discharge rates, solar radiation, wind and humidity. But even after factoring out those elements, the scientists were surprised by the cooler-than-expected maximum, mean and minimum temperatures of the streams.

Results of the research, which was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon State University, have been published online in Geophysical Research Letters.

“Individually, you can find streams that seem to be getting warmer and others that are getting cooler,” said Ivan Arismendi, a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. “Some streams show little effect at all. But the bottom line is that recent trends in overall stream temperature do not parallel climate-related trends.”

The researchers caution that the findings don’t mean that climate change will not have an impact on stream temperature, which is a fundamental driver of ecosystem processes in streams. However, the relationship between air temperatures and stream temperatures may be more complex than previously realized and require additional monitoring.

Alternatively, there may be a time lag between air temperature and stream temperature, they say.

“One surprise was how few stream gauging stations have the necessary long-term records for evaluating climate-related trends in water temperatures,” said coauthor Jason Dunham, an aquatic ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Most of them are located in streams with high human influence, which makes it difficult to separate climate effects from local human impacts.”

“In those areas where human impact was minimal, the variability in trends was impressive,” added Dunham, who has a courtesy appointment in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. “It suggests to us that a variety of local influences may strongly affect how stream temperatures respond to climate.”

Arismendi and his colleagues considered more than 600 gauging stations for the study but only 20 of the stations had a sufficiently lengthy period of monitoring – and lacked human influence. These long-term monitoring sites are operated primarily by the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Forest Service, and were located in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California, Nevada and Alaska.

Coauthor Roy Haggerty, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, said warming temperatures can create more rapid or earlier snowmelt and affect stream temperatures in some locations. Another explanation for the lack of warming in many streams can be a time lag that can occur between precipitation entering underground aquifers and entering the stream.

“Groundwater can influence stream temperatures as well as streamflow and in some cases, it can take many years for that groundwater to make it to the stream,” noted Haggerty, the Hollis M. Dole Professor of Environmental Geology at OSU. “This and the other physics processes of a stream need to be considered when analyzing its heat budget – from the geology and stream bed, to the amount of shading in the riparian zone.”

Sherri Johnson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and coauthor on the study, said stream temperatures can be important for a variety of reasons.

“Temperature is a key indicator of water quality and many streams throughout the Northwest have increased stream temperatures associated with human activity,” Johnson said. “Generally speaking, cooler stream temperatures are beneficial, and are a crucial factor in maintaining healthy ecosystems and populations of salmon, steelhead, trout and other cold-water species.”

Arismendi, who did his doctoral work at the Universidad Austral de Chile before coming to OSU, said the study points out the value of long-term data from streams that have had minimal human impacts.

“The fact that stream temperatures don’t correlate to climate trends in a predicable way indicates we need to study the relationship further to better appreciate the complexity,” Arismendi said. “Our knowledge of what influences stream temperatures is limited by the lack of long-term monitoring sites, and previous lumping of results among streams with relatively low and high levels of human impacts.

“Local variability is really important in driving climate sensitivity of streams,” he added.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A survey on the loss in the Northern Hemisphere of large predators, particularly wolves, concludes that current populations of moose, deer, and other large herbivores far exceed their historic levels and are contributing to disrupted ecosystems.

The research, published today by scientists from Oregon State University, examined 42 studies done over the past 50 years.

It found that the loss of major predators in forest ecosystems has allowed game animal populations to greatly increase, crippling the growth of young trees and reducing biodiversity. This also contributes to deforestation and results in less carbon sequestration, a potential concern with climate change.

“These issues do not just affect the United States and a few national parks,” said William Ripple, an OSU professor of forestry and lead author of the study. “The data from Canada, Alaska, the Yukon, Northern Europe and Asia are all showing similar results. There’s consistent evidence that large predators help keep populations of large herbivores in check, with positive effects on ecosystem health.”

Densities of large mammalian herbivores were six times greater in areas without wolves, compared to those in which wolves were present, the researchers concluded. They also found that combinations of predators, such as wolves and bears, can create an important synergy for moderating the size of large herbivore populations.

“Wolves can provide food that bears scavenge, helping to maintain a healthy bear population,” said Robert Beschta, a professor emeritus at OSU and co-author of the study. “The bears then often prey on young moose, deer or elk – in Yellowstone more young elk calves are killed by bears than by wolves, coyotes and cougars combined.”

In Europe, the coexistence of wolves with lynx also resulted in lower deer densities than when wolves existed alone.

In recent years, OSU researchers have helped lead efforts to understand how major predators help to reduce herbivore population levels, improve ecosystem function and even change how herbivores behave when they feel threatened by predation – an important aspect they call the “ecology of fear.”

“In systems where large predators remain, they appear to have a major role in sustaining the diversity and productivity of native plant communities, thus maintaining healthy ecosystems,” said Beschta. “When the role of major predators is more fully appreciated, it may allow managers to reconsider some of their assumptions about the management of wildlife.”

In Idaho and Montana, hundreds of wolves are now being killed in an attempt to reduce ranching conflicts and increase game herd levels.

The new analysis makes clear that the potential beneficial ecosystem effects of large predators is far more pervasive, over much larger areas, than has often been appreciated.

It points out how large predators can help maintain native plant communities by keeping large herbivore densities in check, allow small trees to survive and grow, reduce stream bank erosion, and contribute to the health of forests, streams, fisheries and other wildlife.

It also concludes that human hunting, due to its limited duration and impact, is not effective in preventing hyper-abundant densities of large herbivores. This is partly “because hunting by humans is often not functionally equivalent to predation by large, wide-ranging carnivores such as wolves,” the researchers wrote in their report.

“More studies are necessary to understand how many wolves are needed in managed ecosystems,” Ripple said. “It is likely that wolves need to be maintained at sufficient densities before we see their resulting effects on ecosystems.”

The research was published online today in the European Journal of Wildlife Research, a professional journal.

“The preservation or recovery of large predators may represent an important conservation need for helping to maintain the resiliency of northern forest ecosystems,” the researchers concluded, “especially in the face of a rapidly changing climate.”

This “fragility index” identifies periods in which international equity markets are more susceptible to widespread pull-backs by identifying common risk exposures. The index identifies when systemic risk exposure is high in markets across multiple countries, and shows an increasing probability of a global stock market draw-down.

For example, the likelihood of a global decline was one in three on days in which the index was high, but less than one in 20 following days in which the index was low.

Dave Berger, an assistant professor of finance at Oregon State University, is lead author on the study, which was published online today in the Journal of Financial Economics.

"The index may have important uses for policy makers, money managers and ultimately private investors," Berger said.

On one level, he said, the fragility index is a measure of when stock movements are most apt to be exaggerated, either positively or negatively. When it is high, movements are more extreme. When fragility is low, stock movements are less apt to experience a significant change, either up or down.

For instance, global daily returns above 1 percent, as well as losses greater than 1 percent, are both more common when the fragility index is high. But when the fragility index is high instead of low, the down days are by far more common. During such periods the probability of one of the bad days occurring is 33 percent – more than seven times higher than when fragility index is low, when these significant downturns occur only 4.5 percent of the time.

Looking at data from 1994 to 2010 that covers indexes from 82 countries, Berger and Kuntara Pukthuanthong of San Diego State University were able to identify periods in which national stock markets had a high degree of correlation, and then were able to identify periods when an initial shock would be more likely to spread.

Berger said the 2008 stock market crash illustrates the importance of studying systemic risk in international equity markets.

“The factors that lead to global declines can change, so we tried to create a general measure of systemic risk,” Berger said. “The probability of a worldwide financial pull-back is highest during periods in which many countries share a high exposure to our factor. When exposures are high across multiple countries, then if a shock occurs it will manifest globally, and multiple markets will simultaneously decline.”

Epigenetics, an increasing focus of research around the world, refers not just to our genetic code, but also to the way that diet, toxins and other forces can change which genes get activated, or “expressed.” This can play a powerful role in everything from cancer to heart disease and other health issues.

Sulforaphane was identified years ago as one of the most critical compounds that provide much of the health benefits in cruciferous vegetables, and scientists also knew that a mechanism involved was histone deacetylases, or HDACs. This family of enzymes can interfere with the normal function of genes that suppress tumors.

HDAC inhibitors, such as sulforaphane, can help restore proper balance and prevent the development of cancer. This is one of the most promising areas of much cancer research. But the new OSU studies have found a second epigenetic mechanism, DNA methylation, which plays a similar role.

“It appears that DNA methylation and HDAC inhibition, both of which can be influenced by sulforaphane, work in concert with each other to maintain proper cell function,” said Emily Ho, an associate professor in the Linus Pauling Institute and the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences. “They sort of work as partners and talk to each other.”

This one-two punch, Ho said, is important to cell function and the control of cell division – which, when disrupted, is a hallmark of cancer.

“Cancer is very complex and it’s usually not just one thing that has gone wrong,” Ho said. “It’s increasingly clear that sulforaphane is a real multi-tasker. The more we find out about it, the more benefits it appears to have.”

DNA methylation, Ho said, is a normal process of turning off genes, and it helps control what DNA material gets read as part of genetic communication within cells. In cancer that process gets mixed up. And of considerable interest to researchers is that these same disrupted processes appear to play a role in other neurodegenerative diseases, including cardiovascular disease, immune function, neurodegenerative disease and even aging.

The influence of sulforaphane on DNA methylation was explored by examining methylation of the gene cyclinD2.

This research, which was published in the journal Clinical Epigenetics, primarily studied the effect on prostate cancer cells. But the same processes are probably relevant to many other cancers as well, researchers said, including colon and breast cancer.

“With these processes, the key is balance,” Ho said. “DNA methylation is a natural process, and when properly controlled is helpful. But when the balance gets mixed up it can cause havoc, and that’s where some of these critical nutrients are involved. They help restore the balance.”

Sulforaphane is particularly abundant in broccoli, but also found in other cruciferous vegetables such as cauliflower and kale. Both laboratory and clinical studies have shown that higher intake of cruciferous vegetables can aid in cancer prevention.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the OSU Environmental Health Sciences Center.

Streams flowing through urban areas and agricultural lands may have some of the same ability to process nitrates as healthy forest streams – if they have adequate forest buffer zones along their banks, the researchers say.

Results of the research were just published the professional journal, Ecosystems.

“There are many important ways in which streamside trees help maintain healthy river systems,” said lead author Daniel Sobota, who conducted the research as part of his doctoral studies at Oregon State University. “The shade they offer may reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the stream, preventing excessive algae growth.

“Additionally, the leaves and woody debris generated by streamside forests hold the nitrogen and prevent it from being released downstream all at once,” added Sobota, whose Ph.D. was in fisheries and wildlife at OSU. “This ability of a stream to ‘take up’ the nitrogen can help reduce the impacts of nitrogen enrichment in human-altered river basins.”

In the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, Sobota and his colleagues looked at nine streams in Oregon’s Willamette Valley that flowed through forest, agricultural or urban landscapes. Among their goals was to discover how much nitrogen was absorbed by the streams near the source, and how much went downriver.

In tests in Willamette Valley streams, the researchers discovered that 21 to 72 percent of nitrates entering the waterway could be stored in leaves, wood and aquatic mosses within one kilometer downstream.

The inability of a stream or river to hold nitrogen can cause “eutrophication,” or excess algae growth that can die and lead to low-oxygen waters. Eutrophication has caused significant problems in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River drains, as well as in the Chesapeake Bay.

“Forested riparian buffers can help delay nitrogen from going downstream so there isn’t a large influx at one time that could trigger harmful algal blooms,” Sobota said. “From a management perspective, that is a desirable trait.”

Rivers also can process nitrogen naturally through a process called “denitrification.” When oxygen levels in the water are low, bacteria will consume nitrogen instead and release it into the atmosphere – mostly as a harmless gas, Sobota pointed out. However, previous studies by researchers at OSU and the U.S. Forest Service found that the Oregon streams in their study have lower-than-average rates of denitrification.

The reason is a combination of high-gradient streams, oxygenated water and porous streambeds, which are not conducive to denitrification, said Sherri Johnson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and a courtesy professor of fisheries and wildlife at OSU.

“A lot of streams in Oregon have subsurface water flowing beneath the streambed through the gravel,” said Johnson, also an author on the Ecosystems article. “This ‘hyporheic’ flow intermixes with the river water and limits the anaerobic processes.”

Linda Ashkenas, a senior faculty research assistant in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU and an author on the study, said maintaining complex river channels is also important to stream health.

“Human impacts on rivers have eliminated many of the braids and channels that existed naturally, causing water to flow downstream faster, carrying nitrates with it,” Ashkenas said. “River systems that are more complex slow the water down and give organisms time to filter out the nitrogen.”

Sobota is working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency office on the OSU campus as a National Research Council post-doctoral researcher. The Ecosystems study is part of a large, multi-institution project called Lotic Intersite Nitrogen Experiment II, or LINX II.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers have developed a type of wearable, non-invasive electronic device that can monitor vital signs such as heart rate and respiration at the same time it records a person’s activity level, opening new opportunities for biomedical research, diagnostics and patient care.

The device is just two inches wide, comfortable, does not have to be in direct contact with the skin and can operate for a week without needing to be recharged. Data can then be downloaded and assessed for whatever medical or research need is being addressed.

The technology has been reported at a professional conference, and research is continuing to make it even smaller and less costly.

“When this technology becomes more miniaturized and so low-cost that it could almost be disposable, it will see more widespread adoption,” said Patrick Chiang, an assistant professor of computer engineering at Oregon State University. “It’s already been used in one clinical research study on the effects of micronutrients on aging, and monitoring of this type should have an important future role in medicine.”

Called a “life and activity monitor,” the system uses different sensors to detect heart rate, respiration, movement and similar vital signs. It will provide doctors, researchers and clinicians a continuous flow of data over time, reduce the need for more frequent office visits, and ultimately provide better care at lower cost.

The system was developed by scientists and engineers at Oregon State University and the University of California at San Diego.

Final designs of the technology may be as small as a disposable bandage, researchers say.

But for the sake of companies forking out big bucks on the ads, it had better be a close and exciting game.

The study by an Oregon State University researcher, which is being published in the spring issue of the Journal of Advertising, found that viewers consider advertising in a more favorable light after watching a close, exciting sporting event.

“Games with high excitement levels result in a transfer of that emotion to the ads – particularly to ads shown at the end of the game that also have a lot of energy and excitement built in,” said Colleen Bee, an Oregon State marketing expert and author of the study. “We expected the outcome of a game to affect a viewer’s attitude toward the brand and the ad itself, but we found that whether the favored team won or lost had no real impact.

“It was all about the excitement and intensity of the game,” she added.

A perfect example of that came in game six of the 2011 World Series, which according to Bee’s study should have been an advertiser’s dream. The St. Louis Cardinals were one strike from elimination not once, but twice, and rallied to beat the Texas Rangers 10-9 in a heart-stopping come-from-behind win.

“The idea is that excitement from watching the game is then transferred to a greater feeling of excitement for the ads and brands at the end of the game,” Bee said. “We also found that the more stimulating the content of the ad itself, the greater impact the exciting game had on the viewer.”

The study was conducted in a computer laboratory with 112 people who watched a collegiate basketball game. They viewed ads in the context of either a high-suspense game or a low-suspense game, featuring either a win or a loss.

Bee, who is an expert on sports marketing – particularly in the areas of sports and emotions and consumer responses – said the findings have important implications for advertisers.

“The most important influence we found was the level of suspense, both for the game and the advertisement,” she said. “An ad with more zip and high energy paired with a close game resulted in increased favorable responses toward the ad and brand.”

Robert Madrigal, associate professor of business at the University of Oregon, is co-author of the study.

The new variety is a novelty type intended for home gardens and the fresh market, and it is now available in seed catalogs, said Jim Myers, a professor in the OSU horticulture department.

"It is the first improved tomato variety in the world that has anthocyanins in its fruit," he said.

Breeding for the antioxidant potential of the purple anthocyanins in the fruit is the most important goal for OSU breeders. "It will lead to a better understanding on how the antioxidants express in tomatoes and may contribute to human health," Myers said.

"If you want a really, really purple tomato that can be as black as an eggplant, give Indigo Rose a try," Myers said. "Other so-called purple and black tomatoes have the green flesh gene, which prevents normal chlorophyll breakdown. A brown pigment called pheophytin accumulates and has a brownish color that makes a muddy purple when combined with carotenoids."

Anthocyanins are in the class of flavonoids – compounds found in fruits, vegetables and beverages – that have aroused interest because of their potential health benefits. "They have many varied effects on human health, but while they are powerful antioxidants in the test tube, we don’t really know whether they have an antioxidant effect in the human body."

Indigo Rose's genesis began in the 1960s, when two breeders – one from Bulgaria and the other from the United States – first crossed-cultivated tomatoes with wild species from Chile and the Galapagos Islands, Myers said. Some wild tomato species have anthocyanins in their fruit, and until now, tomatoes grown in home gardens have had the beneficial pigment only in their leaves and stems, which are inedible.

Graduate students working with Myers crossed together the lines carrying wild tomato species genes to create the population from which ‘Indigo Rose’ was selected.

Indigo Rose is a full-season cultivar in Oregon with an average first ripe date about 91 days after transplanting, which is about 13 days later than 'Siletz' and eight days later than 'Early Girl.' Fruit yield of Indigo Rose was similar to the heirloom cultivar 'Black Prince,' and significantly lower than 'Early Girl' and 'Siletz,' but Indigo Rose produced significantly more fruit than any of the cultivars in trial.  

The new tomato is released as an open pollinated variety, and as such, seed saved from self-pollinated plants will grow true and not produce hybrids. "It's also important to know that genetic engineering techniques are never used to develop these lines," Myers said. "These tomatoes are not GMO."

Does the new variety taste good?

"People are passionate about their tomatoes," Myers said. "The purple color draws their interest and because it's extraordinary, people tend to expect impressive flavor as well. It does have a good balance of sugars and acids and tastes just like a tomato. Anthocyanins are essentially tasteless."

Myers cautions not to pick the tomato too soon. Indigo Rose must be allowed to ripen fully for complete development of sugars and acids. It's easy to harvest too early because the usual visual clues won't be there.

The tomatoes will be purple where exposed to light, Myers said, and they tend to have a purple crown. They are ripe when their color changes from a shiny blue-purple to a dull purple-brown. The fruit also softens similarly to regular tomatoes, and the bottom of the tomatoes will turn from green to red when ripe.

Anthocyanin produces in the fruit only where exposed to sunlight. If shaded by a leaf or on the base, the purple pigment does not develop. "However, if you pick an Indigo Rose and expose the non-purple area to sunlight, it will turn purple in about a week," Myers said.

"While other fruits, such as blueberries, have higher concentrations of anthocyanin, tomatoes are consumed practically daily in the United States," he said. The tomato is the nation's fourth most popular fresh-market vegetable behind potatoes, lettuce and onions, according to the USDA.

Cherry tomatoes likely will be the next of several new versions in the Indigo anthocyanin series to be bred within the next three years and are expected to have a good flavor.

Seed company catalogs that carry Indigo Rose include Territorial, Nichols,
High Mowing (organic), and Johnnys (organic).

A publication on frequently asked questions about the purple tomato is available online: http://hort.oregonstate.edu/purple_tomato_faq

The biennial award is given to a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed work and who has – in the tradition of creative writing at OSU – been a dedicated mentor to young writers. The honorarium for the award is $20,000, making the new Stone Prize one of the most substantial awards for lifetime literary achievement offered by any university in the country.

The award will be presented to Oates at a special event at on Thursday, May 10, at the Portland Art Museum Fields Ballroom beginning at 7:30 p.m. OSU Distinguished Professor of English Tracy Daugherty will conduct an on-stage interview with Oates. A reception and book signing will follow. Tickets are available at: https://pam.spotlightboxoffice.com/purchase/step4?ticketID=63600

“Joyce Carol Oates is that rare literary figure who, over the course of an extraordinarily productive literary career, has also given generous attention and energy to young writers,” said Marjorie Sandor, director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at OSU. “Unflagging in her support for literary magazines and presses, she has enriched and enlivened our nation’s cultural life.” 

Oates is the author of books in several genres including most recently “Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense” (2011) and “In Rough Country” (2010). Her newest novel, the psychological thriller “Mudwoman,” will be released in March.

She published her first book in 1963 and has since published more than 50 novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, literary criticism and essays. Her novel “them” (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels “Black Water” (1992), “What I Lived For” (1994), and “Blonde” (2000) were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2010, Oates received the National Humanities Medal.

The Stone Literary Award was established in 2011 with a $600,000 commitment from OSU College of Liberal Arts alumnus Patrick Stone (’74). Stone and his wife, Vicki, chose to endow the literary prize in order to acknowledge the growing national reputation of OSU’s creative writing program, as well as its commitment to mentoring students, building community, and reaching out to underserved populations including at-risk youth and veterans.

In addition to the Portland event, Oates will give a free public lecture in Corvallis on Wednesday, May 9, beginning at 7:30 p.m. at the CH2M HILL Alumni Center on the OSU campus.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new analysis of satellite data from the late 1990s documents for the first time the “uplift” of ground above a site of underground nuclear testing, providing researchers a potential new tool for analyzing the strength of detonation.

The study has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Lead author Paul Vincent, a geophysicist at Oregon State University, cautions that the findings won’t lead to dramatic new ability to detect secret nuclear explosions because of the time lag between the test and the uplift signature, as well as geophysical requirements of the underlying terrain. However, he said, it does “provide another forensic tool for evaluation, especially for the potential explosive yield estimates.”

“In the past, satellites have been used to look at surface subsidence as a signal for nuclear testing,” said Vincent, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “This is the first time uplift of the ground has correlated to a nuclear test site. The conditions have to be just right and this won’t work in every location.

“But it is rather interesting,” he added. “It took four years for the source of the uplift signal – a thermal groundwater plume – to reach the surface.”

The focus of the study was Lop Nor, a nuclear testing site in China where three tests were conducted – May 21, 1992; May 15, 1995; and Aug. 17, 1995. Vincent and his colleagues analyzed interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images from 1996-99 and detected a change in the surface beginning four years after the tests.

Though the uplift was less than two inches, it corresponds to known surface locations above past tests within the Lop Nor test site.

From past studies, the researchers knew that heat from underground detonation of nuclear devices propagates slowly toward the surface. At most sites – including the Nevada National Security Site – that heat signal dissipates laterally when it reaches the water table, which is usually deep beneath the surface.

At Lop Nor, however, the water table is only about three meters below the surface, and the heated groundwater plume took four years to reach that high, lifting the ground above the detonation site slightly – but enough to be detected through InSAR images.

Lop Nor also is characterized by a hard granite subsurface, which helps pipe the heated water vertically and prevents the subsidence frequently found at other testing sites.

A past study by Vincent, published in 2003, first shed light on how subsidence can manifest itself in different ways – from the force of the explosion creating a crater, to more subtle effects of “chimneying,” in which the blast opens up a chimney of sorts and draws material downward, creating a dimple at the ground surface.

Before joining the OSU faculty in 2007, Vincent spent several years as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Vincent said the analysis of nuclear explosions has become a specialized field. Seismology technology can provide an initial estimate of the energy of the explosion, but that data is only good if the seismic waves accurately reflect coupling to the connecting ground in a natural way, he explained. Efforts are sometimes made to “decouple” the explosive device from the ground by creating specializing testing chambers that can give off a false signal, potentially masking the true power of a test.

“Subsidence data combined with seismic data have helped narrow the margin of error in estimating the explosive yield,” Vincent noted, “and now there is the potential to use test-related thermal expansion as another forensic tool.”

Co-authors on the paper with Vincent include Sean Buckley of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dochul Yang, the University of Texas-Austin, and Steve Carle, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

They have quickly found out.

In the past two years, skyrocketing interest in the degree has more than doubled the undergraduate student enrollment in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and now the program is about to launch a new online professional science master’s degree in the spring.

These online degree-seekers aren’t your typical students, according to Dan Edge, who chairs the department. They are on average nine years older than other OSU students, 40 percent already have one college degree, and 20 percent are employed by a natural resources agency.

“It is all about access,” Edge said. “Many of our students are place-bound or situation-bound because of jobs and family, and simply cannot move to campus from another community and become a full-time student. And increasingly, students are becoming more interested in learning online. So we’ve tailored a degree program for them.”

Since offering the degree, the OSU department has grown from 265 mostly on-campus students to more than 600 students enrolled in on-campus and online degree programs, with many additional students declaring fisheries and wildlife as a minor and taking classes part-time. Selina Heppell, a fisheries ecologist who coordinates the online programs for the department, said the online degree is designed to get students away from the computer and out into the field.

“We really pushed for an experiential component to this degree program,” she said. “First, all of the students are required to complete an internship – usually with an agency or other organization. They also have to take a biology course with a lab through a local university or community college. And many of our courses require going out into the field to observe, sample or monitor wildlife and habitats.

“Being online really offers a different element – especially with the technological capabilities of our students,” she added. “They will collect data and take photos out in the field with their cell phones, for instance, and share them with the class, or enhance their project presentations.”

Because so many of the students have atypical backgrounds, the online classroom discussions are often rich, Heppell said.

“Obviously, there are some things you can’t do online that you can do in a classroom,” she said. “You lose a little bit of spontaneity, for example. But you get participation from a much greater percentage of the class online. It isn’t just the one or two extroverts that dominate – most students take part.”

The same demand that launched the undergraduate degree program has prompted OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife to design a master’s degree program for working professionals, which it hopes to launch this spring. The “Professional Science Master’s in Fisheries and Wildlife Administration” will be limited to a cohort of about 10 students per year and the program will require participants to have five years of professional experience at a natural resources agency or organization.

“This really is in response to agency employees looking for even more training, especially at the management level,” Edge said. He likens the professional science master’s degree to an MBA for natural resources specialists.

The degree will offer training in cooperative project management, conflict resolution, policy decisions, the human dimension of resource management and communication skills, according to Heppell. OSU will work with the agencies to create a flexibility timeline for its employees who wish to participate.

“We’ve got a long list of people already interested in the degree, so it is an exciting experiment for us and the agencies we work with,” Heppell said.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – On the 15^th anniversary of the return of wolves, a quiet but profound rebirth of life and ecosystem health is emerging at Yellowstone National Park.

For the first time in 70 years, the howl in the night is being heard and elk are afraid of wolf predation. As a result, their over-browsing of young aspen and willow trees has diminished. Trees and shrubs are recovering along streams. The habitat is improving for beaver and fish. Bears have more food. Hundreds of species of birds, mammals, fish and reptiles are once again finding their niche in a vibrant ecosystem.

The world’s first national park, a global treasure, is being reborn.

“Yellowstone increasingly looks like a different place,” said William Ripple, a professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University, and lead author of a new study.

“These are still the early stages of recovery, and some of this may still take decades,” Ripple said. “But trees and shrubs are starting to come back and beaver numbers are increasing. It’s very encouraging.”

The findings of this report were just published in Biological Conservation, a professional journal. They outline an ecosystem renaissance that has taken place since wolves were restored to Yellowstone after being extirpated in the 1920s.

Along four streams studied in the Lamar River basin, 100 percent of the tallest young aspen sprouts were being browsed in 1998, compared to less than 20 percent last year. Heavy browsing by elk on this favorite food had caused new aspen tree recruitment to essentially grind to a halt in the mid-to-late 1900s, when wolves were absent, but new trees are now growing again in places.

Among the observations in this report:

• Since their reintroduction in 1995-96, the wolf population generally increased until 2003, forcing changes in both elk numbers and behavior due to what researchers call the “ecology of fear.”

• The northern range elk populations decreased from more than 15,000 individuals in the early 1990s to about 6,000 last year, and remaining elk now have different patterns of movement, vigilance, and other traits.

• By 2006, some aspen trees had grown tall enough they were no longer susceptible to browsing by elk, and cottonwood and willow were also beginning to return in places.

• Improved willow growth is providing habitat that allows for a greater diversity and abundance of songbirds such as the common yellowthroat, warbling vireo and song sparrow.

• The number of beaver colonies in the same area increased from one in 1996 to 12 in 2009, with positive impacts on fish habitat.

• Increases in beaver populations have strong implications for riparian hydrology and biodiversity – Wyoming streams with beaver ponds have been found to have 75 times more abundant waterfowl than those without.

• The coyote population decreased with the increase in wolf numbers, allowing more small mammals that provide food for other avian and mammalian predators, such as red foxes, ravens and bald eagles.

Evidence of improved ecosystem health following the return of wolves is “becoming increasingly persuasive,” the scientists said in their report, though they also note that an increasing population of bison is continuing to impact young woody plants in the Lamar Valley.

“The wolves have made a major difference in Yellowstone,” said Robert Beschta, a professor emeritus of forestry at OSU and co-author on the study.

“Whether similar recovery of plant communities can be expected in other areas, especially on public lands outside national parks, is less clear,” Beschta said. “It may be necessary for wolves not only to be present but to have an ecologically effective density, and mechanisms to deal with human and wolf conflicts also need to be improved.”

But at least in America’s first national park, right now, the wolf is back and on the prowl. Their howls fill cold winter nights, and the power of predation has been restored. The fear is back.

And the park is returning to life.

Note: YouTube video in Yellowstone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGnIYrsF4bk&feature=youtu.be

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Forest thinning to help prevent or reduce severe wildfire will release more carbon to the atmosphere than any amount saved by successful fire prevention, a new study concludes.

There may be valid reasons to thin forests – such as restoration of forest structure or health, wildlife enhancement or public safety – but increased carbon sequestration is not one of them, scientists say.

In research just published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Oregon State University scientists conclude that even in fire-prone forests, it’s necessary to treat about 10 locations to influence fire behavior in one. There are high carbon losses associated with fuel treatment and only modest savings in reducing the severity of fire, they found.

“Some researchers have suggested that various levels of tree removal are consistent with efforts to sequester carbon in forest biomass, and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels,” said John Campbell, an OSU research associate in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. “That may make common sense, but it’s based on unrealistic assumptions and not supported by the science.”

A century of fire suppression in many forests across the West has created a wide range of problems, including over-crowded forests, increased problems with insect and pathogen attack, greater risk of catastrophic fire and declining forest health.

Forest thinning and fuel reduction may help address some of those issues, and some believe that it would also help prevent more carbon release to the atmosphere if it successfully reduced wildfire.

“There is no doubt you can change fire behavior by managing fuels and there may be other reasons to do it,” said Mark Harmon, holder of the Richardson Chair in Forest Science at OSU. “But the carbon does not just disappear, even if it’s used for wood products or other purposes. We have to be honest about the carbon cost and consider it along with the other reasons for this type of forest management.”

Even if wood removed by thinning is used for biofuels it will not eliminate the concern. Previous studies at OSU have indicated that, in most of western Oregon, use of wood for biofuels will result in a net loss of carbon sequestration for at least 100 years, and probably much longer.

In the new analysis, researchers analyzed the effect of fuel treatments on wildfire and carbon stocks in several scenarios, including a single forest patch or disturbance, an entire forest landscape and multiple disturbances.

One key finding was that even a low-severity fire released 70 percent as much carbon as did a high-severity fire that killed most trees. The majority of carbon emissions result from combustion of surface fuels, which occur in any type of fire.

The researchers also said that the basic principles in these evaluations would apply to a wide range of forest types and conditions, and are not specific to just a few locations.

“People want to believe that every situation is different, but in fact the basic relationships are consistent,” Campbell said. “We may want to do fuel reduction across much of the West, these are real concerns. But if so we’ll have to accept that it will likely increase carbon emissions.”

The findings, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show a speed of evolution and natural selection that surprised researchers.

They confirmed that a primary impact of hatcheries is a change in fish genetics, as opposed to a temporary environmental effect.

“We’ve known for some time that hatchery-born fish are less successful at survival and reproduction in the wild,” said Michael Blouin, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “However, until now, it wasn’t clear why. What this study shows is that intense evolutionary pressures in the hatchery rapidly select for fish that excel there, at the expense of their reproductive success in the wild.”

Hatcheries are efficient at producing fish for harvest, the researchers said, but this and other studies continue to raise concerns about the genetic impacts that hatchery fish may have when they interbreed with wild salmon and steelhead, and whether or not they will help wild salmonid runs to recover.

These findings were based on a 19-year genetic analysis of steelhead in Oregon’s Hood River. It examined why hatchery fish struggle to reproduce in wild river conditions, a fact that has been made clear in previous research. Some of the possible causes explored were environmental effects of captive rearing, inbreeding among close relatives, and unintentional “domestication selection,” or the ability of some fish to adapt to the unique hatchery environment.

The study confirmed that domestication selection was at work.

When thousands of smolts are born in the artificial environment of a hatchery, those that survive best are the ones that can deal, for whatever reason, with hatchery conditions. But the same traits that help them in the hatchery backfire when they return to a wild river, where their ability to produce surviving offspring is much reduced.

“We expected to see some of these changes after multiple generations,” said Mark Christie, an OSU post-doctoral research associate and lead author on the study. “To see these changes happen in a single generation was amazing. Evolutionary change doesn’t always take thousands of years.”

It’s not clear exactly what traits are being selected for among the thousands of smolts born in hatcheries, the scientists said, but one of the leading candidates is the ability to tolerate extreme crowding. If research can determine exactly what aspect of hatchery operations is selecting for fish with less fitness in the wild, it could be possible to make changes that would help address the problem, they said.

Historically, hatchery managers preferred to use fish born in hatcheries as brood stock to create future generations, because whatever trait they had that allowed them to succeed in the hatchery helped produce thousands of apparently healthy young salmon. But they later found that when those same fish were released they had a survival and reproductive success that was far lower than those born in the wild.

Billions of captive-reared salmon are intentionally released into the wild each year in order to increase fishery yields and bolster declining populations. The steelhead studied in this research are, in fact, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and part of their recovery plan includes supplementation with hatchery fish.

“It remains to be seen whether results from this one study on steelhead generalize to other hatcheries or salmon species,” Blouin said.

“Nevertheless, this shows that hatcheries can produce fish that are genetically different from wild fish, and that it can happen extraordinarily fast,” he said. “The challenge now is to identify the traits under selection to see if we can slow that rate of domestication.”

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Thinning of young Douglas-fir forests in the Pacific Northwest, done in part to help them return to a structure more similar to old-growth forests and aid recovery of the threatened northern spotted owl, also reduces the populations of flying squirrels that form an important part of the owl’s diet.

A recent study by scientists from Oregon State University and the U.S. Geological Survey found that this unwanted impact illustrates the complexity of trying to restore old-growth characteristics in forests that for decades were managed primarily for Douglas-fir timber production.

In the long run, researchers said, a restoration of old-growth structure should be a positive force for both spotted owl recovery and the northern flying squirrel – but in the near term, forest stands that have been thinned support significantly lower densities of flying squirrels than unthinned stands.

“Some of the stands being thinned were probably not great spotted owl habitat to begin with, and the impact on flying squirrel populations may not be permanent,” said Joan Hagar, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey and courtesy faculty member in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society.

“This is a fairly common problem in restoration ecology, in which there are always winners and losers,” she said. “What this really suggests is that we may not want to thin all of these forest types, we need to preserve some as a refuge that would allow flying squirrel populations to recover in the future.”

Flying squirrels, Hagar said, are a major part of the diet of the northern spotted owl and also help disperse fungi important to tree health. There are millions of acres of even-aged, Douglas-fir dominated forests being considered for thinning, for both spotted owl recovery and other goals, both economic and ecological.

The northern flying squirrel is considered a “keystone species” by ecologists and an indicator of forest health. They do best in forests with many large live trees and well-developed understories, characteristics that are now largely lacking in many young forests.

This research studied various types of thinning treatments, and found that the heavier the thinning, the heavier the impact on flying squirrel populations. It was one of the longer-term studies done on this issue, for up to 13 years after thinning.

The findings “would seem to argue for caution in carrying out commercial thinning across large portions of the Pacific Northwest landscape, especially if one eventual goal is to sustain the primary prey of the northern spotted owl,” the researchers said in their conclusion.

Continued monitoring of northern flying squirrels and their habitat will help determine when flying squirrel populations begin to recover in thinned stands, in which treatment levels this occurs most quickly and which habitat features are most important, the scientists said.

The study was supported by the USDA Forest Service. It was published in Forest Ecology and Management, a professional journal.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A team of scientists from Oregon has collected microbes from ice within a lava tube in the Cascade Mountains and found that they thrive in cold, Mars-like conditions.

The microbes tolerate temperatures near freezing and low levels of oxygen, and they can grow in the absence of organic food. Under these conditions their metabolism is driven by the oxidation of iron from olivine, a common volcanic mineral found in the rocks of the lava tube. These factors make the microbes capable of living in the subsurface of Mars and other planetary bodies, the scientists say.

The findings, supported by a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), are detailed in the journal Astrobiology.

“This microbe is from one of the most common genera of bacteria on Earth,” said Amy Smith, a doctoral student at Oregon State University and one of the authors of the study. “You can find its cousins in caves, on your skin, at the bottom of the ocean and just about anywhere. What is different, in this case, is its unique qualities that allow it to grow in Mars-like conditions.”

In a laboratory setting at room temperature and with normal oxygen levels, the scientists demonstrated that the microbes can consume organic material (sugar). But when the researchers removed the organic material, reduced the temperature to near-freezing, and lowered the oxygen levels, the microbes began to use the iron within olivine – a common silicate material found in volcanic rocks on Earth and on Mars – as its energy source.

“This reaction involving a common mineral from volcanic rocks just hasn’t been documented before,” said Martin Fisk, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and an author on the study. “In volcanic rocks directly exposed to air and at warmer temperatures, the oxygen in the atmosphere oxidizes the iron before the microbes can use it. But in the lava tube, where the bacteria are covered in ice and thus sheltered from the atmosphere, they out-compete the oxygen for the iron.

“By mimicking those conditions, we got the microbes to repeat that behavior in the laboratory,” Fisk added.

The microbes were collected from a lava tube near Newberry Crater in Oregon’s Cascades Mountains, at an elevation of about 5,000 feet. They were within the ice on rocks some 100 feet inside the lava tube, in a low-oxygen, near-freezing environment. Scientists, including Fisk, have said that the subsurface of Mars could have similar conditions and harbor bacteria.

In fact, Fisk has examined a meteorite originating from Mars that contained tracks – which could indicate consumption by microbes – though no living material was discovered. Similar tracks were found on the rocks from the Newberry Crater lava tube, he said.

“Conditions in the lava tube are not as harsh as on Mars,” Fisk said. “On Mars, temperatures rarely get to the freezing point, oxygen levels are lower and at the surface, liquid water is not present. But water is hypothesized to be present in the warmer subsurface of Mars. Although this study does not exactly duplicate what you would find on Mars, it does show that bacteria can live in similar conditions.

“We know from direct examination, as well as satellite imagery, that olivine is in Martian rocks,” Fisk added. “And now we know that olivine can sustain microbial life.”

The idea for exploring the lava tube came from Radu Popa, an assistant professor at Portland State University and lead author on the paper. Popa used to explore caves in his native Romania and was familiar with the environmental conditions. Because lava tubes are a sheltered environment and exist on both Earth and Mars, Popa proposed the idea of studying microbes from them to see if life may exist – or could have existed – on the Red Planet.

“When temperatures and atmospheric pressure on Mars are higher, as they have been in the past, ecosystems based on this type of bacteria could flourish,” Popa said. “The fingerprints left by such bacteria on mineral surfaces can be used by scientists as tools to analyze whether life ever existed on Mars.”

The research sheds further light on the way in which toxic damage early in life can later manifest themselves as cancer, due to “epigenetic” changes in cells. It was done by scientists in the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, and other institutions, in laboratory studies with mice.

In this study, published in the journal Cancer Letters, mice received four separate doses of a carcinogen commonly found in air pollutants or other combustion products. As a result, they had triple the level of ovarian cancer at the rodent equivalent of middle age. About 80 percent of them also got lung cancer, and many of the male mice had abnormally small testes – a phenomenon not seen before.

In previous research, by contrast, the same amount of this carcinogen given in a single dose had caused a much higher rate of T-cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, which this study found to almost disappear when the carcinogen exposure was spread out over time. Liver cancer also was largely absent.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how the fetus responds to carcinogens and at what points in time it is most vulnerable,” said David Williams, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at OSU.

“We know it’s far more sensitive than adults for several reasons, including faster cell division and the lack of protective detoxifying enzymes,” he said. “But it’s interesting that the timing of fetal exposure makes such a difference in which organs are targeted. These results were somewhat surprising.”

The mice in these experiments were exposed to one type of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, a group of compounds commonly produced by everything from coal combustion to automobile exhaust. The levels of carcinogen the mice received were far higher than humans would face in a normal environment.

In the research, tracking with radioactive labeling showed that the carcinogens clearly made their way into the mouse fetuses, although at about 10 percent of the tissue concentration of those in the mother. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, and included collaborators from OSU and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. 

Increasing amounts of research are being done on PAHs, which are associated with the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum, and may be on the rise in some areas, particularly China, Williams said. They can also get into soils, be taken up by plants and make their way into the human food chain.

The types of cancer that these carcinogens can cause in animal models include lymphoma and leukemia, and cancer is the number one cause of disease-related death in children. Epidemiological studies have shown that exposure of pregnant women to carcinogens such as cigarette smoke enhances the risk for offspring to develop a number of cancers.

“The fetal basis of adult disease is relevant to a number of chronic diseases in humans, including diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular disease and cancer,” the researchers wrote in their report, “as well as neurological and behavior toxicities.”

Research such as this, scientists say, suggests that a healthy diet is important during pregnancy, including a wide range of fruits and vegetables. Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower, in particular, have high levels of some compounds believed to help protect against cancer.

Families and states are burdened with millions of dollars in unpaid child support, and the program may help ease some of the financial strain on both parents and the government.

As of 2009, there was more than $100 billion in unpaid child support debt owed nationally. According to Brett Burkhardt, an assistant professor of public policy at Oregon State University and one of the study’s authors, much of that debt is owed by low-income noncustodial parents who are unlikely to ever pay back the full amount.

“Custodial parents are not receiving much-needed income that they should be, and much of this debt is just uncollectable,” he said. “In addition, government agencies are strained because they have to put a great deal of resources into trying to collect what is owed, and then enforce it and penalize those who do not pay.”

Burkhardt conducted the study as part of a group of researchers at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. Led by lead author Carolyn Heinrich, now at the University of Texas at Austin, and joined by Hilary Shager, of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, the scientists were charged with studying the effectiveness of a multi-year pilot program called Families Forward in Racine County, Wis.

The program targeted noncustodial parents with more than $2,000 of debt. For every $1 of child support paid, the program forgave 50 cents of debt toward the family and another 50 cents toward the state debt.  Forgiveness of family debt required the permission of both custodial and noncustodial parents.

More than 120 people completed the program. The noncustodial parents in the Families Forward program contributed, on average, more than $100 more per month than similar parents who did not participate. Overall, they also paid down their debt at a higher rate than those who did not participate and made more payments (8.5 percent increase) than non-participants.

“Implementation of the program was the most challenging part,” Burkhardt said, citing bureaucratic problems and reluctance on the part of the custodial parent to agree as some of the key issues with the program. “Still, we did see the intended result, which was to get parents paying more on their child support debt.”

Burkhardt said some states, including Wisconsin and Texas, are considering adopting similar child support forgiveness models on a larger scale.

The researchers published their findings in the current issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Trees from certified farms have met standards for protecting land, water, wildlife and the people who work on the farm. The trees bear a tag identifying their origin as a Socially and Environmentally Responsible Farm (SERF).

"A SERF-certified tree assures you that this real tree is grown using the best and safest methods known," said Chal Landgren, a Christmas tree specialist with OSU Extension who helped create the program.

To be certified, a farm must develop a plan for all it operations addressing five areas of social and environmental health: biodiversity, soil and water resources, integrated pest management, worker health and safety, and consumer and community relations.

OSU Extension provides training and support to growers in developing their sustainability plans. The Oregon Department of Agriculture conducts independent inspections of the farm, and the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Growers Association provides the final certification approval.

This is the first year that trees are available with this certification, Landgren said. Five farms are now SERF-certified in Oregon, and Landgren expects several more to come on board in the coming year.

Christmas trees are big business in Oregon, the nation's leading producer of holiday trees. The state's growers sold 6.4 million trees in 2010, grossing $91 million, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. About 1,600 operations cultivated 57,000 acres in Oregon last year and employed nearly 8,000 full-time and seasonal workers. The trees are shipped around the world.

Grown on sustainable farms, trees are cultivated just like other crops, said Mike Bondi, an OSU Extension forester and the director of the university's North Willamette Research and Experiment Center in Aurora. Growers plant one or more to replace every tree they harvest.

"People can feel good about purchasing real trees because they help reduce carbon emissions by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen," Bondi said. "And real trees can be 100 percent recycled and turned into mulch or compost, so no waste goes into landfills."

The new certification program requires that Christmas tree farms:

• Protect and promote biodiversity. Certified operations must demonstrate that they protect natural features, waterways, fish and wildlife habitat and ensure that workers and equipment minimize harm to biodiversity.

• Use appropriate Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Certified farms must use least toxic methods to control insects, weeds, diseases and other pests, and provide training and evidence of IPM in decisions and actions.

• Create a safe environment for all workers. Certification requires health and safety training for employees and evaluating and reducing risks on the farm.

• Actively engage in long-term conservation of soil and water resources. Certified farms must use practices to prevent soil erosion and mitigate potential negative impact on water quality.

• Actively foster farm stewardship and environmental education in the community and with industry groups to preserve, protect and conserve natural resources.

"SERF certification reinforces the message that a real tree is a responsible choice for the holidays," Landgren said.

Information on the program is at http://www.serfcertified.org.

Abbott, who is dean of OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, is the fourth recipient of the award since its 2008 inception. It is presented to a nationally recognized researcher who has made outstanding contributions to data-intensive computing.

He will receive the award today (Dec. 5) in Stockholm, Sweden, at a joint meeting of the 2011 Microsoft Research eScience workshop and the annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers conference.

The award is named for Jim Gray, a Microsoft Research innovator, who disappeared at sea in 2007. A video feature focusing on the Gray Award is available on the Microsoft Research homepage.

"The Jim Gray eScience Award recognizes innovators who use computing to advance scientific discovery," said Tony Hey, corporate vice president, Microsoft Research Connections. "Mark Abbott represents the essence of this award with his outstanding contributions to integrating biological and physical science, data-intensive science and educational leadership."

Under Abbott’s leadership, OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences has developed an international reputation for its research – especially in the collection, synthesis and distribution of data. The college’s Environmental Computing Center houses one of the most sophisticated marine science computing networks in the country, and OSU researchers are global leaders in data-driven research on climate change, near-shore oceanography, ocean-atmosphere interactions and other fields.

Abbott’s own research has pioneered the use of satellite measurements of ocean productivity, the deployment of an array of biological sensors in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica, and the use of advance computer technology on board ocean gliders and vehicles. All of these projects involved the collection and synthesis of complex data sets through the use of data-intensive information technology.

OSU also is a leader for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the National Science Foundation’s $386 million signature project to monitor the oceans’ response to climate change. The college operates a fleet of undersea gliders that patrol the near-shore Pacific Ocean, logging critical data.

Also being honored in Stockholm is Alex Szalay, a Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist, who will receive a Jim Gray eScience award retroactively. Szaley had received a Microsoft Research award in 2007 based on technical computing contributions – the same profile as the Gray Award. He will retroactively be named a 2007 winner of the Gray Award.

This “farming” behavior was described for the first time in detail by the scientists this week in the journal PLoS One.

This new species of the Yeti crab, called Kiwa puravida, was first discovered in 2006, according to Andrew Thurber, a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University and lead author of the study. It is only the second member of the Yeti family of crabs – first discovered in 2005 – and illustrates how little scientists know about the deep ocean environment, the researchers say.

“We watched the crabs wave their claws back and forth in fluid from a methane seep, and rather than trying to capture bacteria, it appeared that they were providing food to the bacteria already growing on their claws,” Thurber said. “There isn’t sufficient food that deep that is derived from the sun’s energy, so vent and seep animals harness chemical energy released from the seafloor.

“These bacteria are specialists and can be found on a variety of crustaceans – crabs, shrimp and barnacles – near seeps and vents," added Thurber, who is in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. “But we hadn’t before seen that kind of ‘farming’ behavior in which the host waves its symbionts in seep fluid.”

Thurber, who did much of the research as a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wasn’t part of the 2005 that found the first Yeti crab, but participated in the 2006 expedition that discovered Kiwa puravida, and follow-up cruises in 2009 and 2010 that collected the crabs using the submersible Alvin.

Having the specimens allowed the scientists to more closely examine the bacteria on their claws and run their genetic code through GenBank – an international database that includes thousands of species of bacteria. They discovered that it is most similar to bacteria found on crabs and shrimp living near hydrothermal vents.

“We don’t know for certain whether hydrogen sulfide alone fuels this species’ symbionts,” Thurber said, “but we suspect it may use both hydrogen sulfide and methane released from the seafloor to exist so far from the sun.”

Thurber said symbiotic behavior in nature is common, but few animals are known to behave in quite the same way as Kiwa puravida. Some organisms, including mussels and tubeworms, have symbionts inside of them that allow them to harness chemical energy, while others that do not have symbionts – including barnacles – wave their appendages to grab food as it goes by. This new species is the only one that combines the two, by using symbionts on its appendages and waving those bacteria-laden appendages in seep fluid to capture chemical energy as a food for themselves.

Lipid and isotope analyses showed that these epibiotic bacteria are the crabs’ main food source, though Thurber said they may be getting a small amount of sun-derived energy from dead plankton that have filtered down through the water column.

Thurber said the crabs harvest the bacteria growing on their claws by using a specially adapted appendage to scrape the bacteria off their bodies and bring it to their mouths, and then continually waving their claws near methane seeps to boost the bacteria’s productivity.

Only one specimen of the original Yeti crab, K. hirsuta, has been collected and that was near a hydrothermal vent. About 30-40 specimens of Kiwa puravida have been examined and the scientists believe they may exist at similar methane seeps.

“Since this entire family of crabs wasn’t even discovered until 2005, there is a strong possibility other species are out there,” Thurber said.

Other authors on the study are W. Joe Jones of the University of South Carolina and Kareen Schnabel of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, New Zealand.

Authors of the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program and published online this week in the journal Science, say that global warming is real and that increases in atmospheric CO2 will have multiple serious impacts.

However, the most Draconian projections of temperature increases from the doubling of CO2 are unlikely.

“Many previous climate sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 through today, and not fully integrated paleoclimate date, especially on a global scale,” said Andreas Schmittner, an Oregon State University researcher and lead author on the Science article. “When you reconstruct sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago – which is referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum – and compare it with climate model simulations of that period, you get a much different picture.

“If these paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future, as predicted by our model, the results imply less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought,” Schmittner added.

Scientists have struggled for years trying to quantify “climate sensitivity” – which is how the Earth will respond to projected increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The 2007 IPCC report estimated that the air near the surface of the Earth would warm on average by 2 to 4.5 degrees (Celsius) with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial standards. The mean, or “expected value” increase in the IPCC estimates was 3.0 degrees; most climate model studies use the doubling of CO2 as a basic index.

Some previous studies have claimed the impacts could be much more severe – as much as 10 degrees or higher with a doubling of CO2 – although these projections come with an acknowledged low probability. Studies based on data going back only to 1850 are affected by large uncertainties in the effects of dust and other small particles in the air that reflect sunlight and can influence clouds, known as “aerosol forcing,” or by the absorption of heat by the oceans, the researchers say.

To lower the degree of uncertainty, Schmittner and his colleagues used a climate model with more data and found that there are constraints that preclude very high levels of climate sensitivity.

The researchers compiled land and ocean surface temperature reconstructions from the Last Glacial Maximum and created a global map of those temperatures. During this time, atmospheric CO2 was about a third less than before the Industrial Revolution, and levels of methane and nitrous oxide were much lower. Because much of the northern latitudes were covered in ice and snow, sea levels were lower, the climate was drier (less precipitation), and there was more dust in the air.

All these factor, which contributed to cooling the Earth’s surface, were included in their climate model simulations.

The new data changed the assessment of climate models in many ways, said Schmittner, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. The researchers’ reconstruction of temperatures has greater spatial coverage and showed less cooling during the Ice Age than most previous studies.

High sensitivity climate models – more than 6 degrees – suggest that the low levels of atmospheric CO2 during the Last Glacial Maximum would result in a “runaway effect” that would have left the Earth completely ice-covered.

“Clearly, that didn’t happen,” Schmittner said. “Though the Earth then was covered by much more ice and snow than it is today, the ice sheets didn’t extend beyond latitudes of about 40 degrees, and the tropics and subtropics were largely ice-free – except at high altitudes. These high-sensitivity models overestimate cooling.”

On the other hand, models with low climate sensitivity – less than 1.3 degrees – underestimate the cooling almost everywhere at the Last Glacial Maximum, the researchers say. The closest match, with a much lower degree of uncertainty than most other studies, suggests climate sensitivity is about 2.4 degrees.

However, uncertainty levels may be underestimated because the model simulations did not take into account uncertainties arising from how cloud changes reflect sunlight, Schmittner said.

Reconstructing sea and land surface temperatures from 21,000 years ago is a complex task involving the examination of ices cores, bore holes, fossils of marine and terrestrial organisms, seafloor sediments and other factors. Sediment cores, for example, contain different biological assemblages found in different temperature regimes and can be used to infer past temperatures based on analogs in modern ocean conditions.

“When we first looked at the paleoclimatic data, I was struck by the small cooling of the ocean,” Schmittner said. “On average, the ocean was only about two degrees (Celsius) cooler than it is today, yet the planet was completely different – huge ice sheets over North America and northern Europe, more sea ice and snow, different vegetation, lower sea levels and more dust in the air.

“It shows that even very small changes in the ocean’s surface temperature can have an enormous impact elsewhere, particularly over land areas at mid- to high-latitudes,” he added.

Schmittner said continued unabated fossil fuel use could lead to similar warming of the sea surface as reconstruction shows happened between the Last Glacial Maximum and today.

“Hence, drastic changes over land can be expected,” he said. “However, our study implies that we still have time to prevent that from happening, if we make a concerted effort to change course soon.”

Other authors on the study include Peter Clark and Alan Mix of OSU; Nathan Urban, Princeton University; Jeremy Shakun, Harvard University; Natalie Mahowald, Cornell University; Patrick Bartlein, University of Oregon; and Antoni Rosell-Mele, University of Barcelona.

The new professors come from such campuses as Harvard, the London School of Economics, Yale, Brown, MIT, Cornell, London’s Imperial College, Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Minnesota, UCLA, the University of California-Berkeley and the UC system and West Point.

Other new faculty members are from prestigious non-university settings, including NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and more.

OSU leaders say the new hires, which were announced on campus yesterday, are essential for a growing land grant university committed to helping the state meet higher educational goals that many say are critical to Oregon’s future economic success.

“Oregon’s new 40-40-20 law seeks to ensure that 40 percent of the state’s adult population has earned a bachelor’s degree or more, 40 percent at least an associate’s degree, and 20 percent at least a high school diploma,” said Oregon State President Edward J. Ray. “To the degree that OSU and other campuses help achieve those goals, Oregon will be prepared to compete in the global marketplace of tomorrow, with a highly educated workforce supporting this state’s companies and industries.

“Our new faculty will enable OSU to make greater contributions in this area, and further extend OSU’s research and service missions,” Ray added, “and we’re very proud to have them all here.”

In service of those goals, Oregon State is already home to more Oregon freshmen than any other university, and its record enrollments totaling 25,500 for the main campus in Corvallis and OSU-Cascades in Bend trail only Portland State University in overall headcount.

OSU is also home to the lion’s share of Oregon’s “high achievers” – valedictorians, salutatorians and other top performers from state high schools – and is Oregon’s only university to hold the prestigious Carnegie Foundation’s top ranking for the nation’s most successful research universities and its designation for exemplary “community engagement.” The new faculty members come from institutions with similar claims to quality and success, and will make substantial contributions as teachers, researchers and scholars.

The faculty span 10 colleges and are further notable for their international diversity, with some originally from or having been recently employed in Korea, China, India, the Netherlands, Afghanistan, Great Britain, Ukraine, Poland, Spain, Chile, Switzerland, Romania and Puerto Rico. Twenty-five of the hires are women.

Biographical information and photos of each of the new faculty are available online. That background includes information on the following five hires, who are representative of the quality and accomplishment of these academic professionals:

Jennifer Sykes is a 2011 Ph.D. graduate of Harvard University in sociology and social policy. She completed a master's degree in social policy and social work at the University of York in Great Britain.  While at Harvard, she received many honors and fellowships including a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching.  Sykes has published research related to child and family welfare and is examining the impacts of tax policy on parenting. She will be in the School of Public Policy within the College of Liberal Arts.

Jiyao Chen is an assistant professor of innovation management in the College of Business. Prior to OSU, he was a research associate at the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation, Kellogg School of Management. His Ph.D. in technology management was earned at Stevens Institute of Technology. His primary research interests include business innovation, new product development, time-based strategy, and sustainability.

Chad Higgins is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering with research interests in examining water use and dynamics in the environment generally and agricultural systems specifically. Prior to coming to OSU, he was a research associate and lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. He did his undergraduate studies at Cornell University and completed a masters and doctoral degrees in engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Ravi Balasubramanian, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is coming off of recent stints as an associate research scientist in engineering at Yale University and postdoctoral researcher in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He has also worked at Intel Labs in Seattle on transferring human skills to robotic manipulators. Balasubramanian completed his Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.  His research is pursuing natural human-robot interaction with applications for prosthetics using neural signals.

Meghan Freeman recently received a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University; she holds a B.A. from Williams College and has studied abroad at Oxford University. Her teaching and research specialization is in interdisciplinary Victorian literature and culture. She is working on a book-length manuscript on the public institutionalization of aesthetic experience, and has several book chapters forthcoming on how American and British authors contribute to these lively and ongoing debates.

A nationally representative sample of more than 2,600 men and women, ages 18-85, found that 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week, which is the national guideline, provided a 65 percent improvement in sleep quality. People also said they felt less sleepy during the day, compared to those with less physical activity.

The study, out in the December issue of the journal Mental Health and Physical Activity, lends more evidence to mounting research showing the importance of exercise to a number of health factors. Among adults in the United States, about 35 to 40 percent of the population has problems with falling asleep or with daytime sleepiness.

“We were using the physical activity guidelines set forth for cardiovascular health, but it appears that those guidelines might have a spillover effect to other areas of health,” said Brad Cardinal, a professor of exercise science at Oregon State University and one of the study’s authors.

“Increasingly, the scientific evidence is encouraging as regular physical activity may serve as a non-pharmaceutical alternative to improve sleep.”

After controlling for age, BMI (Body Mass Index), health status, smoking status, and depression, the relative risk of often feeling overly sleepy during the day compared to never feeling overly sleepy during the day decreased by 65 percent for participants meeting physical activity guidelines.

Similar results were also found for having leg cramps while sleeping (68 percent less likely) and having difficulty concentrating when tired (45 percent decrease).

Paul Loprinzi, an assistant professor at Bellarmine University is lead author of the study, which was conducted while he was a doctoral student in Cardinal’s lab at OSU. He said it is the first study to examine the relationship between accelerometer-measured physical activity and sleep while utilizing a nationally representative sample of adults of all ages.

‘Our findings demonstrate a link between regular physical activity and perceptions of sleepiness during the day, which suggests that participation in physical activity on a regular basis may positively influence an individual's productivity at work, or in the case of a student, influence their ability to pay attention in class,” he said.

Cardinal said past studies linking physical activity and sleep used only self-reports of exercise. The danger with this is that many people tend to overestimate the amount of activity they do, he said.

He added that the take-away for consumers is to remember that exercise has a number of health benefits, and that can include helping feel alert and awake.

“Physical activity may not just be good for the waistline and heart, but it also can help you sleep,” Cardinal said. “There are trade-offs. It may be easier when you are tired to skip the workout and go to sleep, but it may be beneficial for your long-term health to make the hard decision and get your exercise.”

Results of their study have been published in the journal Ecohydrology.

Unlike alluvial aquifers, which can be replenished seasonally with rain and snow, these regional aquifers were filled by melting glaciers during the last Ice Age, the researchers say. When that water is gone, it won’t come back – at least, until another Ice Age comes along.

“It is a finite resource that is not being recharged,” said Jeffrey Falke, a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. “That water has been there for thousands of years, and it is rapidly being depleted. Already, streams that used to run year-round are becoming seasonal, and refuge habitats for native fishes are drying up and becoming increasingly fragmented.”

Falke and his colleagues, all scientists from Colorado State University where he earned his Ph.D., spent three years studying the Arikaree River in eastern Colorado. They conducted monthly low-altitude flights over the river to map refuge pool habitats and connectivity, and compared it to historical data.

They conclude that during the next 35 years – under the most optimistic of circumstances – only 57 percent of the current refuge pools would remain – and almost all of those would be isolated in a single mile-long stretch of the Arikaree River. Water levels today already are significantly lower than they were 40 and 50 years ago.

Though their study focused on the Arikaree, other dryland streams in the western Great Plains – comprised of eastern Colorado, western Nebraska and western Kansas – face the same fate, the researchers say.

Falke said the draining of the regional aquifers lowers the groundwater input to alluvial aquifers through which the rivers flow, creating the reduction in streamflow. He and his colleagues estimate that it would require a 75 percent reduction in the rate of groundwater pumping to maintain current water table levels and refuge pools, which is “not economically or politically feasible,” the authors note in the study.

Dryland streams in the Great Plains host several warm-water native fish species that have adapted over time to harsh conditions, according to Falke, who is with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. Brassy minnows, orange-throat darters and other species can withstand water temperatures reaching 90 degrees, as well as low levels of dissolved oxygen, but the increasing fragmentation of their habitats may impede their life cycle, limiting the ability of the fish to recolonize.

“The Arikaree River and most dryland streams are shallow, with a sandy bottom, and often silty,” Falke said. “The water can be waist-deep, and when parts of the river dry up from the pumping of groundwater, it is these deeper areas that become refuge pools. But they are becoming scarcer, and farther apart each year.”

Falke said the changing hydrology of the system has implications beyond the native fishes. The aquifer-fed stream influences the entire riparian area, where cottonwood trees form their own ecosystem and groundwater-dependent grasses support the grazing of livestock and other animals.

Pumping of regional aquifers is done almost entirely for agriculture, Falke said, with about 90 percent of the irrigation aimed at corn production, with some alfalfa and wheat.

“The impact goes well beyond the Arikaree River,” Falke said. “Declines in streamflow are widespread across the western Great Plains, including all 11 headwaters of the Republican River. Ultimately, the species inhabiting these drainages will decline in range and abundance, and become more imperiled as groundwater levels decline and climate changes continue.”

Other authors on the study include Kurt Fausch, Robin Magelky, Angela Aldred, Deanna Durnford, Linda Riley and Ramchand Oad, all of Colorado State University. The study was supported by the Colorado Division of Wildlife and the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station.

Economists at Oregon State University produced these new economic impact estimates as an update to an earlier OSU report, based on the findings of the 2009 final report of the Governor’s Task Force on Federal Forest Payments and County Services.

In this latest report, the economists note that Oregon counties face a steep drop in revenue that will sooner or later require employee layoffs, a reduction of services, less funding for schools, and long-term economic consequences that may push the overall impact even higher unless they receive significant new funding, or Congress reauthorizes the federal act.

Bruce Weber, an economist who directs the Rural Studies Program at OSU, says the expiration of the Secure Rural Schools (SRS) act will result in a 94 percent drop in projected federal forest payments in 2013 from the amount counties received in 2008.

“Secure Rural Schools act payments to Oregon counties have been phased down over the past four years,” Weber said, “and some counties already have cut jobs, eliminated services, increased local fees and reduced road repairs and construction in anticipation of the termination of these payments.

“In counties with financial reserves from prior SRS payments, the full impacts of termination may not be evident next year or the year after as they spend down reserves,” he said. “However, for other counties – particularly those for whom federal forest revenues represent more than half of their general fund – the impacts will come sooner, and SRS termination threatens their fiscal viability as governmental units.”

More than half the land in Oregon is owned by the federal government. For the past 100 years, the federal government has shared revenues from its timber harvests with county government, providing an important revenue source for many counties.

After timber harvests began declining in the early 1990s, shared revenues declined sharply and Congress passed a series of laws that supplemented shared timber revenues, culminating in the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000.

This act provided payments to counties and schools in 42 states that were based on shared revenues in years with historically high timber harvests.

In Oregon, these payments went to 33 of its 36 counties. Funding tied to U.S. Forest Service lands were earmarked for county roads and schools, while funding tied to Bureau of Land Management lands could be used for general purposes in those counties.

The new report estimates that Oregon counties will receive about $14.8 million from federal timber harvests in 2013 without the Secure Rural Schools funding – a far cry from the $230.2 million counties received in 2008 under the act.

In estimating what impacts the expiration of the Secure Rural Schools act might have, the OSU economists compared projected 2013 federal forest revenues with the amounts counties received in 2008 with payments under the act. They looked at two possible scenarios – one, that counties’ future cuts would be based on current budgetary allocations with 65 percent of the general fund expenditures involving personnel; and second, where all such cuts taken involve personnel. Among the estimates:

• When 65 percent of the cuts are used for personnel, the loss of jobs for Oregon counties from the elimination of the Secure Rural Schools funding is estimated to be 3,833; at the 100 percent level, it is 4,469;

• Sales of goods and services by Oregon businesses would be reduced by $385 million to $438 million;

• The loss of income – wages, rent and other property income – is projected to range from $250 million to $300 million.

“These estimates only represent the short-term economic impacts related to the reduced spending and re-spending of the SRS funds,” Weber said. “There may be more significant longer-term negative impacts on economic activity that result from the counties not providing levels of services in public health, law enforcement and other areas that are important to business, citizens and visitors.”

Weber emphasized that the report does not account for economic impacts from the loss of funding to schools. In 2007-08, nearly $32 million in Secure Rural Schools funding – or more than 13 percent of the overall total of $230 million – went to Oregon schools.

“Obviously, the loss of those funds will have additional impacts,” Weber said.

Although the Secure Rural Schools funding historically has had a disproportionate impact on Oregon’s coastal, southern and eastern counties, it does affect urban regions as well, the OSU economists note. However, urban counties may have more diverse revenue streams to offset the loss of federal funding than their rural counterparts.

The 2011 update was written by Weber, Paul Lewin and Bruce Sorte of OSU. It is available online at the OSU Rural Studies Program website: http://ruralstudies.oregonstate.edu/

In the study, 23 romantic couples were videotaped while one of the partners described a time of suffering in their lives. The other half of the couple and their physical, non-verbal reactions were the focal point of the study. Groups of complete strangers viewed the videos. The observers were asked to rate the person on traits such as how kind, trustworthy, and caring they thought the person was, based on just 20 seconds of silent video.s

“Our findings suggest even slight genetic variation may have tangible impact on people's behavior, and that these behavioral differences are quickly noticed by others,” said Aleksandr Kogan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author.

The study builds on previous research conducted by Sarina Rodrigues Saturn, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University. In that study, Saturn and her colleagues linked a genetic variation that affects hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin's receptor to empathy and stress reactivity. Saturn is senior author on the new study, which is in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“It was amazing to see how the data aligned so strongly by genotype,” Saturn said. “It makes sense that a gene crucial for social processing would yield these findings; other studies have shown that people are good at judging people at a distance and first impressions really make an impact.”

Before the videos were recorded, the scientists tested the couples and identified their genotype as GG, AG, or AA. Individuals homozygous for the G allele (carrying two copies of the G version of the gene) of the oxytocin receptor tend to be more “prosocial,” defined by researchers as the ability to behave in a way that benefits another person. In contrast, the carriers of the A version of the gene (AG or AA genotypes) tend to have a higher risk of autism, as well as self-reported lower levels of positive emotions, empathy and parental sensitivity.

Oxytocin has already been significantly linked with social affiliation and reduction in stress. It is a peptide made in the hypothalamus and has targets all over the body and the brain. It is best known for its role in female reproduction and is associated with social recognition, pair bonding, dampening negative emotional responses, trust and love.

Out of the 10 people who were marked by the neutral observer as “most prosocial, six carried the GG genotype associated with the oxytocin receptor; of the 10 people who were marked as “least trusted,” nine were carriers of the A version of the gene. The people carrying an A version of the gene were viewed as less kind, trustworthy and caring toward their partners in the video.

“The oxytocin receptor gene in particular has become of great interest because a select number of studies suggest that it is related to how prosocial people view themselves,” Kogan said. “Our study asked the question of whether these differences manifest themselves in behaviors that are quickly detectable by strangers, and it turns out they did.”

What is not known, however, is what occurs from the genetic level to the behavior – that is, the exact way the gene affects the biology underlying behavior is still poorly understood and remains a major topic of inquiry. Saturn, for one, believes that people can and do overcome their genes all the time.

“These are people who just may need to be coaxed out of their shells a little,” she said. “It may not be that we need to fix people who exhibit less social traits, but that we recognize they are overcoming a genetically influenced trait and that they may need more understanding and encouragement.”

Kogan said that many factors ultimately influence kindness and cooperation.

“The oxytocin receptor gene is one of those factors – but there many other forces in play, both genetic and non-genetic,” he said. “How all these pieces fit together to create the coherent whole of an individual who is or is not kind is a great mystery that we are only beginning to scratch.”

Laura Saslow at the University of California at San Francisco, Emily Impett with the University of Toronto, Christopher Oveis with University of California at San Diego, and Dacher Keltner with University of California at Berkeley contributed to this study.

According to a new report looking at child care in the state and in every Oregon county, child care prices increased 7 percent more than family incomes from 2004 to 2010. And for single parents, the situation is more serious: their child care prices increased 14 more than their incomes during that same period.

The average cost of toddler care in a child care center in Oregon is now $10,392, almost $4,000 more than the average annual cost of college tuition in the state.

Furthermore, the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies lists Oregon as the seventh most expensive state for child care in the nation, with Massachusetts ranking highest. In 36 states, the average annual cost for center-based care for an infant was higher than a year’s tuition at a four-year public college.

“This issue of affordability is huge,” said Bobbie Weber, a faculty research associate in the Family Policy Program at Oregon State University and author of the report along with Becky Vorpagel, an independent consultant for the Oregon Child Care Resource and Referral Network.

 “Families are facing serious challenges, and they want to do the right thing for their children, but faced with these unbearable costs, they do what they can to make it work.”

Survey findings show more low-income families are using free child care services, including asking relatives or friends to look after their children. For those who do not have a viable free option, it can mean making tough decisions.

“High quality care, which involves little or no screen time, healthy food, a ton of physical exercise and many activities that support cognitive and social development, is what parents want for their children,” Weber said. “The cost of getting quality care and education is not possible for many Oregonians, including many in the middle class.”

“Families making under $28,000 a year are spending 29 percent of their income just on child care, compared to families at the top income bracket who spend 7 percent of their income,” she said. “The care is the same price for everyone, and a family of three who makes around $34,000 often find themselves in a difficult situation of choosing between work and quality care for their children.”

While there are subsidies available for those earning up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level, parents have to pay part of their subsidies and that amount rises as incomes rise. Weber said in some cases, the co-pay is more than the child care itself.  Budget cuts continue to constrain how many families can be served.

Weber is a member of the Gov. John Kitzhaber’s Early Learning Council, which has been tasked to design the most effective early-childhood education system, one that will ensure children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn. Weber said child care is one of the many issues related to early childhood that the council is tackling.

A full report on each county in Oregon can be found at: http://health.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/sbhs/pdf/occrp-state--county-profiles-2010.pdf

Some of the county findings include:

• The most expensive county in Oregon for child care was Washington County, where the average cost was $11,880 for toddler care. Benton and Multnomah counties followed closely as the most expensive.
• Rural counties in general suffer from a lack of resources. Many rural areas do not have enough family day care providers or child care centers to meet the needs of the communities.
• In the average child care center, teachers earn between $9 and $13 an hour, even though many have post-secondary education in their field. Finding qualified workers willing to work for near-minimum wage salaries poses a challenge for centers.
• More than half of parents reported that their children did not get a lot of individual attention in their child care and 46 percent said the arrangement was not ideal for their child. Almost 19 percent said their children do not feel safe and secure at their daycare facility.
• The average minimum wage worker is spending almost 60 percent of their income on child care.
• Low-income families are finding ways to not pay for child care, with a 7 percent drop since 2004 in those who report using paid care. However, the amount of children and low-income families in Oregon has risen during that same time.

Researchers assessed more than 200 at-risk boys annually from the age of 12 to 31, and examined how men’s crime, tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use changed over time. While previous studies showed that marriage can change a man’s negative behavior, they had not isolated the additional effects of fatherhood.

“These decreases were in addition to the general tendency of boys to engage less in these types of behaviors as they approach and enter adulthood,” said David Kerr, assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University and lead author of the study. “Controlling for the aging process, fatherhood was an independent factor in predicting decreases in crime, alcohol and tobacco use.”

The study was published in the current issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. Collaborators included the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, Ore., and the University of Houston.

The researchers also found that men who were well into their 20s and early 30s when they became fathers showed greater decreases in crime and alcohol use, compared to those who had their first child in their teens or early 20s. Men who had children at a more developmentally-expected time could have been more able or willing to embrace fatherhood and shed negative lifestyle choices, Kerr said.

“It is hopeful that for both older and younger men, tobacco use tended to decrease following the birth of a first child,” Kerr said. “This kind of change could have important health consequences for men and for their families.”

The study adds to a body of research pointing to key periods when men from disadvantaged backgrounds may be ripe for intervention, Kerr said.

“This research suggests that fatherhood can be a transformative experience, even for men engaging in high risk behavior,” he said. “This presents a unique window of opportunity for intervention, because new fathers might be especially willing and ready to hear a more positive message and make behavioral changes.”

Deborah Capaldi, Lee Owen and Katherine Pears with the Oregon Social Learning Center and Margit Wiesner with the University of Houston contributed to the study. The research was supported by awards to the Oregon Social Learning Center from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

In an enormous display of survival of the fittest, the forests of the future are taking a new shape.

In a new report, scientists outline the impact that a changing climate will have on which tree species can survive, and where. The study suggests that many species that were once able to survive and thrive are losing their competitive footholds, and opportunistic newcomers will eventually push them out.

In some cases, once-common species such as lodgepole pine will be replaced by other trees, perhaps a range expansion of ponderosa pine or Douglas-fir. Other areas may shift completely out of forest into grass savannah or sagebrush desert. In central California, researchers concluded that more than half of the species now present would not be expected to persist in the climate conditions of the future.

“Some of these changes are already happening, pretty fast and in some huge areas,” said Richard Waring, professor emeritus at Oregon State University and lead author of the study. “In some cases the mechanism of change is fire or insect attack, in others it’s simply drought.

“We can’t predict exactly which tree (species) will die or which one will take its place, but we can see the long-term trends and probabilities,” Waring said. “The forests of our future are going to look quite different.”

Waring said tree species that are native to a local area or region are there because they can most effectively compete with other species given the specific conditions of temperature, precipitation, drought, cold-tolerance and many other factors that favor one species over another in that location.

As those climatic conditions change, species that have been established for centuries or millennia will lose their competitive edge, Waring said, and slowly but surely decline or disappear.

This survey, done with remote sensing of large areas over a four-year period, compared 15 coniferous tree species that are found widely across much of the West in Canada and the United States. The research explored impacts on 34 different “eco-regions” ranging from the Columbia Plateau to the Sierra Nevada, Snake River Plain and Yukon Highlands.

It projected which tree species would be at highest risk of disturbance in a future that’s generally expected to be 5-9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2080, with perhaps somewhat more precipitation in the winter and spring, and less during the summer.

Among the findings:

• Some of the greatest shifts in tree species are expected to occur in both the northern and southern extremes of this area, such as British Columbia, Alberta, and California.

• Large declines are expected in lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce, and more temperate species such as Douglas-fir and western hemlock may expand their ranges.

• Many wilderness areas are among those at risk of the greatest changes, and will probably be the first to experience major shifts in tree species.

• Some of the mild, wetter areas of western Oregon and Washington will face less overall species change than areas of the West with a harsher climate.

• More than half of the evergreen species are experiencing a significant decrease in their competitiveness in six eco-regions.

• Conditions have become more favorable for outbreaks of diseases and insects.

• Warming will encourage growth at higher elevations and latitudes, and increased drought at the other extremes. Fire frequency will continue to increase across the West, and any tree species lacking drought resistance will face special challenges.

“Ecosystems are always changing at the landscape level, but normally the rate of change is too slow for humans to notice,” said Steven Running, the University of Montana Regents Professor and a co-author of the study. “Now the rate of change is fast enough we can see it.”

Even though the rate of change has increased, these processes will take time, the scientists said. A greater stability of forest composition will not be attained anytime soon, perhaps for centuries.

 “There’s not a lot we can do to really control these changes,” Waring said. “For instance, to keep old trees alive during drought or insect attacks that they are no longer able to deal with, you might have to thin the forest and remove up to half the trees. These are very powerful forces at work.”

One of the best approaches to plan for an uncertain future, the researchers said, is to maintain “connective corridors” as much as possible so that trees can naturally migrate to new areas in a changing future and not be stopped by artificial boundaries.

Also collaborating on the research was Nicholas Coops at the University of British Columbia. The work has been supported by NASA, and the study is being published in two professional journals, Ecological Modeling and Remote Sensing of Environment.

Bend business leader and resident Allan Bruckner made a commitment of $800,000 to OSU–Cascades to help the institution finalize its purchase of a building to house many of its graduate and research programs. The building, located at 650 S.W. Columbia St. in Bend, has a full purchase price of $3.88 million.

Bruckner’s gift will complement $2 million in lottery bonds approved in June by the Oregon State Legislature, with the additional funds being provided by OSU-Cascades.

“This new building will allow us to move our graduate programs as early as spring term, and will accelerate the evolution of OSU-Cascades into a comprehensive university,” said Becky Johnson, vice president for OSU-Cascades.

The rapidly growing campus has an enrollment this fall of approximately 750 junior, senior and graduate students – an increase of 10 percent in headcount, and 16 percent in FTE, over last fall.

A Bend, Ore., resident since 1970 and president of Cayuga Properties, Bruckner served as a Bend city commissioner in 1988 and was elected mayor in 1992.  He is an alumnus of Cornell University and the University of Oregon.

“Almost everyone agrees that the number one priority for a strong community is an educated populace,” Bruckner said. “Bend has a fine public school system, a well-established and outstanding community college, and an emerging university that deserves and needs greater support.”

Legislative support for the building stems from House Bill 3627, which was introduced by Rep. Jason Conger (R-Bend) and sponsored by Sen. Chris Telfer (R-Bend) and Reps. Gene Whisnant (R-Sunriver), Mike McLane (R-Powell Butte) and John Huffman (R-The Dalles).

The sale marks OSU-Cascades’ first building purchase; remodeling of the office space to incorporate classroom and learning spaces will begin shortly. The building will house OSU-Cascades administrative staff, its graduate teaching and counseling programs, and future programs such as the proposed Master in Public Health and Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

“Allan Bruckner’s generous gift illustrates increasing confidence in the campus’ evolution into a comprehensive university and sets the stage for continued philanthropic support from the Central Oregon community,” Johnson said.

The next step, OSU-Cascades administrators and Bruckner agree, is to continue the growth of the institution and develop support for degree programs, faculty endowments and student scholarships.

“We truly hope others will take note of this support and that it will be a catalyst for the community to concentrate efforts on nurturing development of OSU-Cascades,” Bruckner said.

The mass of debris, weighing millions of tons and forming a trail a thousand miles long, will likely strike Oregon and Washington, according to models based on winds and currents.

But new accounts of where the trail has progressed suggest that at least some of that debris may peel off and enter the infamous “Garbage Patch,” a huge gyre in the Pacific where plastic and other debris has accumulated over the years, according to Jack Barth, an Oregon State University oceanographer and an expert on Pacific Ocean currents and winds.

“Recent reports of debris are from farther south than the axis of the main ocean currents sweeping across the north Pacific toward Oregon,” said Barth, a professor in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. “This means a fair amount of debris may enter the patch. We should still see some of the effects in Oregon and Washington, but between some of the materials sinking, and others joining the garbage patch, it might not be as bad as was originally thought.”

Barth said as time goes on, more of the materials will sink as they become waterlogged, or become heavy from barnacles and other organisms growing on them.

Conversely, he said, items of debris that are higher in the water and can be caught by the winds – such as small boats – may arrive more quickly than anticipated. The “westerlies,” as these winds are called, blow straight across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Pacific Northwest coast “and they can be pretty strong,” Barth pointed out.

Recent reports that the debris is ahead of schedule don’t match Barth’s calculations, which suggest that the bulk of the debris should arrive along the West Coast in 2013 to 2014. It appears to be moving about 10 miles a day, he said.

Fears of contamination from the debris are largely unfounded, Barth said. The OSU scientist just returned from a meeting of PICES - the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, where Japanese scientists reported that radiation levels in the waters off the Japanese coast were below a safe threshold.

“The dilution power of the Pacific Ocean is enormous,” Barth said.

Barth led a five-year study a decade ago looking at how water moves off the Oregon coast in the aftermath of the 1999 shipwreck of the New Carissa. Hundreds of gallons of oil leaked from the vessel and despite sophisticated ocean current models, the fuel appeared in places that surprised scientists.

Although the westerlies will bring some of the debris toward the Northwest coast, what happens as it arrives near the shore will depend on the time of year, Barth said.

“One thing we learned from the New Carissa, is that when things get dumped off the Oregon coast in winter, they go quickly northward,” Barth pointed out. “If the debris arrives in the winter, some of it may get pushed up to Vancouver Island. If it gets here in the summer, it is more likely to drift down to the south.”

Local winds can further confuse the issue, keep debris off-shore in the summer when the winds are from the north, and pushing it on-shore in the winter.

The findings, announced this week in the Journal of Wildlife Management, are important because previous research had demonstrated that marten populations had become increasingly fragmented in northeastern California and this new study offers an explanation for the pattern.

Martens also are considered an “indicator” species that reflect beneficial conditions for other animals that occupy old forests.

Katie Moriarty, an Oregon State University doctoral student and lead author on the study, says martens typically utilize large home ranges with patches of dense trees, large snags, downed logs, and decadent trees for resting and denning. Martens are often found in areas where these patches are connected, which may allow them to safely travel from one area to the next without being predated by large carnivores including bobcats, coyotes and goshawks.

Timber harvests and recent fires have reduced some of the available habitat or created gaps that fragment the landscape, the authors say. In addition, efforts to reduce the risk or severity of fire – including the removal of “fuel” in the form of downed woody material – may contribute to habitat loss.

“In the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges, martens are associated with older forests above 5,000 feet and are usually found in wooded areas that contain red and white fir, or lodgepole pine, and riparian areas,” Moriarty said. “Marten numbers may be declining throughout this range as the highest densities of detections have been in isolated and unmanaged areas.

“Preserving marten habitat is important,” Moriarty added, “because what is beneficial for martens is presumably good for other species that thrive in old forests at high elevations. Marten habitat is associated with favorable conditions for spotted owls, pileated woodpeckers, northern goshawks, northern flying squirrels, red-backed voles and other species.”

Martens are one of the smaller members of the weasel family, weighing between one and two-and-a-half pounds – and they look something like a cross between a fox and a mink. Martens are “smaller than a Chihuahua,” Moriarty said, “but have the attitude of a pit bull.”

Small but fierce predators, martens feast on snowshoe hare, chipmunks, voles and other small mammals, and also consume bird eggs and berries. They can survive rugged winters with snow more than a dozen feet deep.

Moriarty’s study focused on the Sagehen Experimental Forest, which is located on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The Sagehen Creek Field Station, established in 1951 and operated by the University of California, is located about 30 miles north of Lake Tahoe. The Sagehen Creek study area is particularly important it is the only place in the United States where martens have been surveyed, using similar methods, for more than a quarter-century.

The marten detections in the study were recorded in part by using “track plates” – long, rectangular black boxes that are set in the woods and baited. When the martens enter them they leave tracks on contact paper. Other methods include snow tracking, cameras and hair snares, which are devices that snag bits of hair off the animal as it tries to reach a piece of bait. The hair can then be used to identify individual martens based on DNA analysis.

Nine previous surveys of martens had been conducted from 1980 to 1993, using similar methods on the same grid, giving the scientists an ideal basis for comparison. The focus of the Journal of Wildlife Management study was a series of surveys in 2007-08, which found 60 percent fewer detections than previous surveys – a decline the authors suggest may be due to habitat fragmentation and loss.

“We’ve estimated that there has been about a 25 percent loss in suitable habitat for martens since the 1980s,” Moriarty said.

Moriarty and her co-authors recommend three strategies for retaining marten habitat at Sagehen Creek:

• Resource managers should consider retaining the remaining contiguous patches of closed-canopy and old forest, which are thought to be the highest quality marten habitat;
• Corridors of dense, late-seral forest should be retained among thinned areas to provide corridors that martens and other animals can use to travel between patches of closed-canopy forests;
• Managers should strive for a “silvicultural paradigm” that retains large snags, diverse tree structure, large downed woody material, and patches of decadent trees as potential resting and denning habitat.

Moriarty has been studying martens in northern California for several years and gained attention in 2008 when she and her field crew photographed a wolverine during this marten research – the first wolverine seen in California in three-quarters of a century.

Co-authors on the Journal of Wildlife Management study are William Zielinski, of the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station in Arcata, Calif., and Eric Forsman, of the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, Ore.

In general, the researchers found only a few protective factors against these higher levels of stress – people who self-reported that they had good health tended to live longer and married men also fared better. Moderate drinkers also lived longer than non-drinkers.

“Being a teetotaler and a smoker were risk factors for mortality,” said Carolyn Aldwin, lead author of the study and a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University. “So perhaps trying to keep your major stress events to a minimum, being married and having a glass of wine every night is the secret to a long life.”

This is the first study to show a direct link between stress trajectories and mortality in an aging population. Unlike previous studies that were conducted in a relatively short term with smaller sample sizes, this study was modified to document major stressors – such as death of a spouse or a putting a parent into a retirement home – that specifically affect middle-aged and older people.

“Most studies look at typical stress events that are geared at younger people, such as graduation, losing a job, having your first child,” Aldwin said. “I modified the stress measure to reflect the kinds of stress that we know impacts us more as we age, and even we were surprised at how strong the correlation between stress trajectories and mortality was.”

Aldwin said that previous studies examined stress only at one time point, while this study documented patterns of stress over a number of years. 

The study, out now in the Journal of Aging Research, used longitudinal data surveying almost 1,000 middle-class and working-class men for an 18-year period, from 1985 to 2003. All the men in the study were picked because they had good health when they first signed up to be part of the Boston VA Normative Aging Study in the 1960s.

Those in the low-stress group experienced an average of two or fewer major life events in a year, compared with an average of three for the moderate group and up to six for the high stress group. One of the study’s most surprising findings was that the mortality risk was similar for the moderate versus high stress group.

“It seems there is a threshold and perhaps with anything more than two major life events a year and people just max out,” Aldwin said. “We were surprised the effect was not linear and that the moderate group had a similar risk of death to the high-risk group.”

While this study looked specifically at major life events and stress trajectories, Aldwin said the research group will next explore chronic daily stress as well as coping strategies.

“People are hardy, and they can deal with a few major stress events each year,” Aldwin said. “But our research suggests that long-term, even moderate stress can have lethal effects.”

Michael Levenson, Heidi Igarashi, Nuoo-Ting Molitor and John Molitor with Oregon State University and Avron Spiro III with Boston University all contributed to this study, which was funded by the National Institute on Aging as well as an award from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Researchers conclude in a new study that the albedo effect, which controls the amount of energy reflected back into space, is important in the climatic significance of several types of major forest disturbances.

In some cases – mostly in boreal forests with significant snow cover – increases in reflectivity can provide cooling. If the area disturbed by fire or insects is large, this cooling can substantially offset the increase in global warming that would otherwise be caused by these forest disturbances and the release of greenhouse gases. In other cases where the ground itself is unusually dark, albedo decreases can magnify concerns about warming.

Wildfires are not the only disturbance that significantly alters surface albedo, this study concluded. Insect outbreaks and defoliation by hurricanes can also change surface reflectivity, with effects on climate as great as those caused by carbon dioxide release from the disturbed area.

“On a global scale, warming caused by increased carbon dioxide still trumps everything else,” said Beverly Law, a professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. “On a smaller or local scale, however, changes in albedo can be fairly important, especially in areas with significant amounts of snow, such as high latitudes or higher elevations.”

Albedo is a measure of radiation reflected by a surface, in this case the surface of the planet. Lighter colors such as snow reflect more light and heat back into space than the dark colors of a full forest and tree canopy.

“This decreased absorption of heat by the land surface is a local atmospheric cooling effect,” said Tom O’Halloran, a recent postdoctoral research at OSU who is now with the Department of Environmental Studies at Sweet Briar College. “This was clear in one case we studied of trees killed by mountain pine beetles in British Columbia.

“In areas with substantial snow cover, we found that canopy removal due to either fire or insect attack increased reflected radiation and approximately offset the warming that would be caused by increased release of carbon dioxide,” O’Halloran said. “However, we haven’t been able to measure the full impact from the current beetle outbreak, which could take decades to complete.”

This complex phenomenon would be much less in lower latitudes or areas without snow for much of the year, the researchers said. It relates primarily to boreal or colder mid-latitude forests, such as the Canadian insect outbreak over 374,000 square kilometers of forest.

“The impacts of insects on forest carbon dynamics and resulting changes in albedo are generally ignored in large-scale modeling,” Law said.

The study also found that forest disturbance does not always cause an albedo increase. When Hurricane Wilma in 2005 partially defoliated more than 2,400 square kilometers of a mangrove forest in the Florida Everglades, it exposed an underlying land surface darker than the previous forest canopy. In that case, an albedo decrease effectively doubled the warming impact of released carbon dioxide.

All of the forces studied in this research – fire, insect attack and hurricanes – are expected to increase in severity, frequency or extent under climate change scenarios, the scientists said. In the United States alone, these events affect 20,000 to 40,000 square kilometers of forest a year. If Earth system models are to be accurate, this makes it important to more accurately incorporate changes in albedo.

Globally, forest disturbances are a major factor in the carbon cycle and greenhouse gas warming. They can instantly switch forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources for two decades or more. In cold regions where forest recovery is slower, albedo increases can persist for 100 years.

This research was published in Global Change Biology, a professional journal. It was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, and used data from both the AmeriFlux Network and NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite.

There is now no treatment for this disease, which causes progressive death of motor neurons, serious debility, paralysis and ultimately death within a few years.

Even a way to slow its progression would be hugely important, scientists say.

The findings were reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by researchers from the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, Clemente Estable Institute and the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

The scientists discovered a type of “astrocyte” cell that displays atypical behavior and causes motor neuron death. They are referring to them as aberrant astrocyte, or AbA cells. Astrocyte cells are very common in the brain, and usually help provide metabolic support and protection to neurons. But they can sometimes also become toxic and cause the death of neuron cells.

The researchers now have markers to identify the AbA cells, and found them adjacent to dying motor neuron cells in the spinal cord of laboratory animals with ALS.

The newly-identified AbA cells are selectively toxic to motor neurons, the researchers reported in the study, and 10 times more toxic than any other astrocyte cell known to exist. That level of toxicity is unprecedented, they said.

“We believe these AbA cells are helping drive the progression of ALS,” said Joe Beckman, an OSU professor of biochemistry and principal investigator in the Linus Pauling Institute who has been working on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for more than 15 years.

“These cells are a new target to aim at, a basis for therapies for this disease,” Beckman said. “It should allow us to rapidly screen existing or new drugs to identify ones that could kill the AbA cells, which are easy to culture in the laboratory. This is very exciting.”

Of considerable interest, the researchers said, is that the AbA cells share some of the same characteristics as cells that cause glioblastoma, a serious brain cancer. The AbA cells divide unusually fast, though not as fast as a cancer cell, and don’t respond to the ordinary biological mechanisms that help control cell division. The scientists said they “appear as a new subclass of astrocytes” with an unusual affinity for killing motor neurons.

The aberrant astrocyte cells were initially discovered by Pablo Diaz-Amarilla, a doctoral student in Uruguay, who tried to develop some cell cultures of astrocyte cells from an adult rodent dying of ALS. That should not have worked – researchers for decades have been unable to propagate laboratory cultures of astrocyte cells from adult animals. But Diaz-Amarilla, with the direction of Luis Barbeito, director of the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, persisted in this attempt and found a new type of cell that rapidly propagates.

“Our colleagues in Uruguay kept trying something that conventional wisdom said could not be done, an experiment that no one thought would work,” Beckman said. “And they succeeded. We now have laboratory cultures of the specific types of cells that we think are causing the spread of ALS, and new markers to identify them when we find them. This is very important.”

Other scientists have recently demonstrated in laboratory experiments that transplant of astrocyte cells into the spinal cord of a healthy animal will give it ALS.

Slowing or stopping the progression of ALS would be a critical first step on the road to understanding its exact causes and working towards a cure, the researchers said. At any given time, about 30,000 Americans have this disease.

The current studies have been supported by the National Institute of Health and the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association. Also contributing to this study was the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The study this story is based on is available in ScholarsArchive@OSU: http://bit.ly/oA4LLz

CORVALLIS, Ore. – An eight-year study has concluded that increasingly frequent and severe drought, dropping water tables and dried-up springs have pushed some aquatic desert ecosystems into “catastrophic regime change,” from which many species will not recover.

The findings, just published in the journal Freshwater Biology, raise concerns that climate change, over-pumping of aquifers for urban water use, and land management may permanently affect which species can survive. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

“Populations that have persisted for hundreds or thousands of years are now dying out,” said David Lytle, an associate professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “Springs that used to be permanent are drying up. Streams that used to be perennial are now intermittent. And species that used to rise and fall in their populations are now disappearing.”

The research, done by Lytle and doctoral candidate Michael Bogan, examined the effect of complete water loss and its subsequent impact on aquatic insect communities in a formerly perennial desert stream in Arizona’s French Joe Canyon, before and after severe droughts in the early 2000s.

The stream completely dried up for a period in 2005, and again in 2008 and 2009, leading to what researchers called a rapid “regime shift” in which some species went locally extinct and others took their place. The ecosystem dynamics are now different and show no sign of returning to their former state. Six species were eliminated when the stream dried up, and 40 others became more abundant. Large-bodied “top predators” like the giant waterbug disappeared and were replaced by smaller “mesopredators” such as aquatic beetles.

“Before 2004, this area was like a beautiful oasis, with lots of vegetation, birds and rare species,” Lytle said. “The spring has lost a number of key insect species, has a lot less water, and now has very different characteristics.”

The phenomena, the researchers say, does not so much indicate the disappearance of life – there is about as much abundance as before. It’s just not the same.

“Our study focused on a single stream in isolation, but this process of drying and local extinction is happening across the desert Southwest,” Bogan said. “Eventually this could lead to the loss of species from the entire region, or the complete extinction of species that rely on these desert oases.”

Small streams such as this are of particular interest because they can be more easily observed and studied than larger rivers and streams, and may represent a microcosm of similar effects that are taking place across much of the American West, the researchers said. The speed and suddenness of some changes give species inadequate time to adapt.

“It’s like comparing old-growth forests to second-growth forests,” Lytle said. “There are still trees, but it’s not the same ecosystem it used to be. These desert streams can be a window to help us see forces that are at work all around us, whether it’s due to climate change, land management or other factors.”

The researchers noted in their report that the last 30 years have been marked by a significant increase in drought severity in the Southwest. The drought that helped dry up French Joe Canyon in 2005 resulted in the lowest flow in Arizona streams in 60 years, and in many cases the lowest on record. At French Joe Canyon, the stream channel was completely dry to bedrock, leaving many aquatic invertebrates dead in the sediments.

That was probably “an unprecedent disturbance,” the researchers said in their report. Community composition shifted dramatically, with longer-lived insects dying out and smaller, shorter-lived ones taking their places.

Conceptually similar events have taken place in the past in plant communities in the Florida Everglades, floodplains in Australia, and boreal forests following fire disturbance, other researchers have found. In the Southwest, climate change models predict longer, more frequent and more intense droughts in the coming century, the scientists noted in their study.

However, a new model presented this week by researchers at Oregon State University points to a combination of temperature influence and the geometrical configuration of the magma chamber as a potential cause for these super-eruptions.

Results of the research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, were presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, Minn.

Patricia “Trish” Gregg, a post-doctoral researcher at OSU and lead author on the modeling study, says the creation of a ductile halo of rock around the magma chamber allows the pressure to build over tens of thousands of years, resulting in extensive uplifting in the roof above the magma chamber. Eventually, faults from above trigger a collapse of the caldera and subsequent eruption.

“You can compare it to cracks forming on the top of baking bread as it expands,” said Gregg, a researcher in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. “As the magma chamber pressurizes at depth, cracks form at the surface to accommodate the doming and expansion. Eventually, the cracks grow in size and propagate downward toward the magma chamber.

“In the case of very large volcanoes, when the cracks penetrate deep enough, they can rupture the magma chamber wall and trigger roof collapse and eruption,” Gregg added.

The eruption of super-volcanoes dwarfs the eruptions of recent volcanoes and can trigger planetary climate change by inducing Ice Ages and other impacts. One such event was the Huckleberry Ridge eruption of present-day Yellowstone Park about two million years ago, which was more than 2,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington.

“Short of a meteor impact, these super-eruptions are the worst environmental hazards our planet can face,” Gregg said. “Huge amounts of material are expelled, devastating the environment and creating a gas cloud that covers the globe for years.”

Previous modeling efforts have focused on an eruption trigger from within the magma chamber, which scientists thought would leave a visible trace in the form of a precursor eruption deposits, according to Shanaka “Shan” de Silva, an OSU geologist and co-author on the study. Yet there has been a distinct lack of physical evidence for a pre-cursor eruption at the site of these super-volcanoes.

The model suggests the reason there may be no precursor eruption is that the trigger comes from above, not from within, de Silva pointed out.

“Instead of taking the evidence in these eruptions at face value, most models have simply taken small historic eruptions and tried to scale the process up to super-volcanic proportions,” de Silva said. “Those of us who actually study these phenomena have known for a long time that these eruptions are not simply scaled-up Mt. Mazamas or Krakataus – the scaling is non-linear. The evidence is clear.”

It takes a “perfect storm” of conditions to grow an eruptible magma chamber of this size, Gregg says, which is one reason super-volcano eruptions have occurred infrequently throughout history. The magma reservoirs feeding the eruptions could be as large as 10,000- to 15,000-square cubic kilometers, and the chamber requires repeated intrusions of magma from below to heat the surrounding rock and make it malleable. It is that increase in ductility that allows the chamber to grow without magma evacuation in a more conventional manner.

When magma chambers are smaller, they may expel magma before maximum pressure is reached through frequent small eruptions.

The Yellowstone eruption is one of the largest super-volcano events in history and it has happened several times. Other super-volcano sites include Lake Toba in Sumatra, the central Andes Mountains, New Zealand and Japan.

Gregg said that despite its explosive history, it doesn’t appear that Yellowstone is primed for another super-eruption anytime soon, though the slow process of volcanic uplift is taking place every day.

“The uplift of the surface at Yellowstone right now is on the order of millimeters,” she explained. “When the Huckleberry Ridge eruption took place, the uplift of the whole Yellowstone region would have been hundreds of meters high, and perhaps as much as a kilometer.”

Other authors on the investigation include Erik Grosfils, of Pomona College, and John Parmigiani, an OSU engineer.

The total is about $7.5 million larger than OSU’s previous monthly high point, established in 2004-05, when two foundations combined to provide $24.5 million to the OSU-led Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans. By comparison, the largest grant in September 2011’s total came from the National Science Foundation -- $12 million for a green materials chemistry center being developed with partners from the University of Oregon and elsewhere.

Only three other grants among the month’s diverse 222 awards were in excess of $1 million. Federal departments from NASA to USDA – 13 agencies in all -- funded OSU studies, as did a long and diverse list of state agencies, private foundations, university partners and five separate industry interests, including Hewlett-Packard and major firms in energy exploration and development.

“Even as the funding environment becomes more competitive, our faculty consistently rise to the challenge, both at the federal level and in creating research partnerships with private industry and other research enterprises,” said OSU President Edward J. Ray. “This not only allows them to seek answers to the important questions being posed in their labs, but to involve our undergraduate and graduate students in the exciting process of discovery. That’s one of a growing number of reasons why more of the best and brightest students are choosing OSU – our research program provides experiential learning opportunities that simply aren’t available in many other places.”

The research projects are just as diverse as their funders. One aims to find more effective ways to prevent the spread of HIV among African-American youth, another will support testing of ocean wave energy technology while yet another will fund continued research in wheat program that has already bred the two most widely planted varieties in the Pacific Northwest.

The funding is vital to pushing the boundaries of research forward, and OSU plays an integral role in that regard. Faculty in some of its most prominent areas – the College of Agricultural Science, for instance – find their work cited by other scientists more often than those of any similar faculty in the United States. The university’s wave laboratory is the western hemisphere’s largest and most sophisticated for the study of tsunamis and wave energy and its nuclear energy department is the only university facility nationally authorized to test and certify reactor designs.

The funding also has a substantial economic impact in Oregon’s economy. Every dollar invested in university research generates as much as four additional dollars in economic activity through wages and purchases of goods and services, some experts say. By that measure, OSU’s September could have an economic impact on Oregon well in excess of $100 million.

“The diversity of our research program continues to expand through the entrepreneurial, competitive efforts of our outstanding faculty, and reflects the values and goals of our new research agenda” said OSU Research Vice President Rick Spinrad. “Success begets more success, helping to develop the strength of our research programs, attract the best and brightest students and lure even more outstanding faculty to OSU. So September shouldn’t be looked at as an anomaly, but as a harbinger of continued accomplishment and value to society in a variety of areas.”

The month’s largest gift, the $12-million NSF award, went to Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Douglas A. Keszler. As director of the Center for Green Materials Chemistry, he leads a multi-institutional effort to translate basic-level discoveries into the commercialization of new technologies. In the first phase of the Center, collaborating scientists at eight institutions applied environmentally friendly green-chemistry approaches to the synthesis and fabrication of compounds, thin films and composite materials. In the second phase, they seek to expand and accelerate that work through education of more students, postdoctoral fellow and faculty.

The outcome is hoped to be a new generation of materials built from chemicals that are less toxic than their predecessors for use in fields ranging from integrated-circuit manufacturing to medicine. Collaborators in the center include the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories, Washington University, Rutgers and more.

OSU’s efforts years ago earned the top ranking for research universities from the Carnegie Foundation. Last year, Carnegie also conferred its “community engagement” designation on OSU, making it one of only 23 land grant universities nationally to simultaneously hold both designations. The community engagement recognition is for comprehensive efforts to share the university’s intellectual treasure with the many external constituents OSU serves.

As its research program grows, OSU is increasingly turning discoveries into commercialized innovation. The university recently disclosed that licensing royalties from OSU patents exceeded $4 million in 2010-11, an increase of 63 percent over the previous year. The university has more than 100 active licenses in products ranging from Braille printers to a new pressure-sensitive adhesive technology that could be used in goods ranging from wound dressings to postage stamps.  

The work behind such product innovation led last year to recognition of Corvallis as America’s most innovative city in a study from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Home to OSU’s main campus, Corvallis was recognized for earning more patents per capita than any other city in the United States, many of them awarded to OSU faculty.

One study outlines services and functions that are disappearing in mountain ash forests in Australia, and a commentary in the journal pointed out that many of the same issues are in play in forests of the Pacific Northwest, the grasslands of the Great Basin, and other areas.

Beneath a veneer of forest health, dramatic reductions may be taking place in such functions as carbon sequestration, water yields, wildlife protection and biodiversity of species, said scientists from Oregon State University and the University of Washington.

They called for more attention to natural processes, restoration of the broad range of forest structures needed to maintain the original ecosystem, and reassessments of policies and management practices as needed. In particular, the article questioned any continued harvest in old growth forests and salvage logging after wildfires or wind storms.

“If you just look at a forest, it may look about the same as it used to,” said K. Norman Johnson, a distinguished professor of forest ecosystems and society at OSU. “But we’re losing them without really knowing it.

“It’s late in the game, and there’s no easy way out,” Johnson said. “We need to recognize this, help to better inform the public, and take the steps both with science and policy that may be required.”

Traditional practices in forest management for wood production, such as clear-cutting, site preparation and replanting, tend to produce young forests with uniform structures and low diversity. Large, old trees with cavities, essential to many wildlife species are often absent. And increasingly, even young but very diverse forest stages are becoming scarce.

“Because the young forests are dominated by the same tree species, how could there be a problem?” the scientists said in the report. “The problem is, of course, that critical forest structures and entire stages in forest development can be effectively eliminated from regional landscapes.”

The researchers in these journal articles call this a “landscape trap,” a complete shift to new ecological processes that bear little resemblance to those of the past. The dry forests of Eastern Oregon, Johnson said, are a perfect example. Where small fires would once burn frequently and clear out undergrowth but allow large trees to survive, the forests are now crowded, thick with undergrowth, prone to severe fire, re-growth and a repeat of that catastrophic pattern.

Allowing burned forests to recover naturally would be a positive contribution to development of both diverse understories and complex forest structures, the analysis said, even though the full process may take centuries to reach fruition. Recovery in some areas may be much faster than that, depending on the situation, Johnson said, but the conditions of many forests will be difficult from which to recover.

“If irreversible and socially undesirable long-term changes to regional landscapes and societies are potential consequences, major changes in policies and practices may be appropriate,” the scientists concluded.

But a new study using detailed radiocarbon dating of foraminifera found in a sediment core from the Gorda Ridge off Oregon reveals that the Northeast Pacific was not an important reservoir of carbon during glacial times. The finding may send scientists back to the proverbial drawing board looking for other potential sources of CO2 during glacial periods.

The study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Michigan, was published online this week in Nature Geoscience.

“Frankly, we’re kind of baffled by the whole thing,” said Alan Mix, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University and an author on the study. “The deep North Pacific was such an obvious source for the carbon, but it just doesn’t match up. At least we’ve shown where the carbon wasn’t; now we just have to find out where it was.”

During times of glaciation, global climate was cooler and atmospheric CO2 was lower. Humans didn’t cause that CO2 change, so it implies that the carbon was absorbed by another reservoir. One obvious place to look for the missing carbon is the ocean, where more than 90 percent of the Earth’s readily exchangeable carbon is stored.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean by volume. The deep water mass longest isolated from the atmosphere and most enriched in carbon is found today in the Northeast Pacific, so the researchers focused their efforts there. They hypothesized that the ventilation age in this basin – or the amount of time since deep water was last in contact with the atmosphere – would be older during glacial times, allowing CO2 to accumulate in the abyss.

“We were surprised to find that during the last ice age, the deep Northeast Pacific had a similar ventilation age to today, indicating it was an unlikely place to hide the missing carbon,” said David Lund, a paleoceanographer at the University of Michigan, formerly at Oregon State, and lead author on the Nature Geosciences paper.

“This indicates that the deep Pacific was not an important sink of carbon during glacial times,” Lund added. “Even more intriguing is that we found the ventilation age increased during the deglaciation, at the exact time that atmospheric CO2 levels were rising.”

The researchers reconstructed the ventilation history of the deep North Pacific, examining the sediments at a site about 75 miles off the coast of southwestern Oregon. There the water is more than a mile-and-a-half deep and is known as the oldest water mass in the modern oceans, Mix said. By radiocarbon dating both the planktonic, or surface-dwelling, and benthic (seafloor-dwelling) foraminifera, the scientists can determine whether the isotopic signatures of the foraminifera match “values predicted by the assumption of oceanic control of the atmosphere.”

The organisms that lived on the seafloor have older “apparent” radiocarbon ages than the organisms that lived at the sea surface, Mix said, even though both come from the same sediment sample and are of the same true age. The radiocarbon dating was performed using an advance particle accelerator by the authors’ colleague, John Southon of the University of California at Irvine.

“Different sources of CO2 have different apparent ages, depending on how long they have been isolated from the atmosphere,” Mix said. “We use these dates as kind of a ‘return address label’ rather than to establish precise ages of the events. The bottom line is that the deep North Pacific wasn’t the source of rising CO2 at the end of the last ice age.”

The study is important not just in tracing climatic history, scientists say, but in forecasting how the Earth may respond to future climate change. The Earth “breathes carbon in and out,” Mix said, inhaling carbon into sediment and soils, while exhaling it via volcanism and a slow exchange between the oceans, soils and plant life with the atmosphere.

When everything is in balance, the Earth is said to be in a “steady state.” But on numerous occasions in the past, the carbon balance has shifted out of whack.

“Because the ocean is such a huge repository of carbon, a relatively small change in the oceans can have a major impact,” Mix said. “We know ocean circulation changed during the ice ages and that is why many scientists assumed the deep Pacific Ocean was the source for rising CO2 levels during the last deglaciation.”

Lund said it “is conceivable that we are misunderstanding the radiocarbon signal by assuming it is controlled by ocean mixing.”

“These are volcanically active regions, so the input of carbon from volcanoes, which lacks radiocarbon because of its great age, needs to be looked at,” Lund pointed out. “But it is premature to draw any conclusions.”

The researchers’ next step will be to look for chemical traces of volcanic influence.

Another source of carbon could be from land, though the authors say it would be difficult to account for the magnitude of atmospheric carbon increase and the apparent radiocarbon age of released carbon by pre-industrial terrestrial sources alone.

“If we can better understand how carbon has moved through the Earth’s systems in the past, and how this relates to climate change, we will better predict how the carbon we are now adding to the atmosphere will move in the future,” Mix said.

In “Just One Catch” (St. Martin’s Press), Daugherty traces famed American author Joseph Heller’s life in from his early days as a Coney Island kid and the son of Russian immigrants, to his growth as a major 20th-century American writer and author of the influential novel “Catch-22.”

Daugherty’s biography was named one of Publishers Weekly’s 2011 Top Summer Books and has garnered praise from reviewers. Donna Seaman, with Booklist, said “Daugherty’s groundbreaking portrait of the prophetic, contradictory, and essential Joseph Heller is dramatic and revelatory.”

Daugherty is the author of four novels, four short-story collections, and a book of personal essays. His critically acclaimed biography of Donald Barthelme, “Hiding Man,” was a New York Times Notable Book. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a four-time winner of the Oregon Book Award.

He holds the title of Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at OSU.

The Literary Northwest Series is co-sponsored by the OSU Beaver Store and the OSU English Department, and celebrates regional literary achievement.

Daugherty will also be appearing in Portland at Wordstock at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 8 at the Oregon Convention Center.

Those efforts paid off with licensing royalty income of more than $4 million for fiscal year ’11 – a $1.5- million, 63 percent increase over last year and the first time that OSU technology income has surpassed the $4 million mark. And that is only the beginning, university leaders say, for an institution based in an environment so creative that its hometown last year was named “America’s most innovative city” by a scientific study conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

That designation is based on the Corvallis metro area’s role as the national leader in patent filings per capita – an area in which it has long been near the top. Recent passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, which is expected to be signed today by President Obama in a White House ceremony, may help further Corvallis and OSU’s success in this area through its multiple enhancements to the patent process.

“The royalties we earn are paid by companies that are licensing our innovations, creating products and services, hiring workers and making money,” said Vice President for Research Rick Spinrad, noting that the bulk of licensing income is funneled back into research projects at OSU, spurring further knowledge creation and economic impact. “This is a very tangible way that we’re contributing to our state’s economic success and stimulating economic recovery in the private sector.”

OSU President Edward J. Ray was one of 130 research university presidents this past school year who signed a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke promising a deeper commitment to encouraging faculty and student innovation and entrepreneurship, promoting technology transfer and facilitating university-industry collaboration.

The expansion of the Office for Commercialization and Corporate Development was reflective of that commitment, as is OSU’s ongoing goal of growing the amount of sponsored research support it earns from private-sector sources. That support grew from $5.2 million to $5.4 million last fiscal year, and now accounts for more than 2 percent of OSU’s overall research funding.

“After preparing highly educated graduates ready to make a difference in the workplace, the transfer of technology into the marketplace is perhaps the second greatest contribution that major research universities make to the economic well-being of our nation,” said Ray. “Oregon State’s focus on sustainability coupled with deep expertise in engineering, agriculture science, forestry and related areas means that what’s coming out of our labs is often of great interest to investors, business developers and the private sector generally speaking.”

The “active” portfolio of OSU licenses is increasingly diverse, with 101 licenses spanning the gamut from mass spectrometry to mold yeast inhibitors. One of its most recent successes is a new pressure-sensitive adhesive technology developed by Wood Sciences professor Kaichang Li. Licensed earlier this year to Avery Dennison Corporation, the adhesive technology will now be developed further in the form of potential commercial products. Pressure-sensitive adhesives are used in goods ranging from labels to wound dressings to sticky notes to postage stamps.   

About one-third of last year’s royalty growth came from licensing of space-age “transparent transistor” technology to businesses using it for development of new flat-screen displays. Another 15 percent came from the success of growers using OSU-bred wheat – an area where the university, which bred the top two varieties of wheat currently grown in the Pacific Northwest, has already experienced strong success. Still additional income growth came from licensing of technology used to make Braille printers.

Commercialization and Corporate Development Director Brian Wall said his office is working hard to connect investors with technologies of interest at OSU. The many points along the path to the marketplace where a business idea or innovation can stall can be challenging, particularly in a tough economy, so the new support OSU has mustered for these activities is essential.

“Even ideas with obvious value sometimes struggle to find a way forward,” said Wall. “We’re fortunate to have an experienced group of professionals providing assistance for our faculty researchers, and we have every reason to believe that our progress will continue this year.”

OUS chancellor George Pernsteiner said, “Classified staff on the OUS campuses play an integral role in every student’s success and they are valued by the entire campus community. In the continuing constrained fiscal environment in Oregon, we believe this is a fair settlement with a compensation and benefits package that recognizes both classified employees’ contributions, and the realities of an unstable economy.”

The settlement incorporates some of the core economic terms of the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) settlement agreement with SEIU completed in August but also recognizes that universities serve student populations who have a unique set of needs, interests and concerns.

“Our thanks go out to the OUS campus bargaining representatives whose hard work reflects our responsibility as stewards of state and tuition funds, and our obligations to Oregonians, students, and members of the campus community,” said Pernsteiner. “We hope that our relationship with the SEIU can continue on a path of mutual respect and understanding of the contributions of everyone in our statewide community of more than 110,000 staff, faculty and students who collaboratively enrich our universities. We can now focus the attention of all our faculty and staff on educating the Oregon students who will be enrolling in our universities this fall.”

Summary of key contract areas for salary and benefits include:

• PERS Pick up: employees will continue to receive the 6% “pick up” of their employee contribution (equal to 6% of employees’ salary).
• Health Insurance: OUS continues to fully pay premiums for insurance coverage through Plan Year 2011, which expires at the end of December.
  • OUS will pay 95% and employees will pay 5% of the monthly premium rate as determined by the PEBB, for Plan Years 2012 and 2013.
  • OUS will pay an additional $40 monthly subsidy toward the monthly premiums for employees with salary rates less than or equal to $2,816 a month from December 2011 through June 2013.
  • OUS will continue to pay the current part-time subsidy for eligible part-time employees who participate in the part-time PEBB plan through December 31, 2011.OUS will pay 95% of the part-time subsidy for part-time eligible employees who participate in the part-time PEBB plan for Plan Years 2012 and 2013.
• Cost Of Living Allowance of 1.5% on 12-1-11 and 1.45% on 1-1-13.
• Step increases:
  • First step increase six months after SED; second step 6 months after SED or 6-30-13 at latest
  • Step Increases given July 1 through September 30, 2011 will be rolled back effective October 1 (no repayment required); subsequent step increases for such employees will be delayed by the same number of months that the first step increases were in effect so as to be equitable to other employees.
  • 10th step for all employees currently at top step effective 1-1-13 (true 10th step, first step retained)
• Selective salary range increases for 14 classifications.
• Differential hourly wage increases for employees with certain duties and responsibilities
• Mandatory Unpaid Leave Day (“furlough days”)
  • Less than $2,485 p/month = 7 days per biennium
  • $2,485 - $3,103 p/month = 9 days per biennium
  • $3,104 p/month and above = 11 days per biennium

Oregon University System (OUS) comprises seven distinguished public universities and one branch campus, reaching more than one million people each year through on-campus classes, statewide public services and lifelong learning. The Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the statutory governing board of OUS, is composed of twelve members appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Oregon State Senate. For additional information, go to www.ous.edu.

CAMBRIDGE, U.K. – The saga of Flex the whale continues to deliver surprises a year after the 13-year-old male western (North Pacific) gray whale was tagged and took scientific observers on a four-month, satellite-tracked ride, far from the Asian coast where he was expected to migrate, across the Bering Sea, through the Gulf of Alaska and down the west coast of North America.

Flex’s surprise journey was a revelation to many whale experts, who had estimated only about 130 of the “critically endangered” mammals remain. A scientific team coordinated by the International Whaling Commission has tagged five more western grays this year in the same Russian coastal waters where it tagged Flex. The team hopes to expand that number to 12 in coming days.

The route taken by Flex, who was initially tagged just off the coast of Russia’s Sakhalin Island, has increased the need to better understand the movements of western gray whales, as well as the need to evaluate and improve conservation measures, according to Greg Donovan, head of Science for the International Whaling Commission and coordinator of the project.

“Notwithstanding the scientific interest, this collaboration is being undertaken because western gray whales are considered one of the most-endangered whale populations in the world,” Donovan said. “It is clear that we need to re-examine our understanding of the population structure of gray whales in the North Pacific and any conservation and management implications. We can only do that through increased information from genetic, individual identification and especially satellite telemetry data from more animals. 

“We are indebted to the Russian and American scientists who are undertaking this work in a challenging part of the world.”

Flex’s journey last summer attracted no small amount of public attention, particularly as he made his way down from the Gulf of Alaska and reached Oregon’s coast before his tag stopped working. In no small part, this was because researchers tracking the whale posted his progress on publicly accessible websites, generating an international game of “where in the world is Flex?”

The research team has created new tracking maps for whales being tagged this year --  http://mmi.oregonstate.edu/Sakhalin2011  for English readers and, for Russian, http://kit.sevin-expedition.ru/news/news_69.html.  Weekly maps stringing together the whales’ coordinates will be updated each Monday afternoon as long as the tags remain active. 

Bruce Mate, who directs Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and is a pioneer in the use of satellites to track endangered whales, is leading the tagging portion of the project. Mate said it isn’t unusual for gray whales to migrate thousands of miles annually, en route between breeding or calving grounds to feeding grounds in search of food, but he acknowledged the importance of the potential migration patterns by Flex and his fellow western gray whales.

“In the 1970s, it had been claimed that western gray whales had gone extinct,” Mate said, “but then a small aggregation was discovered by Russian scientists off Sakhalin Island that has been monitored by Russian and U.S. scientists since the 1990s. It is essential to understand the relationship between the animals that frequent the feeding grounds off Sakhalin Island with those in the eastern North Pacific population – which have recovered from their endangered status, been de-listed from the U.S. Endangered Species Act and re-occupied much of their former range.

“Without better information, it is not possible to state categorically whether the situation is considerably better, or even worse than we thought prior to Flex.”

Another member of the research team, Valentin Ilyashenko from the A.N Severtsov Institute for Ecology and Evolution and the Russian representative to the International Whaling Commission, has proposed since 2009 that recent western and eastern gray whale populations are not isolated and that the animals now found in the west are a part of an eastern population that is restoring its former historical range, which includes the Okhotsk sea.

“The tagging last year of Flex was the first time a whale from Sakhalin had been tagged and monitored via satellite. Flex spent two months feeding near Sakhalin Island as winter began approaching, and other forms of observation would have been almost impossible,” said Ilyashenko.

Flex’s movement from Okhotsk to the Kamchatka Peninsula wasn’t big news; western gray whales are often seen in this area. “But his movement across the deep waters of the Bering Sea and around the Aleutian Islands had never been documented before,” said Ilyashenko. “The possibility that these animals are part of the eastern stock warrants serious consideration.”

The collaboration will help conservationists better protect the western grays, said Ilyashenko. “Resource managers in Russia will use the findings from the tagging and tracking project to plan future conservation strategies.”

The eastern gray whale population was also once tenuous because19th-century whaling decimated its numbers. But the remaining 2,000 eastern gray whales mounted a big comeback in the 20^th century, breeding off the Baja California coast and migrating to feeding areas in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. There are now an estimated 18,000 eastern grays.

In addition to Mate, other team members include Vladimir Vertyankin and Grigory Tsidulko of IPEE RAS, Amanda Bradford from the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in Honolulu, and Ladd Irvine from Oregon State University. Tsidulko and Bradford have both studied western gray whales for many years with U.S. scientists David Weller and Robert Brownell of NMFS and Russian scientist Alexander Burdin.

The telemetry program was developed by IPEE RAS, Oregon State and an international team of experts from the International Whaling Commission and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and was carried out under a permit granted to IPEE RAS as part of their western gray whale research program. Every care is taken for the well being of the animals, and only whales agreed to be in good body condition by Bradford, an expert in this field, can be tagged.

BACKGROUND

The western North Pacific population of gray whales was greatly reduced by whaling in previous centuries. It was feared to be extinct in the mid-1970s, but was ‘rediscovered’ off Sakhalin Island, where it has been monitored for the past 15 years. There is evidence of a fragile recovery. Individual animals can be recognized and sexed by photographs and genetic information obtained from biopsies. Sakhalin Island is also the site of major offshore oil and gas activities, and national and international efforts are under way to minimize the impact of industrial development on the whale population. In addition, the whales are threatened in much of their presumed range by accidental entrapment or entanglement in fishing gear and by heavy ship traffic. A Rangewide Conservation Plan has been developed by IUCN and endorsed by the IWC; obtaining telemetry data is also a high-priority action within that plan.

Funding for this international collaboration was provided by Exxon Neftegas Ltd. (ENL) and Sakhalin Energy Investment Company (Sakhalin Energy). ENL and Sakhalin Energy have sponsored a western gray whale monitoring program conducted offshore Sakhalin since 1997.

The new NSF funding, awarded through its Centers of Chemical Innovation Program, will allow the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry to expand research and development and boost efforts to translate basic-level discoveries into the commercialization of new technologies. A large component of Phase 2 is the education of students, postdoctoral associates and faculty on how to accelerate this translation. 

"The NSF’s chemistry division is pleased to support the Centers of Chemical Innovation program, which aims to address difficult but critically important scientific problems that cannot be met by individual investigators working alone," said Matt Platz, director of NSF’s chemistry division. "The research performed by center scientists could provide the intellectual foundation for a new, green chemical industry in theU.S." 

Since the center's initial formation under a $1.5 million grant to Douglas Keszler, a chemist at Oregon State University and adjunct professor at the UO, collaborating scientists at eight institutions have applied environmentally friendly green-chemistry approaches to the synthesis and fabrication of compounds, thin films and composite materials. 

“The establishment of this center could not come at a better time,” said Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber. “Not only will the innovation and outreach activities contribute to job creation, the green materials emphasis helps ensure that Oregon is looking forward in meeting the challenges of the 21st century economy with fresh ideas and a well-trained workforce.” 

Such green, or toxically benign, products could pave the way for next-generation applications of a wide variety of high-performance electronic devices applicable in such fields as integrated-circuit manufacturing, solar energy and medicine. Several patents have been filed for work done under Phase 1 and subsequently licensed by the center's spinout Inpria Corp. 

"The center has created a transformational thin-film materials platform with broad potential in electronics and energy markets," said Andrew Grenville, chief executive officer of Inpria.  "Graduates from the center are already playing pivotal roles in commercializing the Phase 1 developments through our global partnerships." 

Under the Phase 1 grant -- as the Center for Green Materials Chemistry -- Keszler was the principal investigator. Co-investigators were David C. Johnson, the UO's Rosaria P. Haugland Chair in Pure and Applied Chemistry, Darren W. Johnson, a UO chemist and adjunct professor at OSU, and John F. Wager, professor of electrical engineering at OSU. 

"We've built a strong team for Phase 2, so we're excited about the opportunities for accelerating our basic research efforts, building on our transformational nanoscience of Phase 1 and expanding programs to translate findings to commercial markets," Keszler said. 

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, heralded the center as it moved into its second phase: "It is through grants like these that the United States is able to pursue the development of new and safer technologies that will drive job creation. While the University of Oregon and Oregon State University compete on game day, they collaborate every day in the laboratory, playing a vital role in the innovation that will bring about economic recovery." 

The Phase 2 grant will provide OSU and the UO the opportunity to make a significant impact on the national scale, said David Johnson, who will head education and outreach efforts. "Our vision for the Center is to develop an understanding of the fundamental chemistry enabling the synthesis and assembly of complex nanoarchitectures for technological applications," he said. 

The UO and OSU each will receive about $9 million. The remainder goes to collaborating researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Rutgers University, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Berkeley. Other collaborators include the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of Victoria, British Columbia. 

"The Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry will be a great example of collaborative science," said Kimberly Andrews Espy, UO vice president for research and innovation. "The researchers from the participating institutions will be working together to guide the direction and development of materials needed for future technologies. The University of Oregonis proud to team up withOregonStateUniversityto lead this important research and educational effort." 

To date, collaborating researchers primarily have shared facilities at OSU and the UO, including the Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories. A main office and lab space may be based in the Robert andBeverlyLewisIntegrativeScienceBuilding, now projected to open in Fall 2012. 

Keszler will continue as director. In addition to David Johnson's educational role, Darren Johnson (no relation), Sophia Hayes, professor of chemistry atWashingtonUniversityinSt. Louis, and Eric Garfunkel, professor of chemistry and chemical biology atRutgersUniversity, will head the center's leadership team. 

Under Phase 2, researchers will develop; films and 3D nanostructures from water-based precursors; a new nanochemistry based on interleaving structural elements to yield unprecedented performance; synthetic techniques to make precursor clusters; and films with intentional nano-architectures and new properties. Under an open knowledge model, all innovations will be shared after appropriate patents are recorded. 

"On the education front, we want to create the next generation of graduate education programs with an emphasis on training students in the skills required to translate research into commercial innovations and to assume leadership positions in academia, industry and government labs," David Johnson said. "We aim to create innovative training programs for postdoctoral researchers as well as pilot new research based education models for talented undergraduates." 

Also planned is a series of science-pub presentations across all regions of Oregon; such informal get-togethers to engage in science topics with the public have regularly drawn interest and large turnouts in Portland, Eugene and Corvallis. Center leaders also will develop an innovative high-school chemistry curriculum in collaboration withHermistonHigh School. 

ONAMI (Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute), a state-designated signature research center, is a major supporter of the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry. ONAMI partners with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance on the center’s commercialization program. 

About the University of Oregon: TheUniversity ofOregon is among the 108 institutions chosen from 4,633U.S. universities for top-tier designation of "Very High Research Activity" in the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The UO also is one of twoPacific Northwest members of the Association of American Universities. 

As part of the program, OSU and Scripps will supply trained technicians to go aboard the Healy and Polar Star – both United States Coast Guard icebreaker research ships – and provide technical support for projects focusing on fisheries, climate change, marine ecosystems, physical oceanography, whale research and other areas.

The technicians will come from OSU’s Marine Technician Group in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, and from Scripps’ Shipboard Technical Support department.

“We will be the liaisons between the scientists and the shipboard support team, and work to operate and maintain all of the oceanographic instrumentation,” said Daryl Swensen, superintendent of OSU’s Marine Technician Group. “Though these are Arctic-bound icebreakers, almost everything on board in terms of instrumentation we’ve seen before on the Wecoma (an OSU research vessel) or other ships.

“Most of our technicians have worked off Alaska, in the Bering Sea, and other extreme environments,” Swensen added, “so it should be familiar in many ways. But it will be exciting to be a part of this polar research program.”

OSU has four technicians in the group who will rotate aboard the Coast Guard vessels. The technicians will oversee operation of a variety of instrumentation and equipment, including seafloor coring instruments, bathymetric arrays for seafloor mapping, water sampling and retrieval systems, and ocean sensors that measure everything from dissolved oxygen levels, to phytoplankton productivity.

Research aboard these vessels is broad, researchers say, because so few ships have the capability of journeying into the polar region to conduct studies that are critical to better understanding of climate change and other issues.

“Now more than ever, global policymakers are looking to scientists for accurate information about our polar environments,” said Bruce Appelgate, associate director for Ship Operations and Marine Technical Support at Scripps. “By partnering with the outstanding team at Oregon State, we strengthen our ability to insure that scientific observations performed in the Arctic Ocean will be of the highest possible quality.”

Swensen said the NSF grant is for three years, with the possibility of renewal.

Ron Adams, who has been dean of OSU’s College of Engineering since 1998, will become the university’s first executive associate vice president for research. Before coming to OSU, he was a vice president for Tektronix, and since becoming dean he has forged strong relations with the high-tech sector in Oregon.

Adams will seek to build relations between OSU and other areas within the private sector, said Sabah Randhawa, the university’s provost and executive vice president. Randhawa noted that OSU leads all Oregon University System institutions in research funding, with more than $260 million this year, and would like to further that success by working more closely with industry.

“As a university, we have a long history of successfully competing for grants from federal agencies from the National Science Foundation to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Randhawa said. “Now we need to have the same success in creating partnerships with businesses in Oregon, the region and the nation.

“It is about much more than securing grants from industry,” Randhawa emphasized. “The goal is to identify significant and relevant problems of mutual interest between OSU and industry, and then work to find ways to address those issues. This may involve research, it may involve undergraduate and graduate student participation, and it may create new employment opportunities for our graduates.”

Adams will begin his new duties on Oct. 15. As the executive associate vice president for research, he will work closely with the university’s president and provost, the OSU Foundation, and OSU’s deans to build relationships with the private sector.

He says the new position is a natural extension of his role as dean and he anticipates a smooth transition.

“OSU already has involvement with industry in many of our departments and colleges,” Adams said, “but as an institution, it is somewhat piecemeal. We have a strong culture of collaboration and can better leverage that culture along with world-class capabilities to deliver powerful solutions to global problems. This is what industry is looking for and this change is the first step toward delivering that impact. It will create coordinated responses and give more of an institutional identity so that people in the private sector know where to come when they are looking for potential partnerships.”

As dean, Adams has fostered an era of impressive growth in the College of Engineering. He forged the Engineering Technology Industry Council (ETIC) partnership that advocated to the Oregon Legislature and has led to significant state investments in engineering education over the past decade. During his tenure as dean, research in OSU’s College of Engineering grew by 175 percent to more than $33 million in 2010-11, and the college has raised $141 million toward a goal of $160 million – the largest goal of any unit – in the Campaign for OSU.

Two significant facilities projects during his tenure were the construction of the Kelley Engineering Building, enabled by a $20 million gift from the late Martin Kelley, and his wife Judy, and the complete renovation of Apperson Hall – now known as Kearney Hall – that was driven by a lead gift by Lee and Connie Kearney.

A major grant from the National Science Foundation spurred construction of OSU’s Tsunami Wave Basin, one of the most sophisticated wave research facilities in the world. The college also has become a national leader in the development of wave energy, and it was instrumental in the creation of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) – the state’s first signature research center.

Adams is particularly proud of the spinoff companies that have emerged because of his faculty’s research, including HD+, Inpria and NuScale. “OSU has a bright future in the development of even more spinoff companies, and in sectors ranging from agriculture and forestry to public health,” he said.

Rick Spinrad, OSU’s vice president for research, said Adams’ knowledge of campus and the private sector make him ideally suited for the new position.

“Ron brings an extraordinary and unique familiarity of faculty interests and corporate needs,” Spinrad said. “I know that we will see dramatic gains in university-industry partnering through Ron’s ability to interact effectively with industry and academia.”

Adams earned his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from OSU and his M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in the U.S. Air Force and worked at MIT Lincoln Labs before joining the OSU faculty as an assistant, and then associate professor of mechanical engineering. He specialized in fluid dynamics and ink-jet printers, and then took a leave from OSU to lead a team at Tektronix working on developing color printing and graphics technologies.

Adams eventually led the company’s effort to commercialize and start up its solid ink printing business and in 1995 was named vice president and senior fellow.

OSU will immediately launch a search for a new dean, as well as for an interim leader, Randhawa said.

In research published today in Wildlife Society Bulletin, scientists suggest that a key factor in the Canada lynx being listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act is the major decline of snowshoe hares. The loss of hares, the primary food of the lynx, in turn may be caused by coyote populations that have surged in the absence of wolves. Scientists call this a “trophic cascade” of impacts.

The increase in these secondary “mesopredators” has caused significant ecosystem disruption and, in this case, possibly contributed to the decline of a threatened species, the scientists say.

“The increase in mesopredators such as coyotes is a serious issue; their populations are now much higher than they used to be when wolves were common in most areas of the United States,” said William Ripple, a professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at OSU.

“Before they were largely extirpated, wolves used to kill coyotes and also disrupt their behavior through what we call the ‘ecology of fear,’” Ripple said. “Coyotes have a flexible, wide-ranging diet, but they really prefer rabbits and hares, and they may also be killing lynx directly.”

Between the decline of their central food supply and a possible increase in attacks from coyotes, the Canada lynx has been in serious decline for decades and in 2000 was listed as a threatened species. It also faces pressure from habitat alteration, the scientists said, and perhaps climate change as lower snow packs further reduce the areas in which this mountain species can find refuge.

In numerous studies in recent years, researchers have documented how the presence of wolves and other large predators helps control populations of grazing ungulates including deer and elk, and also changes their behavior. Where wolves have become established, this is allowing the recovery of forest and stream ecosystems, to the benefit of multiple plant and animal species.

Lacking the presence of wolves or other main predators in both terrestrial and marine environments, populations of smaller predators have greatly increased. Other studies have documented mesopredator impacts on everything from birds to lizards, rodents, marsupials, rabbits, scallops and insects. This includes much higher levels of attacks by coyotes on some ranch animals such as sheep, and efforts attempting to control that problem have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Scientists have concluded that exploding mesopredator populations can be found in oceans, rivers, forests and grasslands around the world.

“In the absence of wolves, coyote densities and distributions generally expanded in the U.S., into the Midwest, to the northeast as far as Newfoundland, and as far northwest as Alaska,” the researchers wrote in their report.

Where wolves recovered, as in Yellowstone National Park, coyote populations were initially reduced by 50 percent, Ripple said. Although more sampling will be required, early evidence indicates that a snowshoe hare recovery may be taking place.

As these issues are factored into decisions about how to manage wolves, the researchers said, it’s also important to maintain what they call “ecologically effective” wolf populations, the researchers wrote in their study. The full value of these top predators, and the numbers of them it takes to achieve a wide range of ecological goals, should be more thoroughly researched and better understood, they said.

Give or take a little, one million years seems to be the magic number.

A new study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combined for the first time data from short periods such as 10-100 years with much longer evidence found in the fossil record over millions of years.

It determined that rapid changes in local populations often don’t continue, stand the test of time or spread through a species.

In other words, just because humans are two or three inches taller now than they were 200 years ago, it doesn’t mean that process will continue and we’ll be two or three feet taller in 2,000 years. Or even as tall in one million years as we are now.

“Rapid evolution is clearly a reality over fairly short time periods, sometimes just a few generations,” said Josef Uyeda, lead author of the study and a zoologist at Oregon State University. “But those rapid changes do not always persist and may be confined to small populations. For reasons that are not completely clear, the data show the long-term dynamics of evolution to be quite slow.”

Across a broad range of species, the research found that for a major change to persist and for changes to accumulate, it took about one million years. The researchers wrote that this occurred repeatedly in a “remarkably consistent pattern.”

“What’s interesting is not that we have so much biological diversity and evolutionary change, but that we have so little,” Uyeda said. “It’s a paradox as to why evolution should be so slow.”

Long periods of little change, Uyeda said, are called “stasis,” a pattern that originally led to the concept of “punctuated equilibrium,” controversial when it was first proposed in the early 1970s. This research supports the overall pattern of stasis and punctuational change. However, Uyeda says there may be different causal mechanisms at work than have often been proposed.

“We believe that for changes to persist, the underlying force that caused them has to also persist and be widespread,” Uyeda said.

“This isn’t just some chance genetic mutation that takes over,” he said. “Evolutionary adaptations are caused by some force of natural selection such as environmental change, predation or anthropogenic disturbance, and these forces have to continue and become widespread for the change to persist and accumulate. That’s slower and more rare than one might think.”

Though slow, however, the process appears to be relentless. Most species change so much that they rarely ever last more than 1-10 million years before going extinct, or developing into a new species, the scientists noted.

The exact cause of these long-term, persistent evolutionary changes is not certain. The scientists said that climate change, in itself, does not appear to be a driving force, because many species have remained substantially unchanged over time periods when climates changed dramatically.

This study is one of the first of its type to help reconcile the rapid evolution seen by biologists in contemporary species; the slow, stable changes observed by paleontologists; and dramatic, macroevolutionary differences in body sizes.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Research Council of Norway. It was a collaboration of researchers from OSU, the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Computer scientists in the field of artificial intelligence have made an important advance that blends computer vision, machine learning and automated planning, and created a new system that may improve everything from factory efficiency to airport operation or nursing care.

And it’s based on watching the Oregon State University Beavers play football.

The idea is for a computer to observe a complex operation, learn how to do it, and then optimize those operations or accomplish other related tasks. In this project, the goal is for the computer to watch video of football plays, learn from them, and then design plays and control players in a football simulation or video game.

As it turns out, football is very complex, and computers struggle to see and understand plays a coach or even an average fan would find routine.

The findings of the new study were just published in AI Magazine, a professional journal of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

“This is one of the first attempts to put several systems together and let a computer see something in the visual world, study it and then learn how to control it,” said Alan Fern, an associate professor of computer science at OSU.

“Football actually makes a pretty good test bed, because it’s much more complicated that you might think both visually and strategically, but also takes place in a structured setting,” he said. “This makes it quite analogous to other potential applications.”

Even everyday tasks that are simple for a human, Fern said, are a lot more complicated than they seem.

Consider driving home in your car, he said. What you actually have to do is walk to the parking lot, check for other traffic as you cross the street, select the correct key to put in the ignition, back it up, consider the anticipated traffic to plan a route home, slow down and move a little out of your lane to avoid the child wobbling down the street on a bicycle, make sure you have enough gas. And so on.

Then consider designing an OSU Beavers passing play, which is very fast-paced, designed to confuse the opponent, and based on complex rules; the ball could be thrown to any of several receivers and it still only works about half the time. For a computer that initially has no concept of pass routes and blocking, that’s difficult.

“Using football, we created learning algorithms that allow the computer to see the plays, analyze them and learn from them,” Fern said. “Ultimately these systems should be able to see what is happening, understand it and maybe even improve upon it.”

The work could have multiple applications. Control and logistics planning is hugely important in industry, and even small improvements in efficiency could save billions of dollars. Computer vision and controls might be useful in hospitals or nursing homes to help monitor patients and see who needs care. Large operations such as an airport offer multiple control challenges, or the military could use such approaches to improve supply chains for troops in the field.

The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. It is a collaboration of OSU and the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise in Palo Alto, Calif.

The research is still at a basic stage, the scientists said, but could have commercial applications within a few years. The new study outlines a clear “proof of concept” in action recognition, transferring that recognition into procedural knowledge, and adapting those procedures to new tasks, the scientists said in their conclusion.

“One thing I’d also like to do is return the favor to the football team,” Fern said.

“The study of these football plays is helping us to create intelligent computer systems,” he said. “When this is more fully developed, we should be able to actually apply it to football, maybe help coaches analyze an upcoming opponent, let the computer determine what they are doing and suggest a strategic nugget to the coach.”

The study by Oregon State University researchers surveyed the eating habits of 582 college students, a majority of which were first-year students. The study, now online in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, compares male and female students, but found that both were not getting the proper amount of fruits and vegetables. Male students had about five servings a week, slightly higher than female students who self-reported eating about four servings of fruits and vegetables.

Female students had lower fiber intake, while males tended to consume more fat in their diet. Overall, the females had better eating habits, including skipping fewer meals, eating in the college dining halls more frequently, and reading food labels.

“We found that students skipped meals fairly frequently, which could account for some of the lack of fruits and veggies,” said Brad Cardinal, a professor of exercise and sport science at Oregon State University and one of the study’s authors.

“Still, even accounting for fewer meals consumed, the students were on average not always eating even one serving of fruits or vegetables per day, far below the USDA guidelines.”

Both males and females were consuming more than 30 percent of their calories from fat, which exceeds the American Dietetic Association’s recommendation of no more than 30 percent a week.

Cardinal, who is an expert in the psychological and social aspects of health and exercise, said the larger take-away message is that proper eating and nutrition is not integrated enough into our society. He said the surveyed students came from OSU, where healthy options are available in dining halls.

“We are not teaching youth how to be self-sustaining,” Cardinal said. “Home economics and nutrition classes have all but disappeared from our schools in the K-12 system. There is a fundamental lack of understanding on how to eat well in a very broad sense.”

Cardinal said studies show that when people prepare food at home they tend to eat better and consume fewer calories. He said their survey showed that students ate out a lot and consumed at least one fast food meal per week.

“We have a cooking camp for (elementary school) kids here at OSU that teaches kids how to shop for their food, prepare it and then clean up after themselves,” he said. “These are essential skills every child should know, and it will stay with them long after they leave school.”

Cardinal pointed to recent concerning trends, such as in Texas where health education is no longer required by the state. In addition, many school districts, including ones in Oregon, have cut home economics/nutrition classes due to budget constraints.

“Health is an area being neglected, yet all the available research show that healthy habits and healthy kids can lead to better academic success,” Cardinal said. “We are doing a disservice to our kids by not teaching them these essential life skills.”

OSU alum Kin-Kit “Ben” Li was lead author on the paper, which was funded with a grant from the Good Samaritan Hospital Foundation. The study was also co-authored by associate professor Vicki Ebbeck and former OSU Ph.D. students Rebecca Concepcion, Tucker Readdy, Hyo Lee and Erica Woekel.

Trischa Goodnow, professor of speech communication at Oregon State University, edited the volume that analyzes the nature of “The Daily Show,” a satirical show hosted by Jon Stewart on Comedy Central that features real newsmakers.

The book, “The Daily Show and Rhetoric” examines the arguments that the show makes about the media and politics, the strategies that are used, and some of the particular issues about which the program makes arguments. Rhetoric is often defined as the study of writing or speaking as a means of persuasive communication.

“Recent surveys have polled Americans as saying Jon Stewart is the most trusted journalist in America, yet he refuses this label, insisting he is only an entertainer,” Goodnow said. “In fact, he has established his credibility through sophisticated uses of rhetoric.”

More than a dozen contributors skillfully demonstrate in the book that “The Daily Show” is more than just a show designed to make the audience laugh, but instead uses language to persuade and inform.

In the first chapter, Goodnow and former OSU graduate student Jonathan Barbur outline how Stewart has gained credibility even as the mainstream TV news media has lost it. Goodnow argues that Aristotle describes ethos as “persuasion that is achieved by the speaker’s character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.”

Another essay titled “Before and After The Daily Show” outlines how Stewart and his show have changed the media landscape by using rhetorical tools. Author Robert Spicer of DeSales University shows how Stewart critiques the TV media’s use of clips by taking the same story, but showing an extended version of the same clip. For instance, the announcement by George W. Bush of George Tenet’s retirement from the CIA in 2009 was followed by a short TV clip of Bush referring to Tenet as “resolute” and praising him."The Daily Show" featured an extended clip, complete with Bush fumbling his words, giving his announcement a completely different context.

Goodnow said the idea for the book came out of her class at OSU, Introduction to Rhetorical Theory. The final assignment for the class is to show how rhetoric pervades everyone’s lives, using “The Daily Show” as an example.

“Rhetoric has gotten a bad name but my goal is to get students to unpack these ideas and really look at how rhetoric is used,” she said. “It’s important, because rhetoric is everywhere and can be a very powerful tool, but people need to be able to identify what is legitimate information and what’s not.”

Other chapters in the book include an analysis of the visual aspects by Lawrence Mullen of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, an overview of how the show has changed the nature of political satire by Spicer of DeSales University, and a look at “The Daily Show’s” treatment of “queer” topics by C. Wesley Buerkle of East Tennessee State University.

Goodnow is an expert on visual rhetoric. Her next book will tackle the way rhetorical devices are used in American movies.

What makes the event so intriguing is that the scientists had forecast the eruption starting five years ago – the first successful forecast of an undersea volcano.

Bill Chadwick, an Oregon State University geologist, and Scott Nooner, of Columbia University, have been monitoring Axial Seamount for more than a decade, and in 2006 published a paper in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research in which they forecast that Axial would erupt before the year 2014. Their forecast was based on a series of seafloor pressure measurements that indicated the volcano was inflating.

“Volcanoes are notoriously difficult to forecast and much less is known about undersea volcanoes than those on land, so the ability to monitor Axial Seamount, and determine that it was on a path toward an impending eruption is pretty exciting,” said Chadwick, who was chief scientist on the recent expedition, which was jointly funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Axial last erupted in 1998 and Chadwick, Nooner and colleagues have monitored it ever since. They used precise bottom pressure sensors – the same instruments used to detect tsunamis in the deep ocean – to measure vertical movements of the floor of the caldera much like scientists would use GPS on land to measure movements of the ground. They discovered that the volcano was gradually inflating at the rate of 15 centimeters (six inches) a year, indicating that magma was rising and accumulating under the volcano summit.

When Axial erupted in 1998, the floor of the caldera suddenly subsided or deflated by 3.2 meters (10.5 feet) as magma was removed from underground to erupt at the surface. The scientists estimated that the volcano would be ready to erupt again when re-inflation pushed the caldera floor back up to its 1998 level.

“Forecasting the eruption of most land volcanoes is normally very difficult at best and the behavior of most is complex and variable,” said Nooner, who is affiliated with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We now have evidence, however, that Axial Seamount behaves in a more predictable way than many other volcanoes – likely due to its robust magma supply coupled with its thin crust, and its location on a mid-ocean ridge spreading center.

“It is now the only volcano on the seafloor whose surface deformation has been continuously monitored throughout an entire eruption cycle,” Nooner added.

The discovery of the new eruption came on July 28, when Chadwick, Nooner and University of Washington colleagues Dave Butterfield and Marvin Lilley led an expedition to Axial aboard the R/V Atlantis, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Using Jason, a remotely operated robotic vehicle (ROV), they discovered a new lava flow on the seafloor that was not present a year ago.

“It’s funny,” Chadwick said. “When we first arrived on the seafloor, we thought we were in the wrong place because it looked so completely different. We couldn’t find our markers or monitoring instruments or other distinctive features on the bottom. Once we figured out that an eruption had happened, we were pretty excited.

“When eruptions like this occur, a huge amount of heat comes out of the seafloor, the chemistry of seafloor hot springs is changed, and pre-existing vent biological communities are destroyed and new ones form,” Chadwick added. “Some species are only found right after eruptions, so it is a unique opportunity to study them.”

The first Jason ROV dive of the expedition targeted a field of “black smoker” hot springs on the western side of the caldera, beyond the reach of the new lava flows. Butterfield has been tracking the chemistry and microbiology of hot springs around the caldera since the 1998 eruption.

“The hot springs on the west side did not appear to be significantly disturbed, but the seawater within the caldera was much murkier than usual,” Butterfield said, “and that meant something unusual was happening. When we saw the ‘Snowblower’ vents blasting out huge volumes of white floc and cloudy water on the next ROV dive, it was clear that the after-effects of the eruption were still going strong. This increased output seems to be associated with cooling of the lava flows and may last for a few months or up to a year.”

The scientists will examine the chemistry of the vent water and work with Julie Huber of the Marine Biological Laboratory to analyze DNA and RNA of the microbes in the samples.

The scientists recovered seafloor instruments, including two bottom pressure recorders and two ocean-bottom hydrophones, which showed that the eruption took place on April 6 of this year. A third hydrophone was found buried in the new lava flows.

“So far, it is hard to tell the full scope of the eruption because we discovered it near the end of the expedition,” said Chadwick, who works out of OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. “But it looks like it might be at least three times bigger than the 1998 eruption.”

The lava flow from the 2011 eruptions was at least two kilometers (1.2 miles) wide, the scientists noted.

“Five years ago, these scientists forecast this eruption, which has resulted in millions of square meters of new lava flows on the seafloor,” said Barbara Ransom, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences. “The technological advances that allow this research to happen will lead to a new understanding of submarine volcanoes, and of any related hazards.”

The bottom-anchored instruments documented hundreds of tiny earthquakes during the volcanic eruption, but land-based seismic monitors and the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) hydrophone array operated by the U.S. Navy only detected a handful of them on the day of the eruption because many components of the hydrophone system are offline.

“Because the earthquakes detected back in April at a distance from the volcano were so few and relatively small, we did not believe there was an eruption,” said Bob Dziak, an OSU marine geologist who monitors the SOSUS array. “That is why discovering the eruption at sea last week was such a surprise.” Both Dziak and Chadwick are affiliated with the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resource Studies – a joint NOAA/Oregon State University institute.

This latest Axial eruption caused the caldera floor to subside by more than two meters (six feet). The scientists will be measuring the rate of magma inflation over the next few years to see if they can successfully forecast the next event.

“The acid test in science – whether or not you understand a process in nature – is to try to predict what will happen based on your observations,” Chadwick said. “We have done this and it is extremely satisfying that we were successful. Now we can build on that knowledge and look to apply it to other undersea volcanoes – and perhaps even volcanoes on land.”

Hatfield was supportive of the development of the center, which officially opened in June 1965 during his second term as Oregon governor. During his five terms as a U.S. senator, Hatfield steered critical federal funding to Newport for buildings and programs. In 1983, the center was officially named the Mark O. Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC).

Today, more than 300 scientists and staff members work at HMSC’s 49-acre campus. In addition to faculty researchers and students from OSU and visiting researchers from other academic institutions, the campus is home to representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, as well as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. It is also home port for the OSU research vessels Wecoma and Elakha.

“The Hatfield Marine Science Center is a living legacy, one that will serve Oregon, Oregonians, our nation and our world for generations to come,” OSU President Edward J. Ray. “I can think of no finer tribute to Mark Hatfield's lifetime of public service.”

Ray said the scientific strengths of HMSC, which has an annual budget of more than $45 million, are a major reason why OSU is recognized as being one of the nation’s leading academic centers in marine science, with particular depth in near-shore coastal science.

“Sen. Hatfield understood the importance of the scientific work on Oregon’s coast. And he had the foresight to support a center where that work could take place and to make invaluable contributions toward the center’s expansion over three decades,” said Ray. “Without some of the groundbreaking work that came out of HMSC, climate modeling and our understanding of climate change might not have developed as quickly as it has. We might not have had the capacity to make important contributions to aquaculture science and fisheries management or the understanding of the tectonic plates beneath the Pacific Ocean. And our internationally recognized Marine Mammal Institute might not have had the impact on whale conservation around the globe that it continues to have.

“We at OSU are among many today who can say with heartfelt conviction that he will be missed.”

Images of Sen. Hatfield and HMSC are available at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/oregonstateuniversity/sets/72157627262825293/.

OSU researchers brought in $183.7 million in federal awards for fiscal year 2011, which closed June 30 – just $1 million less than the previous year. Funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense and Department of Interior actually increased, offsetting declines from other agencies, as competitive grant funding available via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) ran out.

Federal funding, the most competitive arena for research awards, accounts for more than 70 percent of OSU scientific funding. ARRA dollars constituted about 10 percent of OSU’s FY ’10 research funds.

Overall, OSU researchers earned $261.7 million in external funding, compared to a record $275.1 million the prior year – a drop of $13.4 million, or 4.9 percent. Nationally, some research universities are reporting funding declines of 15 percent or greater, OSU research officials say.

In addition to answering pressing scientific questions, OSU research has a ripple effect throughout Oregon’s economy. Some studies say every dollar invested in university research generates as much as four additional dollars in economic activity through wages and purchases of goods and services. By that measure, the university’s research projects generated an economic impact of more than $1 billion.

“Even in years of reduced national funding for research, Oregon State University faculty members consistently outperform many of their peers in higher education, ensuring that we continue to grow in areas of strategic focus and enhance our position as the Oregon University System’s leading research institution,” said Edward J. Ray, president of OSU.

“I’m grateful for our faculty’s diligent and entrepreneurial scientific work, both for the abiding good it accomplishes, including positioning the state for job growth and economic expansion, and for the opportunities it provides for our students to deepen their understanding of how to conduct scientific inquiry at the very highest levels.”

Individual research projects funded in FY ’11 targeted a broad range of issues important to Oregon, the nation and the world, from the impact of climate change on essential food crops to better understanding the health needs of seniors as the world population grows increasingly older. A selection of some of those projects is available via the OSU News and Research Communications website.

Other notable facts on OSU research success in FY ’11 include:

• The College of Agricultural Sciences continued its upward trajectory, taking in $58.2 million in research contracts and grants, up from last year’s record total of $55 million. The increase came despite the fact that funding from the federal Department of Agriculture declined by $2.4 million to $36.1 million. The college’s research portfolio is increasingly diverse in focus and funding.

• Other colleges experienced smaller, but significant increases, as well, including Pharmacy ($2.7 million to $5.7 million), Public Health and Human Sciences ($14.8 million to $15.1 million) and Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences ($31.9 million to $32.2 million).

• Research funding from private industry, an area in which OSU has targeted for growth, increased as a dollar amount (from $5.2 million to $5.4 million) and as a percentage of overall funding (1.9 percent to 2.1 percent). President Ray has projected that the university intends to grow that total to somewhere between 4 percent and 8 percent of overall OSU research funding by 2025.

The intentional growth represented throughout the year-end figures is, in part, a reflection of OSU’s strategic plan. Implemented in 2009, the plan calls for increased emphasis on three signature areas of distinction: advancing the science of sustainable earth ecosystems; improving human health and wellness; and promoting economic growth and social progress. All three areas saw research funding growth in FY ’11.

“As Oregon’s land grant university with a deep commitment to the people of this state, OSU has disciplined itself to create a roadmap for future success, and it’s gratifying to see that strategic plan continue to bear fruit,” said Rick Spinrad, OSU vice president for Research. “Through the work of our faculty, OSU is increasingly known for its deep strengths in these areas and the contributions we’re making to advance the frontiers of knowledge.”

The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide historical evidence that warming of water by 3-4 degrees was enough to trigger these huge, episodic discharges of ice from the Laurentide Ice Sheet in what is now Canada.

The results are important, researchers say, due to concerns that warmer water could cause a comparatively fast collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica or Greenland, increasing the flow of ice into the ocean and raising sea levels. One of the most vulnerable areas, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, would raise global sea level by about 11 feet if it were all to melt.

“We don’t know whether or not water will warm enough to cause this type of phenomenon,” said Shaun Marcott, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and lead author of the report. “But it would be a serious concern if it did, and this demonstrates that melting of this type has occurred before.”

If water were to warm by about 2 degrees under the ice shelves that are found along the edges of much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Marcott said, it might greatly increase the rate of melting to more than 30 feet a year. This could cause many of the ice shelves to melt in less than a century, he said, and is probably the most likely mechanism that could create such rapid changes of the ice sheet.

To find previous examples of such events, scientists reconstructed past ocean temperatures and used computer simulations to re-create what probably happened at various times during Heinrich events of the distant past. It had been known for some time that such events were associated with major climate changes, but less clear whether the events were a reaction to climate change or helped to cause them.

“There is now better evidence that the climate was getting colder prior to the Heinrich events, causing surface ocean waters to cool but actually causing warmer water in the subsurface,” Marcott said. “We tried to demonstrate how this warmer water, at depth, caused the base of the ice shelf to warm and collapse, triggering the Heinrich events.”

A present-day concern, Marcott said, is that ocean currents could shift and change direction even before overall ocean water had warmed a significant amount. If currents shifted and warmer water was directed toward ice shelves, more rapid melting might begin, he said.

This study was done by scientists from OSU, the University of Wisconsin, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. The studies were supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA and other agencies.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A growing body of evidence suggests that antioxidants may have significant value in addressing infertility issues in both women and men, including erectile dysfunction, and researchers say that large, specific clinical studies are merited to determine how much they could help.

A new analysis, published online in the journal Pharmacological Research, noted that previous studies on the potential for antioxidants to help address this serious and growing problem have been inconclusive, but that other data indicates nutritional therapies may have significant potential.

The researchers also observed that infertility problems are often an early indicator of other degenerative disease issues such as atherosclerosis, high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. The same approaches that may help treat infertility could also be of value to head off those problems, they said.

The findings were made by Tory Hagen, in the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, and Francesco Visioli, lead author of the study at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Spain.

“If oxidative stress is an underlying factor causing infertility, which we think the evidence points to, we should be able to do something about it,” said Hagen, the Jamieson Chair of Healthspan Research in the Linus Pauling Institute. “This might help prevent other critical health problems as well, at an early stage when nutritional therapies often work best.”

The results from early research have been equivocal, Hagen said, but that may be because they were too small or did not focus on antioxidants. Laboratory and in-vitro studies have been very promising, especially with some newer antioxidants such as lipoic acid that have received much less attention.

“The jury is still out on this,” Hagen said. “But the problem is huge, and the data from laboratory studies is very robust, it all fits. There is evidence this might work, and the potential benefits could be enormous.”

The researchers from Oregon and Spain point, in particular, to inadequate production of nitric oxide, an agent that relaxes and dilates blood vessels. This is often caused, in turn, by free radicals that destroy nitric oxide and reduce its function. Antioxidants can help control free radicals. Some existing medical treatments for erectile dysfunction work, in part, by increasing production of nitric oxide.

Aging, which is often associated with erectile dysfunction problems, is also a time when nitric oxide synthesis begins to falter. And infertility problems in general are increasing, scientists say, as more people delay having children until older ages.

“Infertility is multifactorial and we still don’t know the precise nature of this phenomenon,” Visioli said.

If new approaches were developed successfully, the researchers said, they might help treat erectile dysfunction in men, egg implantation and endometriosis in women, and reduce the often serious and sometimes fatal condition of pre-eclampsia in pregnancy. The quality and health of semen and eggs might be improved.

As many as 50 percent of conceptions fail and about 20 percent of clinical pregnancies end in miscarriage, the researchers noted in their report. Both male and female reproductive dysfunction is believed to contribute to this high level of reproductive failure, they said, but few real causes have been identified.

“Some people and physicians are already using antioxidants to help with fertility problems, but we don’t have the real scientific evidence yet to prove its efficacy,” Hagen said. “It’s time to change that.”

Some commonly used antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, could help, Hagen said. But others, such as lipoic acid, are a little more cutting-edge and set up a biological chain reaction that has a more sustained impact on vasomotor function and health.

Polyphenols, the phytochemicals that often give vegetables their intense color and are also found in chocolate and tea, are also of considerable interest. But many claims are being made and products marketed, the researchers said, before the appropriate science is completed – actions that have actually delayed doing the proper studies.

“There’s a large market of plant-based supplements that requires hard data,” Visioli said. “Most claims are not backed by scientific evidence and human trials. We still need to obtain proof of efficacy before people invest money and hope in preparations of doubtful efficacy.”

First on the list, appropriately, is a brilliant orange pigment – appropriate for the OSU Beavers whose team colors are black and orange, and a university in a “Powered by Orange” advancement campaign.

But the broader potential for these pigments, researchers say, is the ability to tweak essentially the same chemical structure in slightly different ways to create a whole range of new colors in pigments that may be safer to produce, more durable and more environmentally benign than many of those that now exist.

Among the possibilities, they say, are colors that should be of interest to OSU’s athletic rival 40 miles down the road at the University of Oregon – yellow and green.

“The basic crystal structure we’re using for these pigments was known before, but no one had ever considered using it for any commercial purpose, including pigments,” said Mas Subramanian, the Milton Harris Professor of Materials Science in the OSU Department of Chemistry.

“All of these colors should share the same characteristics of being extremely stable, durable, and resistant to heat and acid,” he said. “And they are based on the same crystal structure, so minor adjustments to the technology will produce very different colors and very high quality pigments.”

OSU has already applied for a patent on this technology, samples are now being tested by private industry, and the latest findings were published recently in Inorganic Chemistry, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

This invention evolved from what was essentially an accidental discovery in 2009 in an OSU lab, where Subramanian was exploring some manganese oxides for interesting electronic properties. At one stage of the process, when a sample had been heated to almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the compound turned a vivid blue.

It was found that this chemistry had interesting properties that affects the absorption of light and consequently its color. So Subramanian and his research team, including OSU professor emeritus Art Sleight, quickly shifted their electronics research into what may become a revolution in the paint and pigment industry. Future applications may range from inkjet printers to automobiles or even ordinary house paint.

The work created, at first, a beautiful blue pigment, which had properties that had eluded humans for thousands of years, dating back to the Han dynasty in China, ancient Egyptians and Mayan culture. Most previous blue pigments had various problems with toxicity, durability and vulnerability to heat or acid. Some are carcinogenic, others emit cyanide.

Expanding that research, the scientists further studied this unusual “trigonal-bypyramidal coordination” of crystalline structure, atoms that are combined in a certain five-part coordinated network. The initial blue color in the pigment came from the manganese used in the compound. The scientists have now discovered that the same structure will produce other colors simply by substituting different elements.

“The new orange pigment is based on iron, and we might use copper and titanium for a green pigment,” Subramanian said. “Yellow and deep brown should be possible, and we should be able to make a new red pigment. A lot of red pigments are now made with cadmium and mercury, which can be toxic.

“These should all be very attractive for commercial use,” he said.

Una traduccion en espanol de esta historia es accesible aqui: http://bit.ly/tKeDgR

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The Northwest Forest Plan enacted in 1993 was designed to conserve old-growth forests and protect species such as the northern spotted owl, but researchers conclude in a new study that it had another powerful and unintended consequence – increased carbon sequestration on public lands.

When forest harvest levels fell 82 percent on public forest lands in the years after passage of this act, they became a significant carbon “sink” for the first time in decades, absorbing much more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. At the same time, private forest lands became close to carbon neutral.

Carbon emission or sequestration is a key factor in global warming, and a concept now gaining wider interest is the role of forest lands in helping to address concerns about the greenhouse effect.

Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the USDA Forest Service created these assessments with a new system that incorporates satellite remote sensing and more accurately simulates ecological processes over broad areas. It considers such factors as the growth of trees, decomposition, fire emissions, climate variation and wood harvest.

“The original goals of the Northwest Forest Plan had nothing to do with the issue of carbon emissions, but now carbon sequestration is seen as an important ecosystem service,” said David Turner, a professor in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society.

“Forests provide many services, such as habitat protection, recreation, water purification, and wood production,” he said. “Carbon sequestration has now been added to that list. And our approach can provide the kind of spatially and temporally explicit data that will help evaluate the potential trade-offs associated with management activities.”

Previous estimates of forest carbon balance had suggested a significant loss of carbon from Pacific Northwest forest lands between 1953 and 1987, associated with a high rate of old-growth timber harvest. Those harvests peaked in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Forest fire is also an issue in carbon emissions, but researchers said in the study that the magnitude of emissions linked to fire was modest, compared to the impacts of logging. Even the massive Biscuit Fire in southern Oregon in 2002 released less carbon into the atmosphere than logging-related emissions that year, they said.

The findings are of some interest, researchers said, because the value of carbon sequestration is now something that can be better quantified in economic terms, and then incorporated into management decisions and policies.

This study was just published online in Forest Ecology and Management, a professional journal. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the interagency North American Carbon Program. The area analyzed included western Oregon, western Washington and northern California.

In earlier work, Turner and other researchers had found that carbon sequestration in Oregon, much of it from forests, amounted to almost half of the state-level carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Nationally, forest carbon accumulation offsets about 15 percent of U.S. fossil fuel emissions.

There are about three dozen Argus stations around the world, and the data they have churned out have led to new revelations about beach formation, erosion, rip currents and other critical features.

Now scientists at Oregon State University and their colleagues are working to incorporate a new resource into the Argus system – the literally hundreds, even thousands of cameras mounted above beaches around the world and used by surfers, beach combers, weather watchers and coastal hazard specialists.

“There has been a proliferation of beach cameras around the world and they’re out there taking pictures constantly, but they don’t necessarily collect the scientific data that can be useful,” said Rob Holman, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State and one of the founders of the Argus system. “We think they can be tweaked into providing data that will let us create a near-shore prediction model based on remote sensing.”

Creating such a model, Holman says, would be “huge.” If scientists can map the bathymetry of a beach, analyze the physics of the waves, and plug in water movement patterns, they could predict storm surges, hurricane inundation, beach formation, dune stability, and dangers from rip currents.

Holman is co-principal investigator on a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the Office of Naval Research that is designed to explore how to meld data from radar, optics and infrared observations to make such a model a reality. OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences is partnering with the University of Washington and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the project.

“We know enough about the fluid dynamics of the near-shore to make a model that we think can work,” Holman said. “What is lacking, though, is the input data – especially the bathymetry. The surf zone changes every day and bathymetry is critical for making successful predictions. The lack of such data has always stopped us dead. If we solve that, we should be able to create a model.”

That’s where the beach cameras come in. Holman and his colleagues are working with an Australian company called Coastalwatch that has hundreds of such cameras around the world. Getting those cameras to collect measurable data at timely intervals would be invaluable, he said.

“If we could have, say, 10 well-designed sites along the Oregon coast instead of just the one at Yaquina Head, it might do wonders,” Holman said.

Holman worked on the prototype Argus station at Duck, N.C., in 1986. He and his colleagues “decided on a whim” to leave a camera and video recorder at the beach and return later to see what it would record.

“We used to think that beaches were simple and repetitive,” he said with a laugh. “If we understood the physics of one storm, we knew about all storms. Then we learned about chaos.”

In 1992, OSU installed the first automated Argus system at Yaquina Head near Newport, Ore., where it has collected data ever since. OSU operates 11 Argus systems around the world, and several others are operated by scientists from other institutions internationally.

Oregon State organized the first Argus Workshop to discuss technical issues and advancements, and will host the 10th such workshop in July.

In his previous position as a scientist and research administrator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Spinrad helped to draft a policy that defines the relationship between scientists and the policymakers who use their results.

“Most of us grew up in the world of ‘better living through chemistry,’” Spinrad said. “Now it’s a ‘climategate’ world. And since science is part of everyday life, we need to affirm our commitment to using the best science to inform decisions.”

The meeting among federal agency officials and scientists stems from an Obama administration initiative announced before the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. With input from federal agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy produced draft guidelines in December 2010. Spinrad helped lead the effort for the Department of Commerce, the parent agency for NOAA.

Among the issues covered by the policy are autonomy for scientists reporting on the results of federally funded research, news media access to scientists and the participation of scientists in policy development. The purpose of the new federal policy, said Spinrad, is to affirm and codify standard practice for using peer-reviewed science in agency rules and regulations.

The decline of such species around the world is much greater than previously understood and now affects many other ecological processes through what scientists call “trophic cascades,” in which the loss of top- down predation severely disrupts many other plant and animal species.

Such disruption is sufficiently severe that it now affects everything from habitat loss to pollution, carbon sequestration, wildfire, climate, invasive species and spread of disease, the scientists said. It is also a driving force in the sixth mass extinction in Earth history, which the researchers said is now under way.

“We now have overwhelming evidence that large predators are hugely important in the function of nature, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains, the tropics to the Arctic,” said William Ripple, a professor of forestry at Oregon State University, co-author of the report and an international leader in this field of study as director of OSU’s Trophic Cascades Program.

“In a broad view, the collapse of these ecosystems has reached a point where this doesn’t just affect wolves or aspen trees, deforestation or soil or water,” Ripple said. “These predators and processes ultimately protect humans. This isn’t just about them, it’s about us.”

Historically there has been little appreciation of how large predators affected so many other species, the researchers said, and too often such processes were studied one plant or one animal at a time in a small area, failing to appreciate the larger disruption under way.

Based on the new understanding that is emerging, the scientists argued that the burden of proof should now be shifted, to assume that top predators have major effects on ecosystems until proven otherwise.

“We propose that many of the ecological surprises that have confronted society over past centuries – pandemics, population collapses of species we value and eruptions of those we do not, major shifts in ecosystem states, and losses of diverse ecosystem services were caused or facilitated by altered top-down forcing regimes,” the scientists wrote.

Pioneering research done in recent years at OSU and cited in this study, for instance, has outlined the effect that the loss of wolves had in Yellowstone National Park. When wolves were removed, elk populations increased and elk behavior also changed, because they were no longer afraid of browsing young aspen trees in places where historically they might have been vulnerable to wolf attack.

Without wolves and the element of fear, the growth of young aspen trees and willow almost ground to a halt, and there were fewer beaver. Plant communities, tree growth and stream ecology all were affected. With the return of wolves, those areas are now returning to health, and in places, aspen and willow are recovering where they had been declining.

The scientists cited many examples in their study, both terrestrial and marine:

• Reduction of cougar in Utah led to an eruption of deer, loss of vegetation, altered stream channels, and a decline in biodiversity.

• Industrial whaling in the 20th century likely caused a killer whale diet shift and a dramatic decline of sea lions, seals and sea otters.

• Decimation of sharks resulted in an outbreak of cow-nosed rays and the collapse of bay scallop fisheries.

• Sea otters enhance kelp abundance by limiting herbivorous sea urchins.

• The reduction of lions and leopards in Africa led to a population explosion in olive baboons, which bring intestinal parasites to humans who live in close proximity to them.

For too long, the researchers said, large animals have been seen as “riding atop the trophic pyramid” but not really affecting the species and structure below them. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of ecology, they said.

This report was done by scientists from 22 different institutions in six countries. Studies were supported by the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University, National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and other organizations.

“Top-down forcing must be included in conceptual overviews if there is to be any real hope for understanding and managing the workings of nature,” they wrote in their conclusion.

Editor’s Note: Video is also available to illustrate this story, usable as B-roll or with voice-over narration:

High resolution:   http://bit.ly/r9znrh     On YouTube: http://youtu.be/AGnIYrsF4bk

Oregon State University scientists and students on Thursday (July 14) will drop six samples of bright, fluorescent green dye into the ocean to learn more about near-shore water movement. The dye, known as fluorescein, is harmless to the environment and will degrade after several hours of sunlight, but for a brief time will turn patches of the ocean “a Gatorade green,” said OSU oceanographer Kipp Shearman.

“It is pretty spectacular and should be visible from Yaquina Head,” Shearman said of the dye. “But it’s also a powerful tool for accurately measuring fluid movement, which you can’t do as well with other methods, such as drifters. Fluid can move vertically in the ocean and it can diffuse, and the dye will help us track those movements.”

The researchers are scheduled to begin deploying the dye at about 8 a.m. Thursday.

This pilot project will be directed by students under the supervision of faculty from OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, including Shearman, Jim Lerczak and Jonathan Nash. Leading the project will be Allison Einolf, an undergraduate student from Macalester College who is at OSU this summer as part of the National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program, and newly arrived OSU doctoral student Alejandra Sanchez.

Learning more about near-shore water movement is important, Shearman says, because marine organisms living in the intertidal zone or on the beach – including Dungeness crabs, clams and mussels – disperse larva that needs to go out to deeper ocean waters for those species to repopulate. Circulation in this near-shore region is also important in gauging the effects of pollution, contamination from oil spills and the movement of sediment.

Surprisingly, Shearman says, scientists don’t know all that much about water movement just off our own shore.

“It seems so basic and fundamental, but we just don’t know that much about it,” he said. “We know a lot about ocean currents, waves and upwelling, but how water moves from the rocks and surf zone out to the coastal ocean hasn’t been well-documented. One reason is that it’s a tough place to study.  OSU’s ships – the Elakha and Wecoma – can’t get in there easily.”

The OSU oceanographers are going out in the private boat of Scott and Selina Heppell, marine ecologists who work in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU. Beginning at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday, they will drop six floating drifters in the water between the surf zone and a reef about a mile offshore – just south of the Yaquina Head lighthouse – and at each location, will also dispense about a liter of water that has 200 grams of the fluorescein dye.

The dye will disperse and leave trails of bright green water behind – at least, for a few hours – that will be tracked by OSU’s Coastal Imaging Lab cameras located on Yaquina Head. By sunset, the dye should be gone.

Fluorescein is the same dye used by eye doctors to look for physical defects, and by plumbers to test for water leaks.

“If this works well, we may do it again in August or September, and use the results to plan for a more comprehensive study in the future,” Shearman said.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – As homes and cities expand closer to forests and wildlands across the American West, increasing wildfire threats have created an unlikely new phenomena – confidence in government.

Recent studies show that people in neighborhoods adjacent to public forest lands can and do trust natural resource managers to a surprising degree, in part because the risks they face are so severe.

Thousands of acres burn every year, threatening homes, lives and property, and in many groups and areas, the phrase “I’m from the government – trust me” is no longer being used as a joke or punch line.

In a survey done in seven states, researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions found that a large majority of people rated agency management of public forest lands as good or excellent.

Additionally, more than 80 percent of those surveyed - and up to 90 percent at some sites - showed support for mechanical thinning or mowing to reduce fire risks. Only such approaches as use of herbicides found lower degrees of support. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

“Declining forest health and wildfire are such serious and increasing threats that we are beginning to see partnerships forming among mill owners, logging contractors, residents and environmental groups,” said Bruce Shindler, an OSU professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. “The stakes are just too high for everyone.”

The studies found that local, personal relationships were what mattered most in coming to agreement on natural resource plans and policies, topics that have often been contentious among various interest groups in the West.  Positive interactions between homeowner associations, local leaders and individual land managers make the difference, scientists say. Teachers and retirees, for example, are now organizing programs to create defensible space in their neighborhoods and learning steps that can be taken to protect their homes.

“People may still not trust big business or big government, but they trust Joe, the local Forest Service district ranger,” Shindler said. “In forest communities there’s a growing understanding that threats from wildfire are everyone’s concern.  It helps get these groups past that us-versus-them mentality. And this rings true in diverse places we surveyed in Utah, Colorado, Oregon, and Arizona.”

Surveys were done in 2002 and 2008 - with the same individuals over time - analyzing the status and changes in people’s attitudes towards fire and land management policies. The greatest progress was made where local residents had become involved, Shindler said, and worked closely with government and community groups to develop enlightened management approaches that help protect property and improve forest health.

“I was at a judicial hearing a few years ago in Sisters, Ore., where a large crowd of residents spoke in support of local Forest Service policies,” Shindler said. “It was pretty incredible. It’s just not something you see all the time.”

One study of forest communities was recently published. Among its findings:

• The average annual area burned in the U.S. has more than doubled from that of the 1990s, and 38 percent of all the nation’s housing units are now located in the wildland-urban interface.

• Thousands of homes and structures have burned in massive fires in California, Colorado, Arizona and other areas, despite record federal expenditures on fire suppression.

• Residents in forest interface areas generally agree that agency use of prescribed fire and mechanized thinning along with property owners reducing fuels around their homes offer some of the best options to reduce losses.

• The USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and state management agencies all enjoyed “full” or “moderate” support by a majority of residents who trusted them to make good decisions about wildfires and fire prevention.

• Citizen trust in agency managers is particularly influential in public acceptance of fire management strategies. Dedicating resources that build and maintain citizen trust will be important to long-term success.

“Nearly all participants indicated a good relationship existed between local managers and community members,” the researchers wrote in their report. “Such results may be surprising given the often contentious debate surrounding many forest management decisions in recent years.”

This study was supported by the Joint Fire Science Program of the USDA Forest Service. Other collaborators were from The Ohio State University and Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service.

“Fire is probably the easiest issue to build agreement around, because no one wants our homes or forests to burn up,” Shindler said. “However, this also shows the power of building relationships and trust among community members. These approaches may lead the way to resolving other natural resource conflicts.”

Over the next two years of self-study, the college will demonstrate the “capacity and competency” required for accreditation by CEPH, the Washington, D.C., based independent agency authorized by the United States Department of Education to accredit schools of public health. There are 48 accredited schools and colleges of public health in the United States, but none in Oregon.

“As a comprehensive, international research university and Oregon’s land grant institution, OSU has established improving human health and wellness as one of our three signature areas of distinction. To advance this area, we have been working on a number of key initiatives since updating our strategic plan in 2009, including establishing this accredited college,” said OSU Provost and Executive Vice President Sabah Randhawa.   

According to Tammy Bray, dean of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, modern health care reform requires a comprehensive approach to moving the nation from a system that focuses on sickness to one that focuses on prevention toward achieving and maintaining better health and quality of life for all.

“We are transforming our college to better serve the needs of the people, families and communities in Oregon,” Bray said. “The accreditation process allows faculty and staff to design cutting-edge curricula in the classroom and to intentionally build local partnerships in communities across Oregon that focus on prevention, healthy lifestyle and behaviors.

“There is a real advantage to being part of a land grant university,” continued Bray. “One important part of that is that we have OSU Extension, which helps students engage in learning beyond the classroom and allows researchers to share discoveries that improve lives and communities.”

While the university goes through the accreditation process over the next two years, it will continue to participate in the nationally ranked and accredited Oregon Masters of Public Health program, a collaboration with Portland State University and Oregon Health and Science University. The college has been working closely with its partners over the past few years to plan for this transition.

“Our goal is to build an accredited college that attracts the best and brightest students and faculty to public health,” Bray said. “Together with our county, state and education and private sector partners, we are working to build a world-class public health education, research and outreach system for Oregon.”

About the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences: Emphasizing a holistic approach to optimal health and disease prevention, researchers focus on nutrition, physical activity, healthy aging, environmental and occupational health, the health of children and older adults, public health policy and access to health services.

Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a way for the first time to create successful “CIGS” solar devices with inkjet printing, in work that reduces raw material waste by 90 percent and will significantly lower the cost of producing solar energy cells with some very promising compounds.

High performing, rapidly produced, ultra-low cost, thin film solar electronics should be possible, scientists said.

The findings have been published in Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, a professional journal, and a patent applied for on the discovery. Further research is needed to increase the efficiency of the cell, but the work could lead to a whole new generation of solar energy technology, researchers say.

“This is very promising and could be an important new technology to add to the solar energy field,” said Chih-hung Chang, an OSU professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering. “Until now no one had been able to create working CIGS solar devices with inkjet technology.”

Part of the advantage of this approach, Chang said, is a dramatic reduction in wasted material. Instead of depositing chemical compounds on a substrate with a more expensive vapor phase deposition – wasting most of the material in the process – inkjet technology could be used to create precise patterning with very low waste.

“Some of the materials we want to work with for the most advanced solar cells, such as indium, are relatively expensive,” Chang said. “If that’s what you’re using you can’t really afford to waste it, and the inkjet approach almost eliminates the waste.”

One of the most promising compounds and the focus of the current study is called chalcopyrite, or “CIGS” for the copper, indium, gallium and selenium elements of which it’s composed. CIGS has extraordinary solar efficiency – a layer of chalcopyrite one or two microns thick has the ability to capture the energy from photons about as efficiently as a 50-micron-thick layer made with silicon.

In the new findings, researchers were able to create an ink that could print chalcopyrite onto substrates with an inkjet approach, with a power conversion efficiency of about 5 percent. The OSU researchers say that with continued research they should be able to achieve an efficiency of about 12 percent, which would make a commercially viable solar cell.

In related work, being done in collaboration with Greg Herman, an OSU associate professor of chemical engineering, the engineers are studying other compounds that might also be used with inkjet technology, and cost even less.

Some approaches to producing solar cells are time consuming, or require expensive vacuum systems or toxic chemicals. OSU experts are working to eliminate some of those roadblocks and create much less costly solar technology that is also more environmentally friendly. New jobs and industries in the Pacific Northwest could evolve from such initiatives, they say.

If costs can be reduced enough and other hurdles breached, it might even be possible to create solar cells that could be built directly into roofing materials, scientists say, opening a huge new potential for solar energy.

“In summary, a simple, fast, and direct-write, solution-based deposition process is developed for the fabrication of high quality CIGS solar cells,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion. “Safe, cheap, and air-stable inks can be prepared easily by controlling the composition of low-cost metal salt precursors at a molecular level.”

This work was supported by the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, the U.S. Department of Energy and OSU’s University Venture Development Fund, which helps donors receive tax benefits while sponsoring projects that will bring new technology, jobs and economic growth to Oregon.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – After being hunted to local extinction more than a century ago and unable to remember their ancestral calving grounds, the southern right whales of mainland New Zealand are coming home.

A new study published today has shown for the first time that whales from a small surviving population around remote, sub-Antarctic islands have found their way back to the New Zealand mainland.

Before the onslaught of 19^th century whaling, historical records suggest that up to 30,000 of these impressive whales once migrated each winter to New Zealand’s many sandy, well-protected bays to give birth and raise their calves. As a particularly social and acrobatic species, they could be seen from shore as they frolicked, slapped their tails and breached almost entirely out of the water.

And now they’re coming back, according to researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Auckland and other institutions. The findings were just published in Marine Ecology Progress Series.

“We used DNA profiling to confirm that seven whales are now migrating between the sub-Antarctic islands and mainland New Zealand,” said Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at OSU who initiated a study of these whales in 1995.

“These are probably just the first pioneers,” Baker said. “The protected bays of New Zealand are excellent breeding grounds, and I suspect that we may soon see a pulse of new whales following the pioneers, to colonize their former habitat.”

Because of their playful behavior and inclination to swim close to shore, Baker said, southern right whales have become a major tourist attraction in Argentina and South Africa, where their population has increased more rapidly.

The right whales – three species are now recognized– earned their names from the dubious distinction of being the “right” species to kill. They could be hunted from small boats launched from shore, they couldn’t flee rapidly from approaching boats, and they floated when killed because of their large stores of blubber. The same characteristics that made them an ecological marvel also caused them to be sought by hunters.

A large baleen whale, adult right whales can reach up to 60 feet in length and weigh up to 100 tons. Even calves weigh a ton, and right whales are thought to live for 70 years or more.

Hunting of right whales peaked in New Zealand and Australia in the 1830s and 1840s, the researchers noted in their report, and small remaining populations were further depleted by illegal harvest by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. None were seen around mainland New Zealand for decades of the 20^th century.

A small population of this species survived, however, near the Auckland and Campbell Islands south of New Zealand in sub-Antarctic waters. But right whales have a strong “maternal fidelity” in which migration and calving grounds are passed along from mother to calf. Mainland New Zealand had once been a favored breeding ground, but once the last individuals there were killed, they didn’t come back.

“This maternal fidelity contributed to the vulnerability of these local populations, which were quickly hunted to extinction using only open boats and hand-held harpoons,” said Emma Carroll, lead author on the study and a doctoral student working with Baker, who has an adjunct appointment at the University of Auckland.

The researchers wrote in their report that “fidelity to calving grounds can be viewed as a type of cultural memory, and it seems the memory of the suitable calving ground can be lost along with the whales that formerly inhabited such areas.”

Just lately, however, a few right whales started finding their way back home. By 2005, there were estimates of fewer than a dozen reproductive females sited near the mainland, and there are still only a few dozen. But the new study showed that some of them definitely are coming from the sub-Antarctic islands – and more may follow.

These studies have been supported by the U.S. Department of State, National Geographic, the University of Auckland, Marine Conservation Action Fund, and other environmental groups and agencies. Other collaborators are from the New Zealand Department of Conservation, Australian Antarctic Division, Macquarie University, and the Museum of Western Australia.

“The right whale is remarkably graceful, very spectacular to watch,” Baker said. “There used to be thousands of them in New Zealand and they are now re-discovering their ancestral home. It will be interesting to see what develops.”

CORVALLIS, Ore. – New research by electrical engineers at Oregon State University has confirmed that an electronic technology called “ultrawideband” could hold part of the solution to an ambitious goal in the future of medicine – health monitoring with sophisticated “body-area networks.”

Such networks would offer continuous, real-time health diagnosis, experts say, to reduce the onset of degenerative diseases, save lives and cut health care costs.

Some remote health monitoring is already available, but the perfection of such systems is still elusive.

The ideal device would be very small, worn on the body and perhaps draw its energy from something as minor as body heat. But it would be able to transmit vast amounts of health information in real time, greatly improve medical care, reduce costs and help to prevent or treat disease.

Sounds great in theory, but it’s not easy. If it were, the X Prize Foundation wouldn’t be trying to develop a Tricorder X Prize – inspired by the remarkable instrument of Star Trek fame – that would give $10 million to whoever can create a mobile wireless sensor that would give billions of people around the world better access to low-cost, reliable medical monitoring and diagnostics.

The new findings at OSU are a step towards that goal.

“This type of sensing would scale a monitor down to something about the size of a bandage that you could wear around with you,” said Patrick Chiang, an expert in wireless medical electronics and assistant professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“The sensor might provide and transmit data on some important things, like heart health, bone density, blood pressure or insulin status,” Chiang said. “Ideally, you could not only monitor health issues but also help prevent problems before they happen. Maybe detect arrhythmias, for instance, and anticipate heart attacks. And it needs to be non-invasive, cheap and able to provide huge amounts of data.”

Several startup companies such as Corventis and iRhythm have already entered the cardiac monitoring market.

According to the new analysis by OSU researchers, which was published in the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, one of the key obstacles is the need to transmit large amounts of data while consuming very little energy.

They determined that a type of technology called “ultrawideband” might have that capability if the receiver getting the data were within a “line of sight,” and not interrupted by passing through a human body. But even non-line of sight transmission might be possible using ultrawideband if lower transmission rates were required, they found. Collaborating on the research was Huaping Liu, an associate professor in School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“The challenges are quite complex, but the potential benefit is huge, and of increasing importance with an aging population,” Chiang said. “This is definitely possible. I could see some of the first systems being commercialized within five years.”

Of the 511 students surveyed this year, 62 (12 percent) indicated they’ll be continuing their education at OSU. The University of Oregon was the choice of 46 students, and the University of Washington, 34. The survey was part of The Oregonian's "2011 Academic Achievers" project.

That’s a slight improvement over last year, when 44 respondents, 11 percent of that year’s total, noted their intentions toward OSU. In 2009, 50 listed OSU as their university of choice, just under 11 percent of that year’s total. The University of Oregon was second in both of those years.

“We continue to be pleased with the growing number of leading graduates from Portland-area schools who are making Oregon State University and Corvallis their destination of choice,” said Assistant Provost for Enrollment Management Kate Peterson. “The degree programs we offer, the strength of the faculty within those programs, the opportunities that our success as a research university makes for students, our location in what is now recognized as America’s most innovative city – all of that and more contributes toward our success. It will be great to welcome these students to OSU this fall.”

With a commitment to the state’s goal of ensuring that 40 percent of Oregonians earn a bachelor’s degree or more, OSU is on a growth curve, having added 7,000 students over the past decade.  That growth is taking place principally in targeted demographics -- high-achievers, historically under-represented students and international populations, for instance.

The growth among high-achieving students isn’t specific to Portland, though. Continuing a similar trend of the past several years, OSU is enrolling a greater share of high-achievers from around Oregon. This year, more than one-third of all Oregon high schools will send a valedictorian or salutatorian to OSU.

In addition to the attributes noted above, OSU is an appealing choice for the financial assistance it provides to many students. The Campaign for OSU has already far surpassed its initial goal of raising $100 million in financial aid and scholarship monies. And OSU just completed the third year of its “Bridge to Success Program,” which combines federal, state and university funds to fully cover tuition and fees for qualifying Oregon students.

For each of the past three years, the program has served about 3,000 Oregonians.

“By being thoughtful and creative in the ways we ensure access to OSU, we make it not only attractive to high-achieving students from Portland and beyond, we make it work for all of our 24,000 students,” said Peterson.

The study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, explores the use of a focal species – in this case, the African elephant – to see if preserving movement routes for one group of large, wide-ranging animals would benefit other large mammals.

Lead author Clinton Epps, a wildlife ecologist from Oregon State University, spent 12 months over a two-year period hiking through a 20,000-square-kilometer region of Tanzania documenting what animal species used unprotected areas between reserves. Armed only with a can of bear spray and a machete, Epps, co-author Lauren Gwin and several young Tanzanian biologists looked at the distribution of elephants and other mammals inside and outside of wildlife reserves.

The team used cross-country walking transects, sightings and tracks to identify species in each location.

“The idea of focal species for conservation is not a new one,” said Epps, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife at OSU. “But whether that approach can be applied to connectivity between reserves is something that hasn’t been thoroughly examined on the ground. Are reserves like isolated islands, or will animals move back and forth between them and maintain genetic diversity?”

What Epps and his colleagues found was that elephants used specific routes and limited areas across the entire region, moving freely from reserves into unprotected areas without dense human settlement. And what was good for the elephants seemed to be good for many other species, Epps said. Although some species were found mainly within reserves – including lions, giraffes, zebras and buffalos – others such as kudu, leopards, hyenas and impalas ranged far outside.

Most importantly, even outside reserves Epps’ team found much higher diversity of large mammals where elephants occurred. Thus protecting elephant movement routes would help protect habitat connectivity for other species.

The wild card, Epps says, is human-wildlife conflict.

“When people encounter elephants outside reserves, it’s a big deal,” Epps pointed out. “The only people we heard about during the study who were killed by wildlife were killed by elephants. But people increasingly are moving into areas used by elephants as corridors, and in some cases, elephants have abandoned those routes. This potential conflict needs a solution that involves local communities, while recognizing the regional importance of these movement routes.”

Epps is working with co-author Benezeth Mutayoba of Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania on just those kinds of issues. Wildlife resources are important to Tanzania, he said, accounting for 5 to 10 percent of the country’s gross national product – largely from tourism and hunting.

“It’s worth thinking about letting elephants maintain these connections between reserves,” Epps said. “Having a healthy elephant population is good for the economy and good for other animals. People there are concerned about elephant conflict and they are concerned about the safety of their families and their crops. But many also recognize the importance of wildlife.”

One possibility, Epps says, might be to identify “hot spots” where human activity and key elephant travel corridors intersect and focus on solutions in those areas.

“Ultimately, it is up to the people of Tanzania to decide what is best,” Epps said.

The study, which also included Justin Brashares from the University of California, as well as Gwin and Mutayoba, may also be applicable to connectivity planning in other environmental regions. Corridor designs for individual species frequently are proposed for the United States, Epps said, and this study provides an example of how to consider other species within such designs.

Now researchers may have solved the mystery of why the Atlantic is saltier than the Pacific; the cause appears to be global mountain ranges and the Antarctic ice sheet.

When the cold, salty surface water of the North Atlantic Ocean sinks and begins its long journey toward Antarctica, it triggers a complex pattern of global ocean currents that brings enough warmer water back along the European shoreline to keep most of that continent’s climate temperate. The northern Pacific Ocean doesn’t have that same mechanism because its salinity is much lower, and scientists have long speculated as to why.

The new study pinpointing the role of mountains and ice sheets was published by researchers at Oregon State University and the University of Hamburg. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program, it was just published online in the Journal of Climate.

The Rocky Mountains of North America and the Andes of South America block water vapor transport from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, according to Andreas Schmittner, an Oregon State oceanographer and lead author on the study. Most of the water that evaporates from the Pacific is blocked by those mountains and falls as rain or snow, eventually returning to the Pacific Ocean and keeping it fresher.

“Without those mountains, much of the precipitation would fall in the middle of the continents and drain into the Atlantic instead of the Pacific,” said Schmittner, an associate professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State.

Water vapor from the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean Sea, on the other hand, comes across Central America via tradewinds and dumps into the Pacific – creating the salinity disparity. The amount of fresh water this mechanism creates is significant, Schmittner said, about 200,000 cubic meters per second.

“That is roughly equivalent to the output of the Amazon River flowing into the Pacific,” he pointed out.

The mountains of East Africa keep water transport originating in the Indian Ocean from reaching the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, the massive Antarctic ice sheet also plays a major role, the researchers report in their study. This ice sheet intensifies the winds and shifts the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to the south. Without the sheet, the temperature contrasts between the land mass and the atmosphere at lower latitudes would lessen, decreasing winds, Schmittner said.

“Those winds push the Circumpolar Current, which is the most powerful ocean current in the world, to the south,” he said. “If the ice sheet disappeared and was replaced by air, the current would be pushed northward and block the flow of salty water from the Indian Ocean, around the tip of South Africa, into the Atlantic.”

Climate model simulations by the researchers found that removing the mountain ranges creates a fresh North Atlantic and a salty North Pacific.

Ray assumed the leadership role at an auspicious time for the conference, which last Tuesday earned its unparalleled 400^th NCAA championship via Arizona State University's women's softball team. That total is nearly double that of the next most successful conference, the Big 10.

Ray's new role also begins as the conference has just completed a new television deal that not only will generate significant new revenue for member universities, but that will deliver major new national exposure for conference sports and academic programming via the Pac 12 Network.

Ray brings extensive experience to this role, having served for the past two years as chair of the NCAA Executive Committee and having been a member of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors since 2007. He also chaired the search that resulted in former University of Washington President Mark Emmert being named as the new president of the NCAA.

Ray will serve a two-year term and head the group responsible for governance of the conference. On the staff side, the conference is led by Commissioner Larry Scott, former chairman and CEO of the Women's Tennis Association.

"Under Larry's leadership, the conference is moving in innovative and exciting directions," said Ray. "I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities to work with my fellow presidents and with Larry's team to strengthen our conference further, particularly as we deepen the academic and other non-athletics connections between the excellent institutions that comprise the Pac 12."

OSU's president since 2003, Ray is the longest-serving current president among the state's university leaders.  A doctoral graduate of Stanford University and widely published economist with expertise in international trade and investment and U.S. economic history, Ray had a 33-year career at Ohio State University culminating in his service as executive vice president and provost from 1998-2003.

Under his leadership, OSU has grown substantially to its current enrollment of 24,000, launched the university's first capital campaign, which has thus far raised more than $700 million and strengthened its position as Oregon's leading research university, with annual grant and contract funding of more than $275 million.

Researchers with a rapid assessment team supported by the National Science Foundation say that much of the damage could be linked to inadequate connections between building members, especially trusses, roof rafters and walls. And even though modern codes are generally adequate, they said, such codes are not always followed or enforced.

The result last month, one day of which has been called the fifth deadliest day of tornadoes in the nation’s history, was 305 tornadoes, three of which were the maximum “EF5” category, that killed at least 326 people and may have caused more than $5 billion in damage.

“We often found inadequate or no connections at critical locations in structures, such as attaching the trusses or rafters to the supporting walls, or sill plate to the foundation,” said Rakesh Gupta. He is a professor of wood science and engineering in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, an expert in wind loading and structural resistance, and was a member of the NSF research team.

“Time and again we’ve seen that such connections are often inadequate under extreme loading conditions,” Gupta said. “For instance, trusses that were just toe-nailed to the walls often failed in the high winds, the roof blew off and that allowed the rest of the building to collapse. And in some cases there were no anchor bolts between the bottom plate and foundation, allowing the whole building to shift off the foundation.”

The final report from the assessment team is not yet complete, but early observations pointed not just to building codes, but enforcement of those codes, Gupta said.

“In one town in Alabama, I was told there is no inspection of homes by the city building inspector,” he said. “Property taxes are very low, inspection is often inadequate, and sometimes that can result in inadequate construction quality and enforcement.”

In many cases with the largest tornadoes, the researchers concluded, no existing codes or even quality construction practices made a difference.

“In an EF5 tornado, we observed that even new buildings built with the latest codes were totally destroyed,” Gupta said. “One complex had used hurricane clips on trusses, the code-required nailing of roof and wall sheathing, and anchor bolts every four feet. It was destroyed right down to the concrete slab.”

Gupta said that it would be possible to build structures that might resist an EF5 tornado, but not economically feasible.

“We could design a wood-frame house which would resist such forces, but who will pay for it?” he said.

Another part of the issue, researchers said, is that the more routine steps which can be taken to prevent greater storm damage are often easy and fairly inexpensive when a structure is being built, but comparatively expensive and difficult to do in retrofitting existing structures.

“When homes are under construction, the reality is that people are more interested in what they are spending on deluxe kitchen countertops and hardwood floors than some foundation bolt they never see,” Gupta said. “The things it takes to improve structures and make them more safe are usually hidden behind the walls.”

The team also observed that “safe rooms” designed with special construction features to provide refuge during severe storms may only work if a structure is of adequate size. On small houses or other buildings, the entire structure may be blown away and there is no safe place.

The research team will later compile its findings in a full report. Team members were from OSU, the University of Florida, University of Alabama, South Dakota State University, and some private industry agencies.

This catalyst, named “Hua Cat,” is also one of the first products to reach the marketplace as a result of support from the University Venture Development Fund, an initiative finalized in 2007 by the Oregon Legislature to create jobs and aid business by bringing university-based discoveries to commercial use.

The product itself is a new and important part of the field of organocatalysis, which experts believe offers a better and more affordable avenue for research and commercial production of new drugs, while eliminating the need for toxic heavy metals often used in the past.

“Organocatalysis is a very young science, but we believe it’s about ready to take off and provide improved methods for drug research and development,” said Rich Carter, an OSU professor of chemistry, a national leader in this field and co-inventor of the new catalyst along with Hua Yang, an OSU postdoctoral research associate.

“These types of catalysts can be used in the development of almost any type of drug, whether they are for treating cancer, heart disease, infectious disease or other health problems,” Carter said. “At the same time, OSU students are now gaining an edge in the new era of environmentally-friendly medicinal chemistry.”

The catalyst was developed in close collaboration and with the support of Synthetech, an Albany, Ore., contract manufacturer of pharmaceutical products, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of W.R. Grace, Inc. OSU patented the technology and is licensing its use to private industry.

“Hua Cat is very user-friendly for drug development – simple but effective,” said Michael Standen, director of technology for Synthetech. “It’s this type of inventive, creative technology, and our close relationship with the university that is helping us to keep jobs and production here in Oregon and the U.S.

“That’s very exciting,” Standen said. “And we really believe that organocatalysis is a field that’s about ready to blossom, to become an important part of a $350 billion drug development industry.”

Catalysts are chemical compounds that help facilitate other chemical reactions without themselves being consumed – in industrial production, they can be used over and over. Most medicinal drugs are based on what are called chiral molecules, which are like two mirror images that fit together like a lock and key. A catalyst is often used to induce molecules to become chiral and give them the ability to treat disease.

Existing approaches to create these chiral compounds, however, often use toxic metals, which can also be expensive and create waste disposal issues. By contrast, an "organocatalyst" can not only work better and cost less, but eliminate the environmental concerns.

This particular catalyst was invented by OSU scientists because nothing else that existed was working for one of the compounds they were trying to develop. It was only after creating it that they realized it had a huge range of possible applications in the broader field of drug development.

The Hua Cat catalyst is derived from innocuous compounds such as amino acids, soaps and cleaning solvents. It has a solubility that’s 10 times higher than related compounds now being used for drug development. That solubility and its unique chemical reactivity should make it a very important product to facilitate new drug discoveries, OSU researchers say.

Continuing research is already developing variants on the Hua Cat catalyst that should have other useful applications, they said.

Specifically, researchers found that marital instability when the child was nine months old was related to child sleep problems at 18 months, including difficulties falling asleep and staying asleep, according to Anne Mannering, an Oregon State University faculty member in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences.

“If sleep problems persist, this can correlate with problems in school, inattention and behavioral issues,” Mannering said. “Parents should be aware that stress in the marriage can potentially impact their child even at a very young age.”

The findings of the research, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, appear in the journal Child Development. Mannering was at the Oregon Social Learning Center when she and her collaborators conducted the research.

According to Mannering, this is the first study done on the link between marital issues and infant sleep that unambiguously eliminated the role of shared genes between parents and children. Researchers interviewed more than 350 families with adopted infants in order to eliminate the possibility that these shared genes influence the relationship between marital instability and child sleep problems.

“Our findings suggest that the association between marital instability and children’s subsequent sleep problems emerges earlier in development than has been demonstrated previously,” she said.

The researchers found that marital instability when children were nine months old predicted increases in sleep problems when they were 18 months old. Even after taking into account factors such as birth order, parents’ anxiety and difficult infant temperament, the findings still held.

Interestingly, the researchers did not find the reverse to be true: children’s sleep problems did not predict marital instability.

Marital instability was ranked using a standard four-point research measure, with couples independently answering questions such as “Has the thought of separating or getting a divorce crossed your mind?”

Mannering said the couples were predominately middle class, white and fairly educated and all had adopted their child within the first three months of birth.

The research team is now investigating whether the relationship between marital instability and child sleep problems persists after age two, and the role that the parent-child relationship might play in these associations.

Researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center, University of Leicester, Cardiff University, University of Pittsburgh, University of California at Davis, The Pennsylvania State University, University of New Orleans and Yale Child Study Center contributed to this study.

The study was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health.

The prestigious Pew Fellowship program provides a three-year stipend to distinguished scientists for conservation projects designed to address critical problems facing the world’s oceans. Baker, the associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, will use the fellowship to study populations of dolphins in the South Pacific.

There have been few studies of dolphins around islands of the South Pacific, thus scientists are unsure how many species there are, whether local populations from different islands are genetically distinct, and how they are faring in relation to their historic abundance.

“What little work that has been done suggests that dolphins show a lot more local fidelity than previously assumed,” Baker said. “Although some dolphins are found in large populations in the open ocean, others form much smaller communities attached to individual islands or island chains. One of the goals of our research is to determine whether the distribution of these island populations is influenced by seascape characteristics, and how genetically distinct these different populations might be.”

Baker’s study will focus on a vast area of the South Pacific stretching from Micronesia in the west to Polynesia in the east, an area roughly the size of the North Atlantic Ocean. The region has some of the largest protected marine areas in the world and Baker’s study will help determine if these are sufficient in scale to sustain local dolphin populations.

“Dr. Baker’s project can help guide policy decisions for creating permanent areas, not only to protect dolphins, but other highly migratory creatures as well,” said Joshua S. Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environmental Group.

A professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU, Baker’s laboratory is located at the university’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport on the central Oregon coast. In his genetic analysis laboratory, he conducts forensic work on the tissues of whales and other cetaceans. Baker has documented the under-reporting of fin whales in Japan, the threat to minke whales of commercial “bycatch” whaling, and the illegal sale of whale meat as sushi in restaurants in Seoul, South Korea, and Los Angeles.

Baker’s DNA identification of dolphin meat, potentially tainted with mercury contamination, was prominently featured in “The Cove,” where he was seen in a portable genetic laboratory working in a cramped Tokyo hotel room. The provocative film documented the hunting of dolphins in the small Japanese fishing village of Taiji, and the high levels of mercury found in the dolphin meat sold for human consumption.

Baker is also an adjunct professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and supervises graduate students there and at OSU. He chairs the executive committee of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, frequently testifies at meetings of the International Whaling Commission, and edits the prominent Journal of Heredity, a publication of the American Genetic Association.

The Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation has awarded 120 fellowships to individuals from 31 countries since it began. The program is managed by the Pew Environmental Group in Washington, D.C.

The search for a single causative factor is often missing the larger picture, they said, and approaches to address the crisis may fail if they don’t consider the totality of causes – or could even make things worse.

No one issue can explain all of the population declines that are occurring at an unprecedented rate, and much faster in amphibians than most other animals, the scientists conclude in a study just published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The amphibian declines are linked to natural forces such as competition, predation, reproduction and disease, as well as human-induced stresses such as habitat destruction, environmental contamination, invasive species and climate change, researchers said.

“An enormous rate of change has occurred in the last 100 years, and amphibians are not evolving fast enough to keep up with it,” said Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University and an international leader in the study of amphibian declines.

“We’re now realizing that it’s not just one thing, it’s a whole range of things,” Blaustein said.

“With a permeable skin and exposure to both aquatic and terrestrial problems, amphibians face a double whammy,” he said. “Because of this, mammals, fish and birds have not experienced population impacts as severely as amphibians – at least, not yet.”

The totality of these changes leads these researchers to believe that the Earth is now in a major extinction episode similar to five other mass extinction events in the planet’s history. And amphibians are leading the field – one estimate indicates they are disappearing at more than 200 times that of the average extinction rate.

Efforts to understand these events, especially in the study of amphibians, have often focused on one cause or another, such as fungal diseases, invasive species, an increase in ultraviolet radiation due to ozone depletion, pollution, global warming, and others. All of these and more play a role in the amphibian declines, but the scope of the crisis can only be understood from the perspective of many causes, often overlapping. And efforts that address only one cause risk failure or even compounding the problems, the researchers said.

“Given that many stressors are acting simultaneously on amphibians, we suggest that single-factor explanations for amphibian population declines are likely the exception rather than the rule,” the researchers wrote in their report. “Studies focused on single causes may miss complex interrelationships involving multiple factors and indirect effects.”

One example is the fungus B. dendrobatidis, which has been implicated in the collapse of many frog populations around the world. However, in some populations the fungus causes no problems for years until a lethal threshold is reached, studies have shown.

And while this fungus disrupts electrolyte balance, other pathogens can have different effects such as a parasitic trematode that can cause severe limb malformations, and a nematode that can cause kidney damage. The combination and severity of these pathogens together in a single host, rather than any one individually, are all playing a role in dwindling frog populations.

Past studies at OSU have found a synergistic impact from ultraviolet radiation, which by itself can harm amphibians, and a pathogenic water mold that infects amphibian embryos. And they linked the whole process to water depths at egg-laying sites, which in turn are affected by winter precipitation in the Oregon Cascade Range that is related to climate change.

The problems facing amphibians are a particular concern, scientists say, because they have been one of Earth’s great survivors – evolving about 400 million years ago before the dinosaurs, persisting through ice ages, asteroid impacts, and myriad other ecological and climatic changes.

Their rapid disappearance now suggests that the variety and rate of change exceeds anything they have faced before, the researchers said.

“Modern selection pressures, especially those associated with human activity, may be too severe and may have arisen too rapidly for amphibians to evolve adaptations to overcome them,” the researchers concluded.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Other collaborators on the study were from the University of Colorado, University of Georgia, University of Pittsburgh, and Pepperdine University.

The findings were based on case studies conducted with 27 white, middle-class Americans in 2006. The researchers, Michelle Barnhart of Oregon State University and Lisa Peñaloza of Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales du Nord of France, wanted to explore some of the attitudes, perceptions and cultural meanings behind how Americans view and use debt and credit that could have contributed to the economic recession. While a small study, Barnhart said these participants were representative of overall perceptions Americans have on credit.

The results, which include detailed interviews with participants, are currently available online and will be published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

“The economic crash was not just about people being dumb or greedy,” Barnhart said. “There are compelling forces out there that lead people to live lifestyles outside of their means.”

In 2008 alone, Americans spent 9.3 percent of their income servicing debt. And in 2010, more than 24 percent of homes in the United States had an upside-down mortgage owing more than the homes were worth. Based on interviews conducted before the 2008 financial crisis, researchers found that even though consumers espouse that they should limit their debt, they take on significant debt because doing so has become normal. As one participant put it, taking on debt is “the American way.”

Barnhart and Peñaloza’s research yielded a few key findings, including:

• Americans suffer from a lack of financial literacy. Every participant said they had learned about credit card use and debt primarily through personal experience. Very few had received any training in school or at home, and most participants said they didn’t discuss family finances with their children.
• Half of the participants had debt they were unable to pay and one-third of them were dealing with collection agencies.
• Participants often talked about credit as a measure of worth, noting that if they were approved for a certain loan they were “good enough for that car.” Statements often indicated that approval for big-ticket items such as cars and homes were directly related to a value of the person.
• Those who had credit cards and paid them off each month tended to be older, and had higher incomes.
• Several of the younger participants in the study noted that they did not want to use credit, but felt they had to in order to finance cars and homes in the future. Most of the younger participants also were encouraged by their parents to have credit cards, and started using credit at a much younger age than those older than 50.

Barnhart, who is an assistant professor of marketing at OSU, said much of the research done on cultural behavior and attitudes leading up to the economic downturn has focused on ethnic minorities and low-income minorities. However, she said it has been some of the most educated and privileged of Americans who have engaged in risky financial behavior.

This case study, while a small sample, was able to ask detailed questions to probe into deeper issues within American society.

“Over time, credit card use and heavy debt has become normalized in our culture,” she said. “Even though we say as a society, ‘don’t get in debt,’ the overwhelming messages being sent out – from the way credit is used to approve or disapprove us for services to political leaders telling us to spend after a big disaster to prove our patriotism – all of this has created a culture of debt.”

One of the few young participants to not carry any debt said she felt punished for her refusal to have a credit card. She was refused a cell phone, and had encountered embarrassing situations during business travel because she did not have a credit card. Barnhart said this system of penalizing consumers for not using credit is one of the problems.

“Your credit score is this big black box mystery,” she said. “There are three companies in the entire country that control this information, and they make the rules and the equation is secret. So people are told to get credit cards, but not use them. For some, this is equivalent to filling your freezer with ice cream and telling you not to eat it.”

Barnhart would like to next do a study about how norms, values, and habits have changed since the economic crisis. However, she said financial literacy is still the missing link in American society. She and Peñaloza believe that financial literacy classes should be required in schools, and that these classes should not only address credit card fees and compound interest, but also critique debt as a cultural value.

“It’s easy to sit back and blame consumers for just spending too much, but the truth is we have an entire infrastructure set up to support, maintain and encourage credit card use and debt,” Barnhart said. “I would love to see economics back in high school classes that addresses how to manage household finances. And firms need to step up. The 2010 credit card reform was a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done.”

In the first study of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, Kim Raum-Suryan, an OSU faculty research assistant, studied Steller sea lions between 2005 and 2009 at two of Oregon’s most iconic locations, the Sea Lion Caves and Cascade Head. Steller sea lions use these as “haul-outs,” places where the mammals rest on land between feeding forays.

Over the past 30 years, the Steller sea lion population has declined by more than 80 percent, resulting in its threatened status in the eastern portion of its range (central California to southeast Alaska) and endangered status in the western portion (western Alaska).

During the study, which was completed with funding from Oregon Sea Grant, Raum-Suryan witnessed 72 animals entangled in debris including: black rubber bands used on crab pots; hard plastic packing bands used around cardboard bait boxes (and other cardboard shipping boxes); and hooks and other fishing gear.

Since 2000, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has recorded more than 500 Steller sea lions in Alaska and northern British Columbia that have either become entangled in marine debris or have ingested fishing gear.

“There are likely many more entangled animals from Alaska to the central California coast that are not observed because entanglement can lead to death by drowning, infection or starvation before the sea lions ever come ashore,” said Raum-Suryan, who used spotting scopes as well as remote video cameras to document the entangled mammals. “And because these animals can be observed only when they are on land, the numbers might be significantly higher.”

Raum-Suryan said sea lions often sink when they die at sea, resulting in few dead and entangled Steller sea lions stranding on beaches. “This adds to the difficulty of assessing the mortality of the entangled mammals,” she said.

Of the observed identifiable neck entanglements, black rubber bands were the most common neck entangling material (62 percent), followed by plastic packing bands (36 percent) that are cut and glued at the ends around cardboard boxes to keep boxes from bursting.

“We don’t want to point fingers or place blame, because the important thing here is that entanglement is preventable and everyone can do their part,” Raum-Suryan said. “From fishers and crabbers to beachcombers, people can help get the word out on what I call ‘Lose the Loop,’ or making sure all loops – from six-pack plastics to packing bands – are cut before any bands are discarded.”

Sea lions are curious animals and tend to seek out and play with entangling debris, which is how loops lodge around their necks and then cut into the flesh as the animals grow.

Raum-Suryan, who participated in a similar study in southeast Alaska where salmon fishing gear was a more common cause of entanglement, is working with Oregon’s fishing and crabbing industry to raise awareness about the bands and loops.

She has also suggested to manufacturers and packaging companies that the glue used to attach packing bands around boxes could be biodegradable so it would release after short exposure to saltwater and sunlight. Other materials also could be manufactured to biodegrade more quickly.

In both fishing and packaging industries, plastics and synthetic materials have replaced natural fibers over the past 50 years because these materials are lower cost, lighter weight, stronger, and more durable. But they last longer once discarded or lost, are less likely to sink, and are more difficult for marine organisms to escape from once entangled.

“Because entanglement is preventable, even one animal dying this way is too many,” Raum-Suryan said. “These are human-caused problems, and we can prevent them by being aware and making a few changes, like cutting all bands at home and at work.” She has seen packing bands used on boxes ranging from toys to furniture.

Raum-Suryan worked with Alaska Fish and Game to produce an educational video that helps viewers understand entanglement and what they can do prevent it. The video is available on a free DVD from the Alaska Fish and Game, or can be viewed online at: http://www.multimedia.adfg.alaska.gov:8080/WildlifeConservation/entanglement.wmv

The threatened and endangered Steller sea lions are much larger than the protected California sea lions that are common along the Oregon coast. Male Steller sea lions can weigh up to 2,500 pounds, compared to only 700 pounds for a male California sea lion The vocalizations and coloring also differ. Steller sea lions are lighter in color with thick necks and roar, while California sea lions are darker and bark.

The event is an opportunity for OSU students, alumni, faculty and staff to highlight the impact that OSU has on the economy and people of the state. OSU has more than 160,000 alumni, and serves the state through campuses in Corvallis, Bend and Newport and presences throughout Oregon of the OSU Extension Service, Agricultural Experiment Station and Forest Research Laboratory.

University supporters will speak with legislators about public funding for higher education and about the importance of allowing Oregon’s public universities to control and invest the tuition that students pay in educational services, rather than funneling those monies into the state’s general fund, as is now the practice.

OSU supporters are particularly invited to join students, alumni, faculty, staff and state government officials for a reception from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the Galleria of the Oregon State Capitol building. As part of the reception, Benny Beaver will be on hand to pose with supporters for photos.

Earlier in the day, displays on OSU educational programs and research projects will be set up in the Galleria starting at 8 a.m.  At 10:30 a.m., OSU oceanographer Kelly Benoit-Bird, a 2010 winner of the MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” will offer an invocation on the Senate Floor. The House Floor Session will feature a presentation by the OSU Chamber Choir, and the OSU ROTC Color Guard will perform, as well.

From 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., a Health Fair with College of Pharmacy Students will take place at the Capitol. And at noon, there will be a Master of Public Policy Information Seminar for prospective students.

The Chamber Choir will perform in the Capitol Rotunda at 12:15 p.m. for a lunchtime musical treat. OSU political science professor Bill Lunch, who is also a political commentator for Oregon Public Broadcasting, will present, “The 2011 Oregon Legislative Session, So Far,” at 2 p.m. in Hearing Room 50.

The study focused on the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and offers profound support for the value of such institutions. It also reinforces the emerging concept of “free choice” learning, which holds that people get most of their knowledge about science from someplace other than school or formal education.

The comprehensive, multi-year analysis was one of the first of its kind ever done, researchers said, based on extensive surveys of thousands of adults in the past decade by scientists from Oregon State University. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.

“The holy grail of science museums is not to provide someone all the knowledge they need, but to inspire them, to become a launching point,” said John Falk, an OSU professor of science education and national leader in the free-choice learning movement. “Many people have believed that such institutions could do this, but this study provides some of the first definitive evidence that it works.

“Overall, these results were staggering, much more positive than I could have imagined,” he said.

According to the survey findings:

• More than half of the residents in Los Angeles County, over one million a year, have visited the Science Center since it opened in 1998, and say it strongly improved their understanding of science issues.

• Residents who visited the Science Center were among the most knowledgeable Los Angeles residents about science and technology, and their visit significantly contributed to this.

• The makeup of visitors was broadly representative of the general population, including all races, ethnicities, ages, education and income levels.

• More than a quarter of visitors were Hispanic, and some of the strongest beliefs about positive impacts were expressed by minority and low-income individuals.

• While other leisure activities were decreasing in the past decade, adult use of the Internet, watching educational programs on television, and listening to educational programs in other formats increased.

• Nearly all adults who said their children had visited the Science Center reported an increase in their children’s knowledge of science and technology, and large majorities said the visit raised their long-term interest level.

• The attraction to the museum was amazingly broad – no one zip code accounted for more than 2 percent of the visitation.

“There is a growing appreciation that Americans learn most of what they know about science outside of school,” Falk said. “Institutions like science museums can play an important part in that.”

According to Mark Needham, an assistant professor in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society and co-author on the study, these surveys were unlike almost all done previously. They did not just sample visitors to a museum or science center, but sought out and interviewed a representative cross-section of the general public, he said.

The institution that is now the California Science Center has a long history, tracing its roots to the State Exposition Building constructed about a century ago. It underwent a total reconstruction that was completed in 1998, and three major surveys were conducted since that time – one in 1997, one in 2000 and the results of this study from a survey in 2009. The work has been supported by the Noyce Foundation of California, and some earlier studies by the National Science Foundation and James Irvine Foundation.

The Science Center itself is a remarkable, 245,000-square-foot facility with many outstanding exhibits, and it’s free. But other cities have similar facilities and attendance despite charging fees, Falk noted. And it seems to be working.

“Can you define homeostasis?” Falk asked. “Most people can’t. But in Los Angeles, nearly half of the public say they’ve heard of the term, and 20 percent of them can now give you a decent definition. There was an exhibit on homeostasis at the museum after it re-opened, where a 50-foot-tall animatronic woman named Tess explained it.”

Researchers used this exhibit and the concept of homeostatis as a “marker” to demonstrate that what was presented at the Science Center was actually learned. And lest you feel out-of-touch or uninformed, homeostasis is the balance that organisms or cells try to maintain.

Anyway, that’s what Tess says. And apparently in Los Angeles, when Tess talks, people listen.

“It has long been assumed that formal schooling is the primary mechanism by which the public learns science,” the researchers wrote in their study. “But in recent years there has been a growing appreciation for the fundamental role played by the vast array of non-school science education institutions.”

“Large numbers of the general public have benefited,” they said.

-30-

Editor’s Note: Digital images are available online. If you use one of them, please give photo credit to the California Science Center. They can be downloaded at these URLs:

Tess exhibit: https://picasaweb.google.com/CaliforniaScienceCenter/Tess?authkey=Gv1sRgCL-2xdearL7zEA#

Children at learning exercise:

https://picasaweb.google.com/CaliforniaScienceCenter/KidsAtTheCaliforniaScienceCenter?authkey=Gv1sRgCLzwv9XtxsjAJg#5593003567752060562

Their solution? Why, Facebook, of course.

The researchers posted photos of about a hundred different species on their Facebook pages and alerted their friends. Within 24 hours, they had identified 90 percent of the specimens.

“I’m a scientist and many of my friends are scientists,” said Brian Sidlauskas, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, who led the expedition. “The request went through this network of ichthyologists and the response was amazing. It has definitely changed my perspective on how we can utilize social media outlets like Facebook to bolster our work.”

Of course, not all of the responses and comments were, shall we say, in a serious vein?

“One poster said ‘I think that’s a fish,’ and another identified a species of anchovy as ‘pizza topping,’” Sidlauskas said, with a laugh. “But many of the people who responded were among the leading experts in the world and we did in 24 hours what would have taken our team weeks to accomplish on our own.”

Time was of the essence because the researchers had to properly identify the specimens in order to get export permits from the Guyanese government.

OSU graduate student Whitcomb Bronaugh, a professional photographer, had excellent photos of the fish and another student, Devin Bloom of the University of Toronto, came up with the idea of using Facebook to help identify them. The team will reassemble later this month to double-check the identifications using traditional scientific methodology, which involves lots of literature review and painstaking analysis of distinctive anatomical traits.

The work is important, the scientists say, because accelerated gold mining in the region has dumped vast amounts of sediments into the region’s rivers and many fish species appear to be disappearing.

“Without historical records, it’s hard to tell the complete extent of the mining’s impact, but there were numerous species – even entire families of fish – we thought should be there that weren’t,” said Sidlauskas, who is a research collaborator for the Smithsonian Institution, which funded the trip through its Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield program. “Virtually all of the plant-eating fish were gone, and most of the detritus-eaters.”

Word of the Facebook assist has spread and Sidlauskas and his colleagues have been featured on the Smithsonian Institution website as well as making the story-of-the-week on Facebook.

“I’ll need to repay my colleagues in the future for their rapid response,” Sidlauskas said, “but some of the posters also reaped the benefits. We may have discovered a new species that a few of them want to study. This also helps illustrate the importance of conservation and learning more about ecology and impacts on the environment.”

And so far, Sidlauskas says with a grin, no one has “unfriended” him.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State University engineering professor Scott Ashford has just returned from a research trip to Japan, where he and a team of engineers saw first hand the effects of the massive Tohoku earthquake, and experienced the emotional upheaval of a country in crisis.

Ashford has traveled around the world responding to major quakes with the Geo-technical Extreme Event Reconnaissance (GEER) team, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. In the past year he’s been to Chile, New Zealand, and just last week he was documenting the damage in the Tohoku earthquake alongside Japanese engineers.

“Our mission is to get word out to the scientific community about what’s happened on the ground,” he said.

When a major earthquake strikes somewhere in the world, Ashford is immediately alerted, and gets ready at a moment’s notice to rush to the scene. As head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at OSU, he is interested in soil changes following an earthquake.

The GEER team always pairs up with researchers from the country where they’re working. This not only helps them with cultural and language issues, but allows them to be guided by the hosting country’s scientists as to where it’s appropriate, and safe, to conduct their research. It is also a great way to foster international collaboration.

“You can develop strong personal bonds with someone spending a week together in the car doing an earthquake reconnaissance,” Ashford said. And it is those personal relationships that make the follow-up research collaboration possible.

During his recent trip, Ashford had to balance his own emotional reactions to the devastation. While in Japan, a colleague from there showed him a video that hasn’t been aired on television. It was a shot of the water level rising on the Japanese coast as witnesses gathered on the shore, unaware of the danger. In a flash, the tsunami waves hit the coast, obliterating everything, and everyone, standing on the shore.

“I started crying,” Ashford said. “It was very emotional to see that.”

In Japan, Ashford was photographing and measuring small landslides caused by liquefaction during the recent quake. The evidence of liquefaction was apparent more than 100 miles from the quake’s epicenter, “which may be further away than we’ve ever seen it,” Ashford said.

In order to gather evidence of liquefaction, Ashford and his team looked for sand boils (small sand volcanoes) and lateral spreads, that is, shallow landslides triggered by liquefaction. Although they arrived only two weeks after the initial quake, cleanup was already taking place, erasing evidence in some locations, which is why GEER teams are sent in quickly after a major event.

“The data is very perishable,” he said.  But the more evidence they can gather about how soil has altered during an earthquake, the better engineers will be at predicting the outcomes of future quakes.

Heading to Japan carried some unique risks, as news of the earthquake and tsunami was quickly overshadowed by the nuclear crisis there. But Ashford said he depended on the expertise of his own university to keep him safe. He contacted Kathryn Higley, head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering & Radiation Health Physics, who assured him that he’d be safe if he stayed out of the restricted zone near the reactor.

Ashford usually travels light. He brings a camera, a GPS unit, a tape measure and a meter stick. He also makes sure to be self-sufficient in locations where resources are scarce, in order to not use up food and water that could be used for disaster victims.

While the opportunity to conduct research in a virtual living laboratory can be exciting, Ashford never loses sight of the fact that he’s a guest in a country that has just undergone an extremely devastating natural disaster.  

On occasions when he’s accompanied by younger faculty, he advises them not to express excitement at discoveries when they’re in the field following an earthquake, in order to be respectful of those who have lived through the disaster.

“We’re amongst people who have had their lives ruined and are in upheaval,” he said. “Even though it’s exciting to see the things we’ve been doing research on in action, you can’t show any of that. It’s an emotional rollercoaster.”

Historian Jacob Hamblin is the author of the 2008 book, “Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age.” He specializes in the history of the Cold War era, with a particular focus on environmental sciences and the history of nuclear issues.

“Science without history is just ignorance,” Hamblin said. “Much of the current media debate about the safety of nuclear power and radiation exposure is an echo of conflicts going on since the dawn of the nuclear era.”

Hamblin said nuclear scientists have long decried public concerns over radiation exposure and the safety of nuclear power plants. Yet he says these same issues continue to cause conflict between anti-nuclear activists, scientists and pro-nuclear advocates.

“In the 1950s, the response to the public was that it was irrational and that its fears about nuclear energy were based on emotion,” Hamblin said. “I don’t believe the public is irrational, but I do believe that the nuclear industry has failed to address some key issues, namely the issue of nuclear waste disposal and the risk of radiation exposure and contamination when something like Fukushima occurs.”

Hamblin’s book tells the history of how policy decisions, scientific conflicts and public relations strategies were employed from the end of World War II through the blossoming environmental movement of the 1970s. By avoiding simplistic pro-or-con arguments, Hamblin said his goal was to research how and why decisions are made.

“You can talk to scientists from a variety of backgrounds and hear five different true statements about nuclear power, and each of them will lead you to different conclusions,” Hamblin said. “My point is not that nuclear power is bad, because I don’t necessarily believe that, but that the public is torn on these issues because there are a variety of ways to interpret the science.”

In his book, Hamblin gives the example of tests being done by the U.S. military in the 1950s. Nuclear bombs were detonated over the Pacific Ocean, and oceanographers then studied how radioactivity circulated in the ocean and how much it was diluted.

“Some oceanographers and radiation physicists tested the water and found that indeed, the ocean seemed to have diluted the radiation and there was little to no risk,” Hamblin said. “Then another batch of scientists came out and they started testing the plants and fish and other sea life and they found higher levels of radiation absorption in those things that we eat.”

Hamblin’s cautionary tale is that unanswered questions regarding nuclear energy need to be addressed with the public, and not in a dismissive way. In addition, he believes that there are lessons that can be learned from history.

“Just over 40 years ago, people thought storing nuclear waste in ocean trenches was a good idea, until the discovery of plate tectonics,” he said. “In the 1950s, safety levels of radiation exposure to reproductive organs were based on the assumption that most people were done having children by the age of 30.”

“My point is that the science is often informed by the culture and the politics and the technology of the time – and those things are always shifting. We need to consider what we want our energy legacy to be, and how we as a society plan to deal with the aftermath of whatever we choose.”

Oregon State University marine mammal biologist Jim Rice is urging the public to refrain from touching or approaching the seal pups, which in most cases are not orphaned or abandoned, he pointed out. They frequently are left on the beach by their mothers, who are out looking for food.

“Seal pups being left alone on the beach in the spring is perfectly normal,” said Rice, who coordinates the statewide Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network headquartered at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. “Newborn pups typically spend several hours each day waiting for their mothers to reunite with them.”

“Adult female seals spend most of their time in the water, hunting for food, and only come ashore periodically to nurse their pups,” Rice said. “But the mothers are wary of people and unlikely to rejoin a pup if there is activity nearby.”

Unfortunately, Rice said, concerned but uninformed beach-goers will sometimes interfere, by picking up seal pups and taking them away from the beaches – and their mothers. A more common threat is the hovering by curious onlookers around pups, which can cause stress to the pups and prevents their mothers from returning to them.

“It’s tempting for some people to attempt to ‘rescue’ these seemingly hapless pups,” Rice said, “but a pup’s best chance for survival is to be left alone. A dependent pup that’s taken away from its mother will certainly die.”

Even with the best of intentions, people can do a great deal of harm. And additionally, persons who disturb seal pups – even those who are just trying to help – risk being fined under laws intended to protect marine mammals from harassment. The Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits interference with seal pups and other marine mammals on the beach.

Bystanders should stay at least 50 yards away and keep their dogs leashed, Rice said.

“After suckling for about four weeks, weaned pups are abandoned by their mothers, left to fend for themselves,” Rice added. “They will continue to come onto beaches periodically to rest as they grow and learn how to catch their own food.”

The harbor seal pupping season on the Oregon coast is generally March through June, with a peak in mid-May. Anyone who observes incidents of seal pup harassment, or animals in distress, should call the Oregon State Police at 1-800-452-7888, Rice said.

The Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network is an organization comprised of state agencies, universities, and volunteers, working together to investigate the causes of marine mammal strandings, provide for the welfare of live stranded animals, and advance public education about marine mammal strandings.

You can visit the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network online at http://mmi.oregonstate.edu/ommsn

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University have invented a new way to use surface-mount adhesives in the production of low-temperature, microchannel heat exchangers - an advance that will make this promising technology much less expensive for many commercial applications.

This type of technology will be needed, researchers say, in next-generation computers, lasers, consumer electronics, automobile cooling systems, fuel processors, miniature heat pumps and more.

New industries and jobs are possible. A patent has been applied for, the findings reported in the Journal of Manufacturing Processes, and the university is seeking a partner for further commercial development.

“Even though microchannel arrays have enormous potential for more efficient heat transfer and chemical reactions, high production costs have so far held back the broad, mainstream use of the technology,” said Brian Paul, a professor in the OSU School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.

“In certain applications, this new approach has reduced material costs by 50 percent,” Paul said. “It could cut production bonding costs by more than 90 percent, compared to existing approaches to microchannel lamination. And the use of surface-mount adhesives is directly translatable to the electronics assembly industry, so there is less risk going to market.

“This type of manufacturing research could enable a microchannel revolution,” he said.

Microchannels, the diameter of a human hair, can be patterned into the surface of a metal or plastic, and can be designed to speed up the heat exchange between fluids, or the mixing and separation of fluids during chemical reactions. The accelerated heat and mass transfer leads to smaller heat exchangers and chemical reactors and separators, such as a portable “home dialysis” system that evolved out of previous OSU research.

Cost and production issues, however, have until now constrained the wider industrial use of this technology. The new manufacturing technique developed at OSU should help change that.

“We have demonstrated the use of surface-mount adhesives to create microchannels on a wide variety of metals, including aluminum, which is very cheap,” said Prawin Paulraj, an OSU doctoral candidate and lead author on the recent study. “Bonding aluminum is difficult with conventional techniques.”

These very thin pieces of patterned metal – akin to aluminum foil – can be bonded one on top of another to increase the number of microchannels in a heat exchanger, and the amount of fluid that can be processed. Creation of laminated microchannel arrays in a wide variety of materials is possible, including aluminum, copper, titanium, stainless steel and other metals.

“In computers and electronics, the heat generated by the electrical circuit is a limiting factor in how small you can make it,” Paulraj said. “Microchannel process technology provides an efficient way to cool computers and consumer electronics, and make them even smaller.”

The adhesives are limited in temperature to about that of boiling water. The researchers say that possible uses might include radiators to cool an automobile engine or small, very efficient heat pumps for efficient air conditioning within buildings.

This research was conducted at the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, a user facility of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute.

University officials are now seeking a commercial partner in private industry to continue development and marketing of the technology, according to Denis Sather, a licensing associate in the OSU Office for Commercialization and Corporate Development.

The images and other data are now available to scientists from around the world through an online clearinghouse coordinated by Oregon State University.

Additional details of the project will be announced in a forthcoming issue of the American Geophysical Union journal, EOS, and can be found on an OSU website about the project.

The Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean, or HICO, is the first space-borne sensor created specifically for observing the coastal ocean and will allow scientists to better analyze human impacts and climate change effects on the world’s coastal regions, according to Curtiss O. Davis, an OSU oceanographer and the project scientist.

“What HICO does that other ocean imaging systems like NASA’s MODIS cannot is provide color sensor data down to the human scale,” Davis said. “Whereas the normal resolution for an ocean imager is about one kilometer, HICO provides resolution down to 90 meters. And instead of having just nine channels like MODIS, it has 90 channels.

“This allows us to focus the imaging system on a section of the coastline and map the ocean floor in water as deep as 50 to 60 feet,” he added. “It gives us the ability to track sediment down the Columbia River, and to distinguish that sediment from phytoplankton blooms in the ocean. It can reveal near-shore eddies, currents, and the influence of coastal streams entering the ocean.

“It is a scientific treasure trove for the coastal oceanographer,” he added.

This sophisticated imaging system was developed by the Naval Research Laboratory and installed aboard the space station in 2009. Its development was an experiment – to see if engineers could create an “Innovative Naval Prototype” instrument very quickly, at low-cost, and make it work for a year, said Davis, who worked for several years at the laboratory before joining the OSU faculty.

That first goal was achieved last October and now the focus is on the second goal, conducting useful science with this unique data set.

“We’ve already talked to 40-50 interested scientists and shared some preliminary data,” he said, “and they’ve been excited about the potential. They all want a piece of it.”

Some of the images HICO has provided have revealed interesting data:

• Images of the Han River in South Korea outline the dynamic, rapidly shifting shallow mud flats that are covered by the incoming tide, but include sandbars where boats can easily get mired;

• Images from the Straits of Gibraltar, separating Spain from North Africa, reveal where large internal waves propagate hundreds of feet below the surface. These waves, which were used during World War II to hide submarines moving through the channel, can affect fishing and boat navigation.

• Images of the Columbia River, taken during a large storm and after, reveal changing breakwaters and bars that demonstrate the complexity and dynamics of this large system.

“We hope to begin imaging the area around Sendai, Japan, which was devastated by the recent earthquake and tsunami to see what we might learn,” Davis said.

The space station orbits Earth about 16 times a day and the researchers are able to get about 5-6 good images daily of targeted locations. Cloud cover and darkness limit the number of possible images, and the transmission of data files is enormous.

Jasmine Nahorniak, a senior research assistant, developed and runs the website through OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences where HICO images and other data are stored and shared with scientists around the world.

"We have a couple of thousand images and a growing number of scientists who are interested in the data,” she said. “It’s a work in progress.”

The HICO website is at: http://hico.coas.oregonstate.edu/

It would be a new city hall, a very rugged building on concrete stilts. But it still hasn’t been built.

This debate and quandary raises awkward questions, such as how many people would die in a tsunami, how much it would cost to prevent that, what approaches would work best and who should pay for them. The debate centers on what would be the nation’s first structure designed to survive a tsunami and serve as a refuge people could run to on short notice, to get above the deadly waves.

Some would be local residents in Cannon Beach, Ore. Many others saved might be tourists from all over the nation who flock to its scenic beauty – in the recent Chilean earthquake and tsunami many of those who died were tourists.

And researchers at Oregon State University say they hope the events now taking place across the Pacific Ocean will raise new awareness about these issues and help point the way to a solution.

“We’ve been struggling with this for several years now,” said Harry Yeh, a professor of coastal engineering at OSU, international expert on tsunamis and one of the people helping community leaders in Cannon Beach to make progress toward this new building. It’s a concept that, once created, might form a model for many more such structures from Northern California to British Columbia.

OSU engineers have been involved in the development of the structure, and are now finishing up an evacuation plan that would help Cannon Beach community leaders sort through the variables and decide what approach is best. They have also tested models of the proposed structure in the Tsunami Wave Basin at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, a sophisticated facility supported by the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation of the National Science Foundation.

“In the last few days, many people survived in Japan by taking refuge in reinforced concrete buildings that did not collapse in the earthquake or tsunami,” Yeh said. “There are hardly any buildings like that anywhere on the coast of Oregon or Washington. 

“A building like this will cost more, but we know it will work,” Yeh said. “These are value judgments that have to be made about how to build structures and why we are doing it. This is an issue that affects not just Cannon Beach but much of the West Coast of the United States and Canada, and many lives are at stake.”

Due to the proximity of the Cascadia Subduction Zone – in geologic terms, a near identical twin to the subduction fault that caused the earthquake and tsunami in Japan – Cannon Beach and many other coastal cities face a very similar disaster in their future. 

“It’s been 311 years since the last earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone in 1700,” said Jay Raskin, a former mayor of Cannon Beach, architect and now a community leader advocating for both a “vertical evacuation” structure such as the new city hall and also improved bridges that would aid escape.

“The researchers at OSU tell us that based on its recurrence interval, 85 percent of the earthquakes on this subduction zone would have already happened by now,” Raskin said. “An analogy I’ve heard is that this is about like being nine months pregnant. This event is going to happen pretty soon.” 

But as years of debate, community meetings and discussion have made clear, the way forward is anything but clear, Raskin said. This small town that runs for a few miles clinging to the Pacific Ocean coastline needs a new city hall, but one that could survive an earthquake and tsunami will cost twice as much, about $3-4 million instead of $1-2 million.

That’s not the only complication. Many people also point out that a bridge over local Ecola Creek, which would be a key to people running to higher ground, would probably be destroyed in the earthquake, and it should be replaced too.

They’re probably right. The bridge was actually built in 1964 – when a great earthquake on a subduction zone in Alaska sent a tsunami sweeping south that destroyed the old bridge over Ecola Creek. 

“Personally, I believe we need both the vertical evacuation structure and a new automobile or pedestrian bridge for escape,” Raskin said. 

Community leaders in Cannon Beach would like to develop some combination of local, state and federal funding. But no federal agencies are set up to support a project such as this.

“As a country, we have the resources and the expertise, but so far not the motivation to properly prepare,” Raskin said. “I would hope that what’s happening now in Japan might help change that.” 

“It’s tough to be trying to build the first tsunami-resistant structure in the nation," he said. "It is reasonable for government to work to save lives before disasters such as a great earthquake or tsunami occur, but these are questions that tend to be put off until it is too late.”

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Although the situation with damaged nuclear reactors in Japan is still uncertain, every hour without further incidents is good news, according to nuclear energy experts at Oregon State University – and in any case, the events pose virtually no risk to people in the United States or Canada.

The nature of the incident may be similar to that of Three Mile Island in the U.S in 1979, said experts in reactor operation and radiation health physics, in which there were some minor releases of radiation but the containment system ultimately worked and minimized impacts.

No radioactive contaminants from this incident have been recorded in the U.S. and none are expected, said Kathryn Higley, professor and director of the OSU Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics.

“As things look at the moment, whatever impact there is from this event will almost certainly be very local,” Higley said. “Any radioactive contaminants released will end up raining out of the atmosphere into the Pacific Ocean, where they will be diluted and absorbed, or in the near vicinity of the plants.

“We have monitoring capability here in the U.S. that is extraordinarily sensitive and could detect radiation at the level of about 1/100,000 of that produced by an ordinary X-ray, and we don’t expect to see even that,” she said. “This is not Chernobyl.”

At that more serious radioactive accident in 1986 in the Ukraine, considered the worst nuclear reactor accident in history, a great deal of heat and energy was released in explosions that sent radioactive materials high into the atmosphere and had impacts on much of Europe. The events in Japan bear little relationship to that, OSU experts say.

“There has been a hydrogen explosion and some people were hurt,” Higley said. “However, the containment vessels are still intact, made out of very thick steel and concrete, and so far there have been only minor releases of some radioactive iodine and cesium.”

According to Steven Reese, director of the Radiation Center at OSU, any radioactive elements released should follow normal atmospheric patterns and fall with rain into the Pacific Ocean. The iodine and cesium will actually combine with the salt in sea water – salt is sodium chloride - to turn into sodium iodide and cesium chloride, which are common and abundant elements and would readily dilute in the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

Another immediate public concern, the OSU experts said, is the loss of electrical power in Japan at a time when than nation critically needs it. The nuclear power plants that are out of operation supply nearly 4 percent of Japan’s power production, they said, and loss of that energy capacity is a serious concern, especially during winter, as the nation struggles to care for displaced residents. Rolling blackouts will be occurring shortly and Japanese citizens are being urged to minimize electricity usage.

More details will be known about the nature of the accident with the Japanese power plants in coming days, but no scenario is likely to pose any risks to U.S. residents, the OSU experts said.

Including Canada, where it is actually projected to increase in some places, lodgepole pine is expected to be able to survive in only 17 percent of its current range in the western parts of North America.

The research, just published in the journal Climatic Change, was done by scientists from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and the Department of Forest Resource Management at the University of British Columbia. It was based on an analysis of 12,600 sites across a broad geographic range.

Lodgepole pine ecosystems occupy large areas following major fires where extreme cold temperatures, poor soils and heavy, branch-breaking snows make it difficult for other tree species to compete. This includes large parts of higher elevation sites in Oregon, Washington, the Rocky Mountains and western Canada. Yellowstone National Park is dominated by this tree species.

However, warming temperatures, less winter precipitation, earlier loss of snowpack and more summer drought already appear to be affecting the range of lodgepole pine, at the same time increasing the infestations of bark beetles that attack this tree species.

The researchers concluded that some of these forces have been at work since at least 1980, and by around 2020 will have decreased the Pacific Northwest range of lodgepole pine by 8 percent. After that, continued climatic changes are expected to accelerate the species’ demise. By 2080, it is projected to be almost absent from Oregon, Washington and Idaho, some of the areas facing the most dramatic changes.

“For skeptics of climate change, it’s worth noting that the increase in vulnerability of lodgepole pine we’ve seen in recent decades is made from comparisons with real climatic data, and is backed up with satellite-observations showing major changes on the ground,” said Richard Waring, an OSU distinguished professor emeritus of forest science.

“This is already happening in some places,” Waring said. “Bark beetles in lodgepole pine used to be more selective, leaving the younger and healthier trees alone.

“Now their populations and pheromone levels are getting so high they can more easily reach epidemic levels and kill almost all adult trees,” he said. “Less frost, combined with less snow favors heavier levels of bark beetle infestation. We’re already seeing more insect attack, and we project that it will get worse.”

Some species are adapted to lower elevations, experts say, but lodgepole pine is predominately a sub-alpine tree species. Its new foliage can handle frost down to temperatures below freezing, it easily sheds snow that might break the branches of tree species more common at lower elevations, and it can survive in marginal soils.

But it makes these adaptations by growing more slowly, and as the subalpine environment becomes less harsh, lodgepole pine may increasingly be displaced by other species such as Douglas-fir, grand fir and ponderosa pine, which are also more drought-tolerant.

As lodgepole pine continues to decline, one of the few places on the map where it’s still projected to survive by 2080 is Yellowstone National Park – a harsh, high-elevation location – and a few other sub-alpine locations.

The species historically has played important ecological and cultural roles. It provided long, straight and lightweight poles often sought for tepees by Native American tribes, was later harvested commercially for poles and fence materials, and offers cover and habitat for big game animals.

Funding for this research was provided by NASA and the Natural Sciences Engineering and Research Council of Canada. A co-author of the study was Nicholas Coops with the University of British Columbia.

They examined different rolling and mowing techniques on annual bluegrass putting greens and found that golf balls rolled the farthest when the greens were mowed daily and rolled immediately afterward. The balls traveled an average of 11 feet when struck at a controlled speed, which was 15 inches farther than on grass that was only mowed daily, not rolled.

The next greatest distance, an average of 10 feet, was on plots that were rolled daily but mowed only four days a week.

The study is important because the grass was mowed at a higher-than-normal height, which kept the grass healthy and vibrant and proves that putting speed can still be fast on taller grass.

According to the United States Golf Association, the putting greens at most American golf courses have ball-roll distances of seven to 12 feet. The organization considers a ball roll distance of 8.5 feet "fast" for regular course play and 10.5 feet fast for championship events.

A 2010 online survey by the organization found that of 227 golfers who expressed a preference on green speeds, 218 preferred to play on greens where the ball rolled between 9 and 11 feet. Also in the survey, 451 course maintenance workers out of 476 who expressed a preference said that that same distance provided the best compromise between healthy turfgrass and golfer satisfaction.

The OSU study tested a variety of treatments on 60 turfgrass plots at OSU's Lewis-Brown Horticulture Research Farm near Corvallis. Other treatments in the study included mowing daily and rolling Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; rolling daily and mowing Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; and alternating mowing and rolling.

Rolling greens smoothes the putting surface. Researchers in OSU's study rolled plots with a 1,140-pound electric roller and an 845-pound gas roller. While both provided about a 1-foot increase in ball roll distance compared to non-rolled plots, there was no difference in ball roll distance between the two rollers.

Researchers mowed all 60 grass plots at a height of 0.15 inches, well over typical golf course mowing heights of 0.10 to 0.125 inches, said OSU turf grass specialist Rob Golembiewski, the study’s author. The turf was cut at 8 a.m. with a walk-behind greens mower. Green speed was measured at 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. each day. Distance measurements were taken using a Stimpmeter, an aluminum bar that applies a known velocity to a golf ball.

Mowing turf very short to increase ball roll distance has become standard practice, Golembiewski said, but that can potentially damage the grass. The study shows greens can be fast without being cut so short that the health of the grass is compromised, providing a happy medium between golfers' expectations and the interests of course supervisors, he said.

"Now we’re showing you can receive ample ball roll distance at a higher height of cut, which means less stress on the turf," said Golembiewski, who holds the N.B. and Jacqueline Giustina Professorship in Turf Management at OSU. “In the long run, that translates into a much healthier turfgrass stand.”

The findings mirror results from similar studies on creeping bentgrass, which is the most popular turfgrass used for U.S. putting greens. Annual bluegrass, the focus of OSU's research trial, is more common in the Pacific Northwest and has been relatively unstudied, Golembiewski said. 

Performances are set for Feb. 4-5 and Feb. 10-12 at 7:30 p.m., and Feb. 6 at 2 p.m., at Withycombe Hall Main Stage (2901 S.W. Campus Way).

Mamet’s drama about four cutthroat real estate salespersons willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to grab their fair share of the American dream feels even more pertinent today than during its original 1984 production. Laced with Mamet’s characteristic brutal language, this play ruthlessly jerks the audience from dark comedy to tragedy and back again and has become a masterpiece of American theater.

Set in Chicago, “Glengarry Glen Ross” depicts a handful of salespersons facing termination from a second-rate real estate company who viscously compete with one another for the best “leads” to the most promising clients. The play was made into a critically acclaimed film in 1992 starring Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and Al Pacino, who garnered an Oscar nomination for his performance as Ricky Roma.

Although the play was written for and originally produced with an all-male cast, the author gave OSU Theatre and director George Caldwell permission to cast women in this production, which lends to a new dynamic to the interpretation of the play’s relationships. Caldwell’s production depicts the complex nuance of gender, power and age in a work culture motivated by greed.

Audiences should be warned that the script contains extremely course language. One of the points of the play is the degree of cruelty humans are willing to wreak upon each other when their own survival is at stake, and for some, abuse can become a lifestyle. Mamet is unrelenting in his portrayal of that devastating human weakness. His play won both the 1984 Tony Award for Best Play, and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The cast features OSU students Jordyn Patton (San Diego, Calif.) as Ricky Roma, Rowan Russell (San Francisco) as Shelley Levene, Jamie Bilderback (Wilsonville) as Moss, Lacey Nolan (Pendleton) as Williamson, Michael Beaton (Dallas, Ore.) as bartender/bouncer, Alexandra Schireman (Central Point) as the prologue, and Thomas Severs (Pocatello, Idaho) as James Lingk. OSU graduates Jordan Brinck, as Baylen, and Jeff Nichols, as Aaronow, also appear.

Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for persons 55 and older, $8 for youth and $5 for OSU students with I.D. To purchase or for more information: 541-737-2784 or go to http://oregonstate.edu/dept/theatre

The gifts also will add faculty to the burgeoning program.

The funding includes a $300,000 commitment from an OSU engineering alumnus and a $500,000 grant from a national heavy construction engineering membership organization known as The Beavers (the name is not affiliated with the OSU mascot). These gifts are leveraging almost $300,000 in additional funds over five years from the OSU Provost’s Match Program, an initiative to encourage donors’ investments in endowed faculty positions that help advance OSU’s strategic plan priorities.

The new funding will bring the total size of an existing endowed faculty chair to $2.4 million. The chair, previously named the Construction Education Foundation (CEF) Chair, was originally funded by 120 OSU engineering alumni and industry partners. The chair will be renamed in honor of Hal Pritchett, a civil and construction engineering emeritus faculty member who founded the Construction Engineering Management program at OSU.

Endowed chairs play a critical role in helping universities recruit top faculty. The new funding also frees up resources to hire an additional junior faculty member in the Construction Engineering Management program, which has grown so much in recent years that additional teaching capacity is needed.

“Our CEM program is one of the strongest in the United States,” said Scott Ashford, head of the OSU School of Civil and Construction Engineering. “This philanthropic partnership will help us enhance the quality of the CEM program while honoring its founder, Hal Pritchett, and his 45 years of service to OSU.

“I am grateful for the leadership of the Construction Education Foundation Board and the many donors to the CEF Chair, whose vision started this effort,” Ashford added. “I would especially like to thank Mike and Terri Phelps, whose generosity was key to this new, collaborative gift.”

Mike Phelps, a 1976 OSU civil engineering alumnus and an executive vice president at Kiewit Construction Company, and his wife, Terri, made a $300,000 commitment that helped leverage a $500,000 grant from The Beavers Charitable Trust.

The Beavers is a California-based membership association of heavy engineering construction companies and individuals, which funds programs and scholarships that assist students entering the industry. The Beavers Charitable Trust maintains endowed scholarships for civil engineering and construction management students at 40 schools with a combined value approaching $4 million, as well as endowed chairs at three other schools.

Each year The Beavers honor outstanding individuals who have demonstrated particular skill, responsibility and integrity in the trade with the Golden Beaver Award, one of the highest honors in the field of heavy engineering construction. In 2003, Pritchett was selected to receive a Golden Beaver Award, only the third educator in the organization’s 45-year history to have been given the award.

“The objective of the Beavers Charitable Trust is to invest in future leaders of the construction industry,” said Phelps, who serves as president of The Beavers and has supervised Pacific Northwest construction projects for Kiewit that include the West Seattle Bridge and the third Lake Washington Floating Bridge. “I am proud of the quality of the engineering education offered by Oregon State and pleased to make my personal investment as well.”

“The endowed chair is a wonderful tribute to Hal, who has had a tremendous impact on the industry and the lives of so many engineers,” Phelps added.

Prior to joining the faculty at OSU, Pritchett worked for the Bureau of Public Roads and the Army Corps of Engineers, and served in the U.S. Army in Japan and the Philippines. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s in hydraulic engineering from OSU, and the degree of engineer in economic planning from Stanford.

Pritchett was on the OSU faculty for 45 years before retiring in 2002 and has represented OSU on the Oregon Associated General Contractors board of directors. He has received numerous honors, including the Oregon section of ASCE’s 1989 Engineer of the Year Award, and is still very involved at OSU.

Professor David Trejo, who was recruited to OSU from Texas A&M University in 2009, is holder of the existing Construction Education Fund Chair and will be the first holder of the renamed Hal Pritchett Chair. Trejo’s research focuses on the design and development of materials and systems for efficient construction processes and products.

These gifts are part of The Campaign for OSU, the university’s first comprehensive fundraising initiative. Guided by OSU’s strategic plan, the campaign seeks $850 million to provide opportunities for students, strengthen the Oregon economy and conduct research that changes the world. More than $659 million has been committed to date, including gifts creating 35 endowed faculty positions out of OSU’s total of 81.

The gift from Bob and Charlee Moore, founders of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, will establish the Moore Family Center for Whole Grain Foods, Nutrition, and Preventive Health in the College of Health and Human Sciences at OSU.

The academic center will build on the college’s research on nutrition, childhood obesity and related topics, and help promote healthy eating throughout Oregon and beyond.

“Making healthy, whole grain food is what I believe in and what I have focused on for 30-plus years,” said Bob Moore, the company’s CEO.

“Charlee and I are particularly concerned about the pressure on young people to eat junk: pop, candy, empty calories,” Moore said. “Far too many kids are overweight, and so are their parents. It’s a very serious problem for our nation and the world. This center at OSU will help provide solutions.”

The gift will provide endowments for the center’s director and an additional professor, along with two programmatic funds to support the center’s research and outreach, including a fund focused on childhood obesity. This will enhance the college’s current efforts to develop, deliver and evaluate effective public health obesity prevention strategies for schools and communities.

The gift also will create an endowed fellowship fund for graduate students who want to study, research and advance the health and nutritional benefits of whole grain foods. A final portion of the gift will allow the university to renovate the food research laboratory in Milam Hall where faculty and students will study whole grain foods and ways to promote healthy eating behavior.

The lab will be renamed in honor of the Moore family.

This is the second largest gift OSU’s College of Health and Human Sciences has ever received. Its Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families was established in 2007 through an $8 million commitment from the late Oregon philanthropist.

President Ed Ray noted that both of these gifts came from friends who are not OSU alumni.

“We are seeing tremendous investments from representatives of the broader community who identify with OSU’s mission and see that the university is pursuing work critical for the future of our state and our world,” Ray said. “This gift from Bob and Charlee Moore is a great example. Improving human health and wellness is one of three areas of focus identified in our strategic plan, reflecting the depth of expertise we have in this field. The gift will further advance our leadership in preventive health research and outreach.”

Bob and Charlee Moore started their business in 1978 in an historic flour mill near Oregon City, with a mission to grind whole grains into flours, cereals and mixes for the local community and move people back to the basics with healthy whole grains, high-fiber and complex carbohydrates. Now based in Milwaukie, Ore., Bob's Red Mill has become a leading provider of whole grain natural foods with international distribution.

“This is an extraordinary addition to the Moore family legacy in promoting healthy eating,” said Tammy Bray, dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences. “Bob is a passionate advocate for the power of whole grains, and thanks to him and Bob’s Red Mill, thousands of people have made radical changes in their eating habits. We at OSU are thrilled to partner with the Moores to create an academic home for this influential work.”

The gift qualifies for the OSU Provost’s Faculty Match Program, an initiative to encourage donor investments in endowed faculty positions that help advance priorities identified in the university's strategic plan. Over five years the match will provide an additional $675,000 to launch the Moore Family Center.

With this gift, OSU’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign has raised more than $659 million. Guided by the university's strategic plan, The Campaign for OSU seeks $850 million to provide opportunities for students, strengthen Oregon and conduct research that changes the world.

Roger Beachy, director of USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), announced the award during a press conference on the OSU campus today. “Childhood obesity is a problem many families face across the nation,” he said. “However, children in rural areas face obstacles such as limited access to fresh healthy food, physical activity and recreational programs that help prevent obesity.”

Project directors Deborah John and Kathy Gunter from OSU Extension were awarded $4,878,865 to start the program, called “Generating Rural Options for Weight-Healthy Kids and Communities” (GROW HKC). Cooperative Extension in Oregon and six other Western states will develop a plan to prevent obesity among rural children and field test it in rural communities within three Oregon counties: Clackamas, Columbia and Klamath.

The project’s Oregon State University advisory team members will include faculty from public health; nutrition and exercise sciences; human development and family sciences; education; and OSU Extension’s family and community health, Master Gardner, and 4-H programs.

Extension specialists from Oregon and partner states Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Washington, Texas also are part of the team, as are school district superintendents, health care providers and parents and volunteer groups.

The team will use the assessments to begin an obesity-intervention program in September 2012 in the three Oregon counties to promote healthy eating and physical activity. The goal is to improve the body mass index among rural children aged 5-8 years old.

The grant is awarded through NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI).

The idea isn’t to immediately begin seeding the Bering Sea or Gulf of Alaska with hatchery-raised youngsters, the scientists say. It is to see if it’s even feasible – in case it’s needed in the future.

And this all is taking place in Newport, Ore., where the only places to find king crab are in stores and restaurants. In Oregon, the Dungeness reigns supreme among crabs; but Newport is also the site of Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, a place that more than a dozen scientists and technicians from NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center call home.

The reason for locating at HMSC is simple, according to Allan Stoner, who directs the Alaska Fisheries group in Newport. “The OSU lab provides seawater facilities rivaling any in the country for research with cold-water species, and our biologists have more than 25 years experience working with the systems here,” he said.

In the OSU laboratories, where clean seawater is pumped daily from Yaquina Bay, the scientists will try to perfect culture of king crab through the juvenile stages – and explore whether or not the young crabs can be conditioned or “trained” to select good habitat and avoid predators. Hatchery-reared animals are “often deficient in these tasks,” Stoner pointed out.

“Pacific halibut are death on crabs,” Stoner said. “We’re going to see if experience with young halibut about 25 centimeters long helps the juvenile crabs to learn avoidance behavior. Pacific cod can also be a problem, though they aren’t as aggressive as halibut. If these controlled experiments work, we’ll test similarly trained crabs in the field in Alaska.”

The Alaska King Crab Research, Rehabilitation and Biology program – known as AKCRRAB –  received $303,000 from the NOAA SeaGrant Aquaculture Research Program, and an additional $157,000 in matching funds from Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, University of Alaska, and Alaska SeaGrant for the project, some of which will support the Newport research.

AKCRRAB scientists from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery have made great strides in producing king crab larva that can survive in hatcheries. Their early experiments, in 2007, generated just a 2 percent survival rate and a few thousand juveniles. That rose to 31 percent in 2008, and 50 percent in 2009 and 2010, when scientists successfully raised more than 100,000 red king crabs to their first juvenile stage.

But the key now is helping them get bigger – and smarter – so they eventually could be released back into the wild and have a chance at survival, Stoner said.

“It should be an interesting experiment,” Stoner said. “Ben Daly (a Ph.D. student at the University of Alaska) will take crabs into the Gulf of Alaska on tethers during 2011 to see how they respond to their environment and potential predators. The action will be observed using underwater cameras with live-feed to the nearby shore.”

The project is ambitious, but so are the stakes. Red king crab has been Alaska’s top shellfish fishery and since 1959, U.S. fishers have harvested nearly 2 billion pounds of the delicacy from Alaska waters, worth about $1.6 billion. But the fishery has crashed as fewer crabs are reaching adulthood and the fishery for red king crab is now closed entirely in the Gulf of Alaska.

“Overfishing, climate change, predation by fish, and ocean acidification are all possible explanations,” Stoner said, “though it’s likely a host of factors.”

George Boehlert, director of OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, said the location of so many scientists from state and federal agencies on site is equally important to the center’s seawater system.

“We have scientists from many different disciplines, as well as agencies, who can provide different experiences and perspectives that make the Hatfield Marine Science Center unlike any research facility in the country,” Boehlert said.

In one study, OSU scientists are seeking to determine the threshold at which oysters, clams and mussels – including those that are commercially important – become adversely affected by acidification. Principal investigator George Waldbusser of OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and his colleagues also will explore the mechanisms through which those impacts occur.

“We’ll be developing a novel experimental approach to tease apart just what component of acidification is actually affecting the organism,” Waldbusser said. “For example, decreased pH may affect the internal acid-base balance of an organism, but the correlated decrease in calcium carbonate saturation state may also alter the stability of their mineral shells.

“Scientists know very little, to date, about specific modes of action triggered by acidification,” he added.

Waldbusser received a four-year grant of nearly $2 million from NSF to lead the project. He will work with Burke Hales and Brian Haley from the university’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, and Chris Langdon, who directs the Molluscan Broodstock Program at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

They will develop their experimental system at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, which has a large seawater system that makes such research possible.

OSU received a second three-year, $2 million grant from NSF to lead a seven-institution project to monitor ocean chemistry in the California Current System and look at how two marine species – sea urchins and mussels – respond in the wild to different ocean chemistry.

This project is being coordinated through the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, or PISCO, an OSU-based marine research consortium. Principal investigator Bruce Menge and colleagues from multiple institutions will study urchins and mussels at two sites in Oregon and six sites in California, taking advantage of the differing levels of acidification along the West Coast.

The researchers theorize that these organisms have adapted over time to variations in the ocean chemistry, but the increase in carbon dioxide may be pushing their limit.

“They already may be close to their acclimatization or adaptational capacity,” Menge pointed out, “and thus may have limited ability to respond to additional increases in CO2. For the first time, we will be able to examine the genetics and ecology of these key organisms to see how populations that span over a thousand miles of coastline are coping with changes in ocean chemistry.”

Increasing ocean acidification is a major global concern. Previous OSU research, led by Hales, found that seawater being upwelled from the deep ocean may have last been exposed to the atmosphere some 50 years ago and that its already-high levels of carbon dioxide portend more corrosive oceans in the future.

Their ongoing research also found that the upwelled water is influencing Oregon estuaries, where concern about acidic water has prompted oyster hatcheries to alter their protocols. For example, the Whiskey Creek Hatchery is now drawing water into its tanks during relaxed upwelling periods, or in the afternoon, when acidity levels are lower due to increased photosynthesis.

At last Friday’s state Board of Higher Education, further general revenue budget cuts for the current fiscal year were announced for OSU and the state’s other six public universities. Despite that, OSU’s growing enrollment – up this year by approximately 2,000 students – is providing a financial cushion against the bleak state budget picture, the president said.

Ray repeated a promise he made in a university-wide budget forum at the end of the last school year: If the legislature allows OSU to manage and spend the tuition students pay to attend the university, OSU will make it through the current biennium without double-digit tuition increases, layoffs or further furloughs for employees beyond those already being experienced by OSU’s classified staff members.

“If you take nothing else away from today’s discussion, I hope you’ll leave with the fact that the financial state of our university is sound,” Ray told university senators and other faculty, staff and students gathered for the yearly talk.

The university is also going forward with key investments, including hiring 30 new faculty members in critical interdisciplinary areas (half of them in the Arts and Sciences), enhancing information technology and research infrastructure and renovating and upgrading classrooms, 38 of which were completed over the summer. Thirty new faculty positions will be offered next year, too, and $2.5 million will be made available for instructors in Arts and Sciences this year.

Ray acknowledged that the growth of OSU over the past few years coupled with anticipated growth over the next 15 years that likely will see enrollment expand from its current status of about 24,000 to perhaps 30,000 or so has created stress around the community. In response, he is stepping up efforts to invest in academic advising and graduate student recruiting and expanding OSU’s overall physical capacities. Ray is also creating an ombudsperson position reporting to him – “a strong acknowledgement that relationship challenges in a complex organization are inevitable, but we are committed to creating additional mechanisms through which we can address those challenges.”

Ray said OSU is focused most strongly now on three areas: Increasing retention rates for students, as well as graduation rates, particularly among diverse and international student populations; building new research relationships between the university and industry partners, especially in Oregon; and building on the strong success of the Campaign for OSU, which has already raised some $620 million. 

The university’s sustainability is “no small accomplishment as we crawl out of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Ray reminded listeners, in closing. “A lot of smart and very hard decisions have been made to get us to this point financially. …Financial security and a sense of common cause, which derives from a vibrant and cohesive community, are both critical to realizing the potential of this wonderful university.”

The full text of President Ray’s remarks may be found at http://bit.ly/cR1Dlq. 

Lee and Connie Howard Kearney of Vancouver, Wash., have committed $2.5 million to create two faculty endowments in OSU’s School of Civil and Construction Engineering. A $500,000 gift from Thomas W. Toomey of Evergreen, Colo., will create a faculty endowment in the College of Business.

Both gifts qualify for OSU’s innovative Provost’s Faculty Match Program, which aims to build endowments for faculty positions that help expand OSU’s international leadership in programs that advance the science of sustainable Earth ecosystems, improve human health and wellness, and promote economic growth and social progress.

In an endowed fund, the principal gift is invested, producing a steady, reliable flow of expendable funds in perpetuity.

“The Provost’s Match was an attractive encouragement for us to make a gift to support an endowed faculty position because it immediately provides the college with funds that are almost equal to what will be generated by the gift itself,” Lee Kearney said.

“At OSU we have some of the world’s leading researchers,” Kearney pointed out. “Connie and I want to help the university not only retain these faculty, but also help recruit their successors. It’s important for our state and our region to hold on to these exceptional leaders.”

Funded by the OSU Provost’s Office, the matching program has the potential to leverage more than $20 million in private support for endowed faculty positions. Faculty are the drivers for success in OSU’s educational and research programs, said provost and executive vice president Sabah Randhawa, and endowed positions are the most effective way to recruit, and retain, those leaders.

“The Provost’s Faculty Match program and the donors who participate in it will allow us to build a faculty that will advance the university’s areas of distinction, provide high quality education to a growing and diverse student body, and enable us to make progress toward our vision of becoming a top-10 Land Grant university,” he said.

In addition to other gifts to OSU, the Kearneys provided more than $4 million to help renovate the 1898 building which serves as the home of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering and has been renamed Kearney Hall in their honor. Lee Kearney, a former director and division manager of Peter Kiewit Sons’ Co., earned his degree in civil engineering from OSU in 1963, and he serves on The Campaign for OSU steering committee. Connie Kearney, a member of the OSU Foundation Board of Trustees executive committee, began higher education at OSU before earning undergraduate and law degrees at other institutions.

The donor of the second gift to qualify for the Provost’s Faculty Match, Thomas W. Toomey, is also an OSU Foundation trustee. A 1982 OSU graduate, he is the president and chief executive officer of UDR, Inc., an S&P 400 company that owns and manages more than 53,000 apartment homes in targeted markets in the United States. Three years ago Toomey made a $1 million gift to establish an endowed professorship and expand an endowed scholarship in honor of his former accounting professor, Mary Ellen Phillips. He has also committed $500,000 to help construct a new building for the College of Business.

The Provost’s Faculty Match program supports a central goal of The Campaign for OSU, the university’s first comprehensive fundraising effort. During the campaign to date, alumni and friends have contributed more than $60 million to support faculty, creating 32 endowed faculty positions out of OSU’s total of 78. Details of the matching program can be found at http://bit.ly/dneHp1 .

Guided by OSU’s strategic plan, The Campaign for OSU seeks $625 million to provide opportunities for students, strengthen the Oregon economy and conduct research that changes the world. Approximately $620 million has been committed to date from more than 53,000 donors.

Gates will speak on “Making a Difference: The Value of Philanthropy in Education,” particularly fitting as the Portland Chapter of ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) will cross the $1-million mark for awards to graduate students in science and engineering at Oregon Health & Science University and Oregon State University this year.

“Gates has been a long-time supporter of ARCS both in Seattle and nationally,” said Caron Ogg, president of the Portland Chapter of ARCS . “In fact, it was a grant from the Gates Foundation that helped to launch the Portland Chapter six years ago.”

Also speaking will be Clayton Winkler, an ARCS Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Neuroscience at OHSU, who will discuss his research on treating progressive neurological disease with a simple sugar.

At the Oct. 19 luncheon, 10 new ARCS Scholar Awards will be given to OHSU students and five to OSU students.  These scholars join 77 outstanding men and women ARCS scholars, collectively, currently studying at both institutions.

“The ARCS Foundation’s engagement with OSU and support of our students has been both gratifying and of great benefit to some very worthy young scholars ,” said Edward J. Ray, president of Oregon State University. “We are proud to be partners with the Portland Chapter and, along with OHSU, to be beneficiaries of the chapter’s vision and generosity in advancing scientific education and innovation.”

The ARCS Foundation was established in 1958 in Los Angeles by a group of women committed to keeping American technologically strong and internationally competitive. There currently are 17 ARCS chapters nationwide – all dedicated to advancing science in America through the provision of financial support to outstanding U.S. citizens completing graduate degrees in natural science, medicine and engineering.

For further information about the ARCS Foundation Portland Chapter or the October 19 luncheon, call (503) 297-8603 or email Portland@arcsfoundation.org.

Holdren will be one of approximately 120 civilian leaders in business, education and government from throughout the United States who will meet with senior military leaders to explore national security issues.

The forum is designed to encourage interaction between civilian leaders and senior military officers, and to engage participants in exchanging ideas and perspectives on the Air Force, as well as on national and international security issues.

Holdren has been at OSU since 2000, and served as the university’s first director of research initiatives. In that role, he helped Oregon State strengthen its connections with the private sector and played an important role in OSU’s regional and national stewardship of natural resources.

OSU’s research efforts attracted more than $252 million in external funding during the last fiscal year – a total that has grown by nearly $100 million in just six years. Much of that funding is from federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Commerce, Energy, and Health and Human Services.

Before coming to OSU, he worked at Battelle-Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., and at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency laboratory in Corvallis.

In “The Wolf’s Tooth: Trophic Cascades, Keystone Predators and Biodiversity,” just published by Island Press, Cristina Eisenberg outlines the many research findings in recent decades about “trophic cascades,” or the string of problems that can be created when keystone predators – ranging from wolves to sharks or even spiders – are removed from an ecosystem, allowing other species to disproportionately flourish and cause havoc.

In particular, Eisenberg said, more has been learned about the significance of top predators on terrestrial systems, since their role in marine ecosystems was already more advanced. Scientists have now come to understand how wolves, cougars, bears and other leading carnivorous predators, which humans largely eliminated by the early 20^th century, served a critical role in ecosystem function.

“The ecological concept of the 1990s was biodiversity, and that’s important,” said Eisenberg, who is the Boone and Crockett Fellow and a doctoral student in the OSU College of Forestry. “But in the next generation we want the concept of trophic cascades to have that same general awareness, because it’s important too and essential to maintaining biodiversity. And we already know enough that it’s time to start using these concepts to help ecosystems recover, not just in national parks or wilderness areas but everywhere.”

These concepts have gained the most public awareness, Eisenberg said, with the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Wolves have helped to control the overgrazing done by elk, both by reducing their populations and also changing their behavior in what has been identified as “the ecology of fear.” As a result, young aspen and willows are beginning to grow along streams for the first time since the 1920s. This will also help control erosion and lead to more beaver dams, researchers believe, and ultimately affect everything from birds to insects and fish, by improving their habitat.

“When we lost most of the large predators in the U.S., along with climate change and other population impacts, we started a hemorrhage of extinction,” Eisenberg said. “Streams are being degraded, species are being lost, the function of ecosystems that was once complex and diverse is being severely impaired. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are things we know that can change it.”

Many of the obstacles to progress, Eisenberg said, are as much political and social as they are ecological.

In the 1930s, Eisenberg said, the famed naturalist Aldo Leopold once visited some lands in Chihuahua, Mexico that were owned by her grandfather on a huge cattle ranch, and Leopold remarked on how intact and thriving the lands appeared – which, at that time, were still roamed by wolves. Leopold was one of the first to point to the importance of predation in ecosystem function.

“My grandfather still felt he had to get rid of the wolves, so he gave my dad a summer job in which he was supposed to watch the cattle, and kill any wolves he saw,” Eisenberg said. “My father later told me that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, because he couldn’t see that they were really causing any harm.”

Eisenberg comes from a ranching background, and now lives in a valley in northwestern Montana where the wolf and grizzly bear population outnumbers humans. In continued research, she’s working to understand and demonstrate ranching practices and other techniques that can be used to balance commercial land use with the presence of wolves and other predators. It’s both possible and necessary, she said.

“These really are not complicated concepts, they work, and they don’t cost much,” Eisenberg said. “There can be specific times and situations where predators may need to be controlled. But in many cases all we need to do to bring back predators is to stop killing them. It’s all about relationships. I’ve explained ideas about trophic cascades to third graders and they immediately get it.

“The problems are really more social, because many people have such an emotional reaction to large predators,” she said. “But major predators were always a part of balanced ecosystem function, and allowing them to return will be one of the simplest, and most effective ways to restore these lands.”

Much of the leading research on these concepts in terrestrial ecosystems has emerged from research at OSU in the past decade, Eisenberg said, in studies done by William Ripple and Robert Beschta in the College of Forestry. They have analyzed the impact of wolves and cougars as key predators in several national parks that, when allowed to recover, are helping restore healthy and vigorous ecosystems.

Eisenberg’s new book provides both local and landscape-scale applications of what has been learned about these issues, and ways in which recovery efforts could begin.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study concludes that the future effects of global warming could be significantly changed over very small distances by local air movements in complex or mountainous terrain - perhaps doubling or even tripling the temperature increases in some situations.

In an article to be published in the International Journal of Climatology, researchers from Oregon State University used the unique historical data provided by Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest to study potential variations in temperature caused by steep hills and valleys.

Based on a regional temperature increase of about 5 degrees projected for western Oregon by 2100, the study concluded that some locations, such as mountain ridge tops, could actually increase as much as 14 degrees at some times, while cold air pools in the valleys below them with temperature increases similar to the regional average.

“Even if the predictions for average temperature changes are accurate, there’s been very little work done on what that may mean in specific locations and situations,” said Chris Daly, an OSU professor of geosciences, director of OSU’s PRISM Climate Group and expert on the effects of elevation and topography on localized climatic effects.

“We are finding that there’s a potential here for tremendous disparities in local effects that we need to learn more about,” Daly said. “Some locations may get much warmer than the average while others nearby are affected less, with associated impacts on their ecology, the plant and animals species that live there.”

The steep terrain and long-term climate records in the H.J. Andrews Forest near Blue River, Ore., in the central Oregon Cascade Range, have provided an unusual data set to study this phenomenon. In general, temperatures decrease as you go up in altitude – but not necessarily in the mountains. Some ridges in the H.J. Andrews are routinely warmer than protected valleys below them, especially at night and during winter, as cool air drains down their flanks and forms “cold pools” with fairly stable temperatures.

The formation of these cold pools is most pronounced during clear, calm weather. Since the zone of high pressure that provides California with many clear, calm days is projected to shift northward in a warming climate, the Pacific Northwest may see an increase in cold air pooling in many mountain valleys. This could lead to amplified warming on the ridges of several degrees, compared to that in the valleys.

Ecological and hydrological impacts are likely, but difficult to predict. Douglas-fir forests tolerate a wide range of temperature conditions and are fairly resilient, Daly said, but some plant or animal species that can’t readily move may face challenges.

Cool valley bottoms with more stable temperatures could actually act as refuges from the hotter ridge tops for some species, but are not expected to escape the overall warming that will affect the region. Variations in snowmelt between ridge tops and valleys are also likely to become more complex. 

 “At a larger scale, these changes in regional airflow patterns may also alter the flow of marine air from the Pacific Ocean that helps cool and ventilate the interior valleys during summer,” Daly said. “If there are more times when that ocean air flow pattern shuts down, the valleys where most of the population lives could become much hotter than expected.”

Similar forces could be found in many Mediterranean climates around the world, such as in Europe, South America and parts of the western U.S., which have climates that are controlled by the seasonal movement of high pressure belts, Daly said.

“There is more we need to be concerned about than overall warming, and we really haven’t given these localized issues much consideration,” he said.

Research will continue in the Andrews Forest to study these changes as they evolve, scientists said. Although not all U.S. mountains are topographically similar to this area, such steep terrain and poorly ventilated valleys are common in many parts of the Cascade Range, Sierra Nevada mountains, and Rocky Mountains.

This research was aided by the Long Term Ecological Research Program of the National Science Foundation, which supports OSU and the U.S. Forest Service in operating the H.J. Andrews Forest.

Along with his wife, Pat, Mr. Reser served in numerous volunteer leadership capacities for OSU over the past 40-plus years and supported a long list of major university projects, including Reser Stadium and the $62.5-million Linus Pauling Science Center, which is under construction with completion projected for early 2011.

He was honored many times by his alma mater, most recently last Saturday night with the E.B. Lemon Distinguished Alumni Award at the Orange and Black Evening in Portland. The Lemon Award is the highest honor the university bestows on any alumnus, and Mr. Reser’s son, Marty, accepted it on his behalf. (A video tribute shown at the event is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dvEOADPCY.)

Mr. Reser earned his B.S. in business administration in 1960 from Oregon State University, where he also met his wife, who earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education the same year. Together, the couple grew Reser’s Fine Foods, a family-owned fresh refrigerated food company based in Beaverton, Ore., into an $800-million domestic and international business that today employs more than 2,000 workers, half of them in Oregon.

Despite the demands of a thriving business and family – the Resers have five grown children, four of whom graduated from OSU – Mr. Reser always found time to give of himself and his treasure to OSU. Throughout the years, he served on the OSU Foundation Board of Trustees and the Beaver Athletic Student Fund Board of Directors. Pat Reser currently co-chairs the $625-million Campaign for OSU, to which she and her husband gave $10.65 million in support of the Pauling Science Center. They made other gifts to the Linus Pauling Institute and the colleges of Science and Business, as well.

“Al Reser was one of the most successful and most caring people I have ever known. He and Pat fashioned a remarkably successful business and a wonderful family,” said OSU President Ed Ray. “Al loved Beaver Nation, and he was loved in return. In recent years, Al received numerous honors in recognition of his philanthropy and service to others.

“Perhaps one could not expect to have enough time to celebrate him fully and properly but this loss is much, much too soon. We can best honor him by following his example of love and dedicated service to others.”

“Al and Pat’s vision and generosity will make a difference for generations of students and scientists who will learn and study at the Linus Pauling Science Center,” said Science Dean Sherman Bloomer. “We’ll be forever grateful for Al’s friendship and for the legacy he leaves behind.”

The Resers gave gifts totaling more than $14 million to support the renovation and expansion of the OSU football stadium, subsequently named in their honor. On Tuesday, OSU athletics leaders remembered Al’s friendship and generosity fondly.

“On behalf of Beaver Nation and the entire athletic department our thoughts and prayers go out to the Reser Family on their loss of Al. He is a great friend of this department and his support is truly evident in athletics, as well as the rest of campus,” said Bob De Carolis, director of Intercollegiate Athletics. “I will sorely miss those lunch meetings at his plant or watching him scoot around the stadium with a huge smile on his face. He and his family are the architects of whatever success this department has enjoyed. While he may be gone from this earth, his legacy and spirit will be with us for a long time.”

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Al Reser. He was a good friend, and our hearts go out to his great family,” said OSU head football coach Mike Riley. “We’ll miss him, and will always be proud to play our games in the stadium so fittingly named after him.”

Mr. Reser served on the OSU Foundation Board of Trustees from 1994 to 1997, served as an honorary trustee and was a former member of the Beaver Athletic Student Fund (BASF) Board of Directors.  He was inducted into the College of Business (COB) Hall of Fame in 2006; he also received the COB Dean’s Award and was named one of the college's top 10 alumni, both in 2008.  Al and Pat Reser were named the President’s Club Most Honored Members in 2003, and they received the Martin Chaves Lifetime Achievement Award for their contributions to OSU Athletics in 2008. They were also recognized with the 2008 Vollum Award for Lifetime Philanthropic Achievement from the Oregon and SW Washington Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals

Mr. Reser was named the Oregon Entrepreneur of the Year by the Oregon Entrepreneurs Forum in 2000 and received the 2006 Governor’s Gold Award. The Portland Business Journal named Reser’s Fine Foods the Most Admired Company in 2008, and last January, Mr. Reser received the Les Schwab Friends of Sports Award at the Oregon Sports Awards ceremony.

Mr. Reser’s memoirs, “No Small Potatoes,” are soon to be published in conjunction with the OSU Press and the OSU Alumni Association.

The talk is set for April 22, the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, at LaSells Stewart Center on the Oregon State University Corvallis campus. The event will begin at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Dimick, a 1973 OSU graduate, will lead the audience in a sweeping visual journey and in-depth report drawn from National Geographic features and the most recent scientific reports documenting the effects of climate change. He’ll also explore what members of the public can do to reverse troubling climate change trends.

National Geographic has been among the world’s leading media outlets in documenting effects of climate change on the natural world. Dimick has shaped much of that coverage in concert with Editor-in-Chief Chris Johns, also an OSU graduate.

“We’re honored that Dennis Dimick is this year’s McCall lecturer and are excited that attendees will have an opportunity at his presentation to see striking visual representations of climate change and learn about the nature of their impacts,” said David Bernell, chair of the McCall Lecture committee and an assistant professor of political science. “Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and Mr. Dimick is uniquely prepared from a journalism vantage point to provide these insights.”

The McCall Lecture honors the memory of the legendary Oregon governor and his commitment to public service, journalism and environmental protection. In 1975, shortly after completing his second term as governor, McCall came to OSU to teach journalism and political science. The College of Liberal Arts established the McCall lectureship in 1982.

Past McCall Lecture presenters include Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; William Ruckleshaus, the first head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Washington Post writer David Broder; political columnist William Raspberry; and many other prominent leaders from the fields of government and journalism.

The McCall Lecture is presented by the OSU College of Liberal Arts.

FLORENCE, Ore. -  An Oregon State University team worked quickly with the owners of Sea Lion Caves and federal authorities late Thursday to rescue a Steller sea lion tangled in a trawl net and trapped among coastal rocks.

The Marine Mammal Stranding Network rescuers removed the netting and set the 250-pound animal free, preventing its likely death from starvation or trauma. Within minutes, the sub-adult sea lion, likely a female estimated to be about 4 years old, was swimming with dozens of other sea lions in the churning water at the entrance to Sea Lion Caves, one of Oregon’s most popular coastal tourist destinations.

“There was a fair amount of net wrapped around its face and neck, and several feet of trailing net were trapped between rocks. The animal only had about a 10-foot radius of movement,” said Jim Rice, who coordinates the network as part of the OSU Marine Mammal Institute. “It had been stuck there for about a day, and we estimate it had been tangled in the net for a few days, maybe a week. It would not have been able to forage or eat where it was stuck, and eventually, the net would have cut into the face and neck, causing serious tissue damage.”

While the OSU performed the rescue, cooperation from the Sea Lion Caves and quick assistance from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made it possible. Sea Lions Caves managers rarely allow anyone into the cordoned off areas where the animals congregate; patrons view the sea lions from a spectator platform separated by a short wall and fence from the cave interior.

“I’ve been there for 50 years, and this is the first time we’ve ever had an animal trapped like that and the first time for a rescue, so it’s very exciting,” said Steve Saubert, a co-owner of the Caves. “Our goal at Sea Lion Caves is to preserve nature – not just sea lions, but birds, ground squirrels, deer. We have a lot of wildlife around here. So being able to save this animal was very important to us.”

While the Caves were quick to close the attraction early Thursday so rescuers could get to the animal with minimal disruption, the OSU team also needed approval from NOAA, which oversees any human interaction with sea lions in such situations. NOAA gave its approval “almost immediately,” said Rice, making the daylight operation possible.

That didn’t, however, mean that the sea lions would appreciate having strangers among them. Though juveniles and females primarily populate the Caves, the animals can be aggressive. In addition to damaging tissue, a sea lion bite can cause serious infection from organisms typically living in their mouths.

To create a barrier between rescuers and the sea lion, the team used plywood “crowder boards,” which proved valuable when the animal tried to bite them. Still, only light sedation, administered by a veterinarian was part of the rescue team, was necessary to subdue the sea lion while the netting was removed.

“Once the netting was released, the tissue in the neck bounced back and regained its normal appearance, virtually immediately,” said Rice, who called it lucky that the animal had become stuck at the Caves. “It was because she was basically immobilized at the Cave that we had the opportunity to approach her. We typically don’t have this opportunity with entangled animals – they’re typically able to flee and escape a would-be rescuer.”