Oregon’s Willamette Valley is the undisputed “grass-seed capital of the world.” In close partnership with growers and scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, OSU researchers and agronomists have been at the forefront of an industry worth $500 million. Here are some of the milestones. 1909 Seed lab starts up on campus for research and [...]
Archive » April, 2009
April 24, 2009
Building Materials for Sustainability
In the burgeoning green building sector, Oregon is poised to become a national leader. A new R&D partnership forged with cross-university linkages positions the state as a major powerhouse in sustainable materials, technologies and designs. Oregon BEST (Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center) has pulled together $1.6 million in multi-source funding to infuse and expand [...]
April 24, 2009
Buzz About New Honeybee Specialist
Ramesh Sagili arrived in Corvallis in February to start a honeybee research program targeting mites, pesticides, stress and nutrition. The new OSU bee specialist is part of an initiative to help ensure that there are enough healthy honeybees to pollinate Oregon’s crops. Sagili says Varroa mites, nutritional deficiencies or other factors might be the cause [...]
April 24, 2009
On the Trail of America’s First People
Along the Oregon coast, in Idaho’s Salmon River canyon and in Baja California, Loren Davis has searched for signs of North America’s earliest inhabitants. His work along the southern Oregon coast has pushed back documented occupation of this area by 1,500 years. Now, the OSU archaeologist will take a deeper look into the inland and [...]
April 24, 2009
Kearney Hall, Showcase for Civil Engineers
An antiquated building on OSU’s northeast corner has undergone a thoroughly modern makeover. Celebrants who attend Kearney Hall’s grand opening on May 15 will observe its 19th-century heritage faithfully refurbished on the exterior. But on the inside, Kearney has been utterly transformed. With its recycled materials, nontoxic finishes, salvaged woods, efficient lighting, low-flow fixtures and [...]
April 24, 2009
Sensors for Safety
Microbiologists aim for rapid, accurate monitoring of food and water
The news grabbed national headlines in early 2009: eight dead, hundreds sickened by food poisoning in 34 states. After investigators traced the outbreak to Salmonella-tainted peanut butter from a Georgia plant, stores pulled thousands of products from their shelves. Worried consumers tossed suspect items into the trash. At least 100 companies will post losses from [...]
April 24, 2009
Envisioning the Forest
Computer Models Combine Ecology and Economy
John Sessions likes to refer to forestry as “a bio-energy puzzle.” Like a lot of 21st-century puzzles, its solutions are digital and mathematical. “Forest landscape planning, as it is known today, was not possible before the advent of high-speed computers, geographic information systems, modern algorithms and graphic interfaces,” says the holder of the endowed Richard [...]
April 24, 2009
Restoring the Flow
If you had happened upon Lake Creek, a tributary of Central Oregon’s Metolius River, in the fall of 2007, you might have seen Matt Shinderman and his Ecological Field Methods students standing nearly knee-deep in the water with dip nets in hand, hovering over tic-tac-toe style grids. And you might have been puzzled when they [...]
April 24, 2009
Eat Locally, Market Globally
Dann Cutter has maintained a reactor on a nuclear submarine and, for the past 12 years, kept the computer networks running at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. He serves on the Waldport, Oregon city council and two state advisory boards (rural health care and transportation). Why, then, would he return to college for [...]
April 24, 2009
Hiding Man — The Art of Story
In 1948, Donald Barthelme was not quite 17 years old when he and a friend decided to hitchhike from Houston to Mexico City. They had a total of thirty dollars, and since both liked to write, they stopped at a drug store to pick up pencils and notebooks. They left a note for Barthelme’s parents [...]
April 24, 2009
Cut to the Bone
Wendy Baltzer's surgical technique does the trick for an old dog
The surgical suite in OSU’s small animal clinic bristles with crisp efficiency. A masked med tech wearing scrubs of sea-foam green unpacks sterile instruments from stainless-steel carts, treading lightly on puffy blue booties. Above the operating table, a state-of-the-art Stryker scope hangs like a giant jointed bug with shiny hooded eyes. The scene suggests an [...]
April 23, 2009
Climate by the Numbers
Modelers explore future states of the planet
You can’t just walk into the data center in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS). The sign on the door says you need a pass card. There should be another sign too: Caution, planetary experiments in progress. Inside, computer clusters churn 24/7, spinning out information about ocean currents, winds, air temperatures, ice [...]
April 23, 2009
Stage Kiss
Romance, history and science converge in OSU theater production
Arianne Jacques pondered the graphs projected on the screen and listened intently to Professor Ken Krane’s explanations – Newton’s First Law of Physics, Chaos Theory. She filled her notebook with scribbles about thermodynamics, algorithms, fractals and cosines. But at “iterative process,” the 21-year-old junior exclaimed, “I don’t get it!” and tossed down her pen. She [...]
April 23, 2009
Power Surge
New nuclear technologies meet needs
for electricity and safety
Last winter, the cavernous vault housing OSU’s nuclear test facility was base camp for a team of elite scientists from Shanghai and Beijing. For six months, the Chinese engineers studied every bolt, tube and plastic elbow in the scale-model reactor. They ran accident simulations and analyzed the data. They posited every scenario under the sun, [...]
April 21, 2009
Power Surge
Nuclear power tends to stir strong feelings, both pro and con. New engineering approaches address issues such as waste, operating safety and proliferation and underscore the potential for nuclear to raise living standards while reducing carbon emissions. See the Power Surge story in Terra.
April 15, 2009
Salmon on the run
For a second year in a row, commercial salmon boats in California and Oregon will either retool for another fishery or travel north. The cause: Regulators are protecting the paltry returns to the Sacramento River in order to rebuild those stocks. See Mark Floyd’s story in Terra about what OSU scientists and their partners are [...]
April 1, 2009
Baby Blue
See it for yourself, the first baby blue whale ever caught on film. A clip from National Geographic’s groundbreaking story with OSU researcher Bruce Mate and his colleague, John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research Cooperative, is at http://oregonstate.edu/home/stories/index.php?story=bruce-mate. If you’re a student of whales or just fascinated by them, see the Terra story about Bruce Mate’s [...]
