How did Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Institute become home to groundbreaking research on nerve cell degeneration?
Category » Spring 2006
April 23, 2006
Sexual Health: Asking the Tough Questions
Using the research tools of social science — questionnaires, focus groups, interviews and data analysis — Marie Harvey, chair of OSU’s Department of Public Health, delves into the most private of human behaviors and the attitudes that shape them.
April 23, 2006
Sounding an Arctic Retreat
The Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets without a fight. A science team led by OSU oceanographer Kelly Falkner learned that the hard way last year when a sudden windstorm off the northern Greenland coast destroyed their tents and scattered debris for miles.
April 23, 2006
Fish Bones and Tree Rings
Fish bones smaller than a fingernail have a big story to tell.
April 23, 2006
Common Ground: Gardens and Scholarship
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a cultivator and connoisseur of pears. His protégé Henry David Thoreau grew beans on the shores of Walden Pond.
April 23, 2006
Amber Waves of SuperSoft Wheat
Wheat fields may have inspired Katherine Lee Bates to write a song about America’s beautiful “amber waves of grain,” but not all wheat is created equal.
April 23, 2006
Solutions for Business
The Business Solutions Group in the College of Business has performed those services for Fortune 500 companies, start-ups and public agencies such as the Oregon Department of Transportation.
April 23, 2006
Open Source, Hot and Cool
Alex Polvi may work and study at OSU, but he gets paid by Mozilla, an Internet software company in Mountain View, California.
April 23, 2006
Today’s Forecast: Windy and Toxic
Heading out to dig clams at your favorite beach? Someday you may be able to check the red tide forecast in addition to the tide tables.
April 23, 2006
Out of the Woods
A meeting of the minds on forest issues is rare. Yet an innovative energy project underway in Oregon’s Fremont National Forest has won near-unanimous support from stakeholders who are often at odds.
April 23, 2006
20/20 Vision
From a cabin deep in the Oregon Coast Range to the shoulders of a Cascade volcano, the Spring Creek Project asks a difficult question: "How should we understand our relationship to nature?"
The Spring Creek Project takes us into the wild through writing workshops, overland treks and public programs. The goal: to explore our relationship to nature.
April 23, 2006
Ecological Reflections
Science blends with art and writing in Spring Creek’s Long-Term Ecological Reflections (LTER) project at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. In 2004, Robert Michael Pyle, nature writer and scientist, served as the first LTER writer-in-residence. He focused on a 200-year-long log decomposition study. Its purpose: to understand forest cycles of growth and decay. Other participating [...]
April 23, 2006
Finding Today
By Steven R. Radosevich Excerpted from Good Wood: Growth, Loss, and Renewal Oregon State University Press, 2005 Steven Radosevich is a professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of Forest Science at OSU. His research interests focus on plant ecology, sustainable forestry and agriculture, and the impacts and ethics of human land uses. He [...]
April 23, 2006
Namesake for a Generation of Holsteins
In Benton County, a disproportionate number of newborn calves are christened “Chuck.” That’s because when Dr. Charles Estill is called out to attend a birth — usually in the dark hours before dawn — the mother is in distress, and the outcome is precarious. So a successful birth warrants proper recognition of the doctor’s skills. [...]
April 23, 2006
Going to College on the Black Angus Plan
Dana Hoyt’s college fund didn’t grow in the bank. It grew in the pasture. “My parents gave me my first cow when I was eight,” she says. Eventually, young Dana had a herd of 35 beef cattle, which she raised on the family farm in Klamath Falls. Tuition for her undergraduate education in animal science [...]
April 23, 2006
Trading Muck Boots for a Clean, White Lab Coat
Squatting beside a 1,500-pound dairy cow, Jaime Ueda reaches for the udder and pulls tentatively on one of the teats. The thin stream of milk that squirts out misses the plastic sample tray Ueda is aiming for, instead dousing the face of fellow student Dana Hoyt. “Oops! Welcome to Dairy 101!” Ueda jokes. The fourth-year [...]
April 23, 2006
Born with a Stethoscope in Her Hand
“Cow No. 231, possible early pregnancy,” Dr. Bronwyn Crane calls out to Professor Charles Estill, who stands by with a clipboard to record the reproductive status of the Van Beek Dairy herd. Crane moves along the row of Holstein hindquarters, doing “preg” tests with practiced efficiency — lifting tails, feeling for signs of new life, [...]
April 23, 2006
Boot Camp for Vets
Monitoring animal health takes grit and shoulder-length gloves
Chuck Estill knows that taking care of large animals can be tough. That’s why he takes OSU veterinary medicine students out to Willamette Valley farms where they can confront their fears — and see wonders.
April 23, 2006
Down on the Farm
As OSU’s mobile veterinary clinic travels from farm to farm in Benton County, small-talk is all about large animals and their care. Professor Charles Estill, resident vet Bronwyn Crane, and fourth-year students Jaime Ueda and Dana Hoyt trade stories of midnight emergencies during on-call rotations — of a difficult birth that ended in euthanasia, of [...]
April 23, 2006
Sea Power
OSU engineers are working with coastal communities to tap offshore energy.
OSU electrical engineers Annette von Jouanne and Alan Wallace and their students are developing innovative wave energy devices. Their plan to create a wave energy research park near Reedsport, Oregon, brings hope to a community hit hard by economic decline.
April 23, 2006
Wave Power Prototypes
OSU’s “direct-drive” buoy approaches allow electrical generators to respond directly to ocean waves. Inside the Permanent Magnet Linear Generator Buoy, wave motion causes specially designed electrical coils to move through a magnetic field, inducing voltages and generating electricity. The Contact-less Force Transmission Generator Buoy uses large, high-strength permanent magnets configured as a “piston.” It transforms [...]
April 23, 2006
Coastal Views
Four residents of Oregon's shore — a fisherman, a former mayor, a teacher and a doctor — weigh in on wave energy.
Scott Hartzell Fisherman Taking an annual harvest of a quarter-million pounds of Dungeness from his 85-foot craft Ossian, this crabber brings a lifetime of ocean experience to his role as an “industry cooperator” with OSU. “I’m interested in the location of the wave park, how it’s going to be anchored, how invasive it’s going to [...]
April 23, 2006
Water as Destiny
Annette von Jouanne There’s something serendipitous, almost poetic, about von Jouanne’s work in wave energy. She was raised in Seattle, a metropolis laced with lakes and bedeviled by drizzle. Growing up, she never went anywhere without first tossing a Speedo in her backpack, just in case a chance for a swim presented itself. When she [...]
March 23, 2006
Mind Your Math
It just adds up — math education is about more than learning to add and subtract.
