Research into tree biotechnology has gotten a boost through a new agreement between Dow AgroSciences LLC and Oregon State University. The wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company will make its EXZACT™ Precision Technology available to Steve Strauss, distinguished professor of forest biotechnology in the College of Forestry. EXZACT™ provides a versatile and comprehensive [...]
Category » Healthy Planet
June 8, 2011
Free-Choice Science
Study confirms benefits of learning centers, museums
In a world confronted with greenhouse gases, emergent diseases, energy shortages, natural disasters, habitat loss, species extinctions and a thousand other urgent issues, public understanding of science is more essential than ever. Now, an OSU study reveals a powerful vehicle for enhancing science literacy in local communities: science museums. Science museums like the Oregon Museum [...]
June 1, 2011
10 Places for Undergrads to Look for Research Opportunities
Support for student research can be as far away as a phone call or click of a mouse.
1. To help their peers find opportunities and OSU faculty members to mentor undergrads, a group of students worked with Susie Brubaker-Cole, associate provost for academic success and engagement, and Dan Arp, dean of the University Honors College, to produce a comprehensive guide to undergraduate research at Oregon State. 2. The OSU Research Office maintains [...]
May 31, 2011
One Less Child
Reproductive choices affect long-term carbon emissions
If you’re concerned about sustainable living, you probably pay close attention to your “carbon footprint.” We all have one: the amount of climate changing carbon we emit to the atmosphere through our energy intensive lifestyles. Some of us even calculate our household’s footprint with one of the many carbon calculators available online. It helps to [...]
May 31, 2011
How Do You Know That?
“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.”
— Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s, I immersed myself in learning about my field of choice, oceanography. I spent plenty of time in class studying the leading texts of the day. But my real education came from first-hand research experiences.
May 11, 2011
Sea Lions Star in the Center Ring
[Editor's note: Amy Schneider, a junior in zoology from Roseburg, Ore., is an intern with Terra magazine. She wants to write and do science and combines them whenever she can. Her interest in animals started at age three when she told her parents she would die if she didn't get a pet guinea pig.] [...]
May 9, 2011
Place names link birds and King Island culture
Seabirds figure prominently in the island's history and culture.
In her effort to document the place names of her native King Island, Alaska, Deanna Paniataaq Kingston encountered cultural links to birds. Many of the names and stories referenced them. Kauna vaktuat is “the place where you can reach and get birds from rocks,” Tayaguq is “crested auklet place” and Iizrayaq is “sea gull cliff.” [...]
April 26, 2011
Optimizing Energy
Simulations and modeling help to boost a fuel cell's energy output
Imagine a black box with knobs on the outside that you can turn. If you add fuel, the box produces electricity. By adjusting the knobs, you can change the power output, but there’s a catch — you’re not sure how far to turn the knobs to produce the most power. For researchers at Oregon State [...]
April 22, 2011
A Slippery Slope
Warm rains and glacial melting trigger dangerous debris flows
Grinding over ancient layers of lava and ash, the glaciers of the Cascade Range act like supersized sheets of shrinkwrap. Stretched taut across tons of pulverized rock, these blankets of frozen snow hold sand, gravel and boulders in place — that is, until they start to melt. Then the sediments, unlocked from the glaciers’ icy [...]
March 2, 2011
Greenbelts Under Scrutiny
Cities from Corvallis to London use greenbelts to preserve habitat and ease urban congestion. Who doesn’t want the benefits of city living with a backyard the size of New Jersey? Not all greenbelts, however, are created equal, and although some may save critical environmental features, others have failed to restrain urban sprawl. On his Per [...]
February 23, 2011
Listening Post
Corvallis seismic monitoring station feeds data to an international network
In an underground bunker west of Corvallis, scientists monitor tremors around the world
February 21, 2011
Thinking Like a Physicist
OSU leads national effort to reform upper-level physics education
Walk into an upper-level college physics classroom almost anywhere in the country, and you’ll see students sitting down, listening to the professor and taking notes. Despite years of education research showing that students learn better by being active, the common curriculum for juniors and seniors in physics still emphasizes passivity. In recent years, a revolution [...]
February 17, 2011
Hard-rock story
Clues to the planet lie in rocks from underwater volcanoes
Talk about taking things in stride. Three scientists stand at a ship’s railing, arms on each others’ shoulders, sun on their faces and a calm blue sea behind them. They look like tourists on a cruise. Nothing in their calm expressions suggests that they have just pulled half a mile of rock out of the [...]
February 16, 2011
Salmon diets are skin deep
Health clues may be revealed in what fish are eating
Scientists at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center look for clues to what salmon eat in an unlikely place: the mucus that fish produce on their skin. In this video, David Noakes, professor in the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Senior Scientist, Oregon Hatchery Research Center; and Robbins Church, an Environmental Research Scientist with [...]
February 1, 2011
Lines in the Water
Communities and scientists explore proposed marine reserves
As fishermen, scientists and coastal communities spar over Oregon’s system of marine reserves, OSU researchers and their partners are developing the science. One of their first testing grounds is Port Orford’s Redfish Rocks.
February 1, 2011
New Courses Explore Ocean Cultures
Centuries before modern science, humans traveled, exploited, contemplated and celebrated the seas as explorers, fishermen, whalers, merchants, poets, storytellers, musicians and philosophers. Two new courses sponsored by OSU’s Spring Creek Program and Environmental Leadership Institute will delve into this ancient human-ocean relationship. Inspired by the university’s upcoming symposium, Song for the Blue Ocean: Science, Art [...]
February 1, 2011
Shellfish on Acid
How will acidic water affect Oregon's shellfish industry?
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter, “You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?” But answer came there none — And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one. — Lewis Carroll The Walrus and the Carpenter Whether or not you’re a fan of gulping down raw oysters doused with Tabasco, recent [...]
February 1, 2011
Winter Storms Lead to Spring Bloom
New hypothesis supported by satellites and waterborne sensors
If you separate predators from their prey, you get more prey. Now that simple relationship has been used to explain one of the most important annual events in the ocean: the North Atlantic spring phytoplankton bloom. Since the 19th century, oceanographers have sought to explain its origins and have settled on the wintertime mixing of [...]
February 1, 2011
Surprise in the Sargasso
Microbes are masters of adaptation. In some of Earth’s most extreme environments — Antarc- tica’s frigid ice fields, Yellowstone’s sulfuric hot springs, Crater Lake’s lightless depths, the oceans’ deep-sea basalts — Stephen Giovannoni has discovered thriving communities of bacteria. As the holder of the Emile F. Pernot Distinguished Professorship in Microbiology, he has discovered some [...]
February 1, 2011
Run Silent, Run Deep
OSU's growing fleet of underwater gliders monitors the Pacific Ocean
For more than half a century, oceanographers have ventured out of Newport to measure, probe and monitor the Pacific Ocean off the central Oregon Coast. And since the 1950s, these seafaring researchers have recorded about 4,000 “profiles” of the near-shore waters — surface to bottom measurements of temperature, salinity and oxygen levels that begin to [...]
February 1, 2011
Dolphins Hunt Together
Watch spinner dolphins corral their quarry and work together to feed in these animations. Kelly Benoit-Bird used acoustic data of dolphins feeding at night near Hawaii. She reported her findings in the following journal article: Benoit-Bird, K.J. & Au, W.W.L. 2009 “Cooperative prey herding by a pelagic dolphin, Stenella longirostris.” Journal of the Acoustical Society [...]
February 1, 2011
Genius of the Sea
Ecosystem processes hidden in deep ocean waters are falling prey to Kelly Benoit-Bird's investigations
Kelly Benoit-Bird studies ocean organisms smaller than a microchip and bigger than a luxury motor home — the tiniest crustaceans to the mightiest cetaceans. In effect, she studies just about anything that swims or drifts in the sea: copepods and krill, diatoms and dinoflagellates, siphonophores and salps, spinner dolphins and Humboldt squid, Pacific sardines and [...]
February 1, 2011
Down to the Gulf
In the wake of the largest oil spill in U.S. waters, OSU scientists are monitoring whales, chemical pollution and fish.
Bruce Mate didn’t wait long. Within days of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, he was on the phone with officials from the U.S. Minerals Management Service. He and other OSU researchers are analyzing consequences of the largest spill in U.S. waters. Meanwhile, Oregon photographer Justin Bailie was on the scene in Terrebonne Parish.
February 1, 2011
OSU Marine Science by the Numbers
Critical Mass 350 OSU faculty engage in marine research and outreach activities. 120 OSU and 180 state and federal researchers collaborate on ocean science at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. Research Grants Nearly $100 million in 2008-09, or 37 percent of OSU research expenditures, was directly tied to marine-related issues. Education 828 M.S. [...]
February 1, 2011
Smooth Sailing
Oregon has become an international center for ocean research
For the past decade, Oregon State University has boasted an oceanography program ranked among the top five in the nation, and its broad spectrum of marine and coastal research has an international reputation that few institutions can match. OSU Marine Science by the Numbers 350 OSU faculty, nearly $100 million in research, more than 150,000 [...]
February 1, 2011
Plankton Planet
Ocean microbes hold the key to marine ecosystems.
On a South Pacific research expedition, Angelicque White and Ricardo Letelier encountered a surprise: An intense red tide surrounded the ship. (Photo: Angelicque White)
February 1, 2011
Undersea Eruptions Led to Massive Landslide
An erupting undersea volcano near Guam in the western Pacific continues to reshape the seafloor. In March 2010, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and OSU led another in a series of expeditions to NW Rota-1 in the Mariana Arc. Eruptions have been practically continuous since first discovered in 2003, says Bill Chadwick, [...]
February 1, 2011
Lionfish Outcompete the Natives on Coral Reefs
Lionfish memo to coral reefs in the Bahamas: There’s a new predator in town. Native to the South Pacific, the invasive lionfish is reducing the abundance of native fishes on coral reefs in the Bahamas (see “Deep Ecology,” in Terra, spring 2008). OSU zoologist Mark Hixon leads a team of graduate students and other collaborators [...]
February 1, 2011
Hope Rides on Tagged Gray Whale
An electronic tag attached to a single western gray whale may lead to conservation of one of the world’s most endangered whale populations. Bruce Mate, director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, affixed the tag to the animal, a male known as “Flex,” last summer off Sakhalin Island, Russia, in the western Pacific. Mate [...]
February 1, 2011
Tipping Point
West Coast research consortium tackles ocean acidification
In the summer, you may have to go 20 miles out to sea to find it, but close to the seafloor, near the edge of Oregon’s continental shelf, is a preview of the future: water as acidic as what the world’s oceans may be like in 50 to 100 years. “The future of ocean acidification [...]
