Your OSU Blog

Published: Monday, May 16, 2011, 12:34 PM     Updated: Monday, May 16, 2011, 12:41 PM

The Oregon Humane Society, however, announced with some fanfare that the 10-month-old tabby cat was expected Monday to be the 30,000th pet spayed or neutered through its Spay & Save program since the society opened its Holman Medical Center 3 1/2 years ago.

“We were expecting it to take six” years, Kris Otteman, OHS director of shelter medicine said in a news release. “Every pet we spay or neuter brings us one step closer to the solving the huge problem of pet overpopulation.”

By: Angela Yeager, 541-737-0784; angela.yeager@oregonstate.edu

Source: David Bernell, 541-737-6281; david.bernell@oregontate.edu

The following release is online at: http://bit.ly/iIGGYH

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, who faces the challenge of leading Oregon’s economic recovery, will deliver the annual Gov. Tom McCall Memorial Lecture at Oregon State University on Wednesday, May 25.

His talk, “Challenge to Change,” begins at 7 p.m. in LaSells Stewart Center. It is free and open to the public.

In his lecture, Kitzhaber will outline how Oregon is taking a different path than the rest of the nation to revitalize its economy by focusing on sustainability and innovation. He will discuss what he calls “the Oregon example” – a way to create a vibrant future by focusing on clean energy and green jobs, while transforming systems such as healthcare and education.

Kitzhaber, 64, is the 37th governor of Oregon. He previously served as governor from 1995 to 2003, and became the first person to be elected to the office three times when he was re-elected to a third term in 2010.

He moved with his family to Oregon at age 11, and graduated from South Eugene High School in 1965. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College, he returned to Oregon to study medicine at the University of Oregon Medical School (now OHSU). Upon becoming a doctor, he practiced emergency room medicine in Roseburg from 1974 to 1988.

Kitzhaber’s interest in health care public policy, the livelihoods of rural Oregonians and Oregon’s natural heritage compelled him to seek public service. He first won election to the Oregon Legislature in 1978, and served a term in the Oregon House of Representatives. In 1980, he won election to the Oregon State Senate, and served three terms.

The OSU lectureship is named after Tom McCall, who was Oregon’s governor from 1967-75.

This will be Kitzhaber’s second appearance in this lecture series, which continues a tradition of Oregon governors speaking in the series. Other governors who delivered the lecture while in office have included Ted Kulongoski, 2003; Kitzhaber, 1995; and Barbara Roberts, 1991. Former Gov. Bob Straub delivered the 1989 lecture, and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden spoke in 1996.

Notable speakers from different careers have included Washington Post columnists David Broder and William Raspberry; CBS journalists Terry Drinkwater, Richard Threlkeld and Betsy Aaron; Oregon political analyst Floyd McKay; Dennis Dimick of National Geographic magazine; and environmental law attorney and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The McCall Lecture is presented by the OSU College of Liberal Arts.

Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 11:13am PDT – Last Modified: Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 1:45pm PDT Oregon BEST announces new consortium to fund research

By Christina Williams

Sustianable Business Oregon

4-28-11

By: Theresa Hogue, 541-737-0786
Source: Brandon Trelstad, 541-737-3307

This release is available at: http://bit.ly/kOh99y

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State University has been named the Pacific-10 Conference champion in the EPA Green Power Partnership’s 2010-11 College and University Green Power Challenge.

OSU purchased more renewable energy than any other school in the Pac-10 (now the Pac-12), with 51,595,400 kilowatt hours of green power purchased and used. OSU has been the Pac-10 champion every year since the 2007-08 school year.

“We’re glad to see the competition heating up as more and more colleges and universities join the Green Power Challenge,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “This year’s schools used more than 1.5 billion kilowatt hours of green power, cutting harmful emissions from our air, protecting health and driving demand in the clean energy market.”

Two other Oregon schools made the EPA’s list, including Southern Oregon University, which used 33,300,047 kWh, and Lewis and Clark College, which used 12,375,821 kWh.

This year’s challenge participation increased to 69 competing institutions, representing 31 different conferences nationwide. The challenge’s total annual green power usage of more than 1.5 billion kWh has the equivalent environmental impact of avoiding the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the annual electricity use of more than 132,000 homes.

OSU was also just named in the Princeton Review’s annual Green Guide to Colleges.

For more information on OSU’s focus on sustainability, see www.poweredbyorange.com and http://oregonstate.edu/sustainability/

More information on the winners of EPA’s College and University Green Power Challenge can be found at http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/initiatives/cu_challenge.htm

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Published 05/07/2011

(Corvallis, Oregon) – Images of Earth’s coastal region are being beamed straight into a lab at Corvallis, Oregon’s Oregon State University, helping scientists monitor a variety of events in that ecosystem from a brand new vantage point, including things like plankton blooms or even oil spills (above: image of the Columbia River from the imaging system).

More details of the project will be part of an upcoming issue of the American Geophysical Union journal, EOS, but much of this – including the images – can be found on an OSU website about the project.

To read the complete article click here.

May 6, 2011 10:36am

Oregon State University has been selected to host the records and database of the Oregon Century Farm & Ranch Program, which contains century and sesquicentennial farm and ranch applications.

The Oregon Century Farm & Ranch Program was established in 1958 to honor the state’s rich agricultural heritage by awarding farm and ranch families with sesquicentennial and century-long connections to the land. To date, 1,117 families have formally received the “Century” designation and 22 families have received the “Sesquicentennial” award.  

Larry Landis, the university archivist at OSU, says the records paint a picture about the way agriculture has shaped Oregon.

For the complete article click here.

John Foyston/Special to The Oregonian Professor Tom Shellhammer of OSU's Fermentation Science program watches Joe Hortnagl attach the steam line to the heat exchanger that roasts the barley in the mini-malter's kilning cycle

By Special to The Oregonian

A group of Oregon State University engineering students didn’t wait to graduate before endowing their alma mater: For their senior project, they designed and built an innovative barley malter that allows OSU to now teach every step of brewing, from barley field and hop yard to bottling line.

“It’s the bread machine of barley malters,” said professor Pat Hayes of OSU’s Crop and Soil Science department. The malter, which looks a bit like a half-ton stainless steel rocket motor, automates and consolidates the task of steeping, germinating and kilning barley to make barley malt.

Graduate student and team leader Joe Hortnagl and mechanical engineering seniors Aaron Mason, Tyler Froemming, Eric Sunderland and Curtis Barnard designed and built a machine into which you can pour raw barley, set the computer and come back in about a week to shovel out as much as 300 pounds of fragrant, toasty, Grape-Nuts-tasting barley malt.

In reality, it’s a bit more fussy than that, but the students’ flexible and affordable rig has piqued the interest of commercial maltsters and food companies that use sprouted grain.

Malted barley is the essential backbone of beer. The sprouted, toasted seed contains the enzymes and starches that yeast turns into sugars and alcohol. Because it can be kilned to precise degrees of color and roast, maltsters make dozens of styles and colors of malt, from pale Vienna malt to the roasted black patent malt that makes Guinness opaque. Beer recipes often call for several types of malt, and brewers use it by the hundredweight or the ton — after water, malt is beer’s main ingredient.

To read the complete article click here