Congratulations to Jim Carrington, professor of botany and plant pathology, for his election to the National Academy of Sciences!
“This is an extraordinary accomplishment and recognition for any scientist,” said Sabah Randhawa, OSU provost and executive vice president. “It reflects well on the quality of world-class science that is being done here at OSU, and Jim’s election to the academy is an honor for the university.”
Coming soon!
The Graduate Certificate in Water Conflict Management and Transformation is designed to provide decision-makers, graduate students and water professionals with the required specialized resources and skills that go beyond the traditional physical systems approach to water resources management. It will explicitly integrate human, policy and scientific dimensions of water resources within the framework of governance and sustainability.
Read all about it on the program’s website: http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/training/certificate.html
Based at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, the Leopold Leadership Program was founded in 1998 and is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Each year the program selects up to 20 mid-career academic environmental scientists as fellows, who receive intensive communication and leadership training to help them deliver scientific information more effectively to journalists, policymakers, business leaders and the public.
Ed, one of nineteen researchers selected as a fellow, focuses his research on climate history with emphasis on ice core records of greenhouse gases. You can read Ed’s biography here.
Those synthetic food dyes might not be all bad. From New Scientist:
Gayle Orner at Oregon State University in Corvallis added the carcinogens dibenzopyrene (DBP) or aflatoxin to the feed of trout for one month, with or without the food dyes Red 40 – one of six recently linked to hyperactivity in children – or Blue 2.
Nine months later, trout that had been fed either of the dyes in combination with aflatoxin had 50 per cent fewer liver tumours, compared with those that had been exposed to aflatoxin alone.
Click here to read the entire article.
Gayle Orner is a Research Assistant Professor at the Linus Pauling Institute at OSU.
Those of us who don’t study bugs are just laboring under false illusions, apparently.
An excerpt from CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks program, which is downloadable:
“There are plenty of hypotheses about why the dinosaurs went extinct. The most popular is that an asteroid hit the Earth and created a cloud of debris that cooled the planet, leading to the dinosaurs’ eventual demise. But that scenario has never been universally satisfying, and now Dr. George Poinar is proposing his own idea. He’s an entomologist in the department of Zoology at Oregon State University, and the author of What Bugged the Dinosaurs. In his book, he explores an often overlooked aspect of life in the Cretaceous period: the role of insects in ecology. He believes invertebrates played a major role in shaping the world at that time, including spreading disease to a largely naive dinosaur population. That, he suggests, may have pushed them to the edge of extinction, and combining that with changes to the environment may have pushed them over the edge to total loss.”
To learn more about Dr. Poinar’s research: click here.
PNW amphibian experts have found evidence of a fungal scourge in frogs that has previously wiped out amphibian populations around the world–think ebola for frogs. And that’s not all.
As reported in a recent Seattle Times article:
“…killer fungus is only one of the perils amphibians face today, said Oregon State University biologist Andrew Blaustein, whose own research has shown that UV radiation can harm amphibians and their eggs. Chemical contaminants, parasites and other diseases also take a toll. Susceptibility varies by species, and factors interact, Blaustein pointed out. A frog whose immune system is weakened by UV radiation or toxins may be more vulnerable to infection. Global warming adds another level of stress.”
More than just a handsome prince waiting to be kissed by a princess, frogs are vital to the ecosystem. For one thing, they eat lots and lots of insects. And princesses aren’t the only ones who would suffer if frogs didn’t eat all those bugs.
Remarkable things are happening in the College of Science at Oregon State and we want to share the news with you – on a daily basis. We hope you’ll drop in when it is convenient for you (and often!) to learn about research coming out of the College, student achievements, star faculty and occasionally a few highlights about the benefits of private support in advancing science at OSU.
Experience. Explore. Discover. Achieve.
And now… Steward!
From Smithsonian Magazine, April 2008:
Gasping for Breath
An ocean “dead zone” has been discovered off the Pacific Northwest. The water has so little oxygen that it “kills any marine animals that cannot swim or scuttle away,” says Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University. She and her colleagues analyzed 60 years of data and found that oxygen levels dropped in 2002. Most of the hundreds of dead zones worldwide are caused by pollution. But this one was caused by winds and currents that disrupted the ecosystem and fueled oxygen-depleting bacteria.
Visit Jane’s webpage here: http://lucile.science.oregonstate.edu/lubchenco/
Prior to say, 1997, when such programs came into existence, scientists may have been on their own finding themselves rising a corporate or non-profit ladder and making all kinds of business-type decisions. Similarly, business-minded folks may have felt out of their element working in a science-oriented industry. OSU has a solution to this conundrum in the The OSU Professional Science Masters Degree Program. (PDF document)
The program was featured in OSU This Week on April 3rd:
PSM students currently enroll in one of four tracks: applied biotechnology, environmental sciences, applied physics and applied systematics in botany. In addition to completing two years of coursework in their scientific discipline, students receive 19 credits of professional training in business management, communications, and research ethics, and they complete an internship in a business or government agency.
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/otw/backissues/2007-2008/april03.pdf
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