Author Archives: Matt McConnell

About Matt McConnell

Matt McConnell is from Midland, Michigan and received his undergraduate BS in Psychology and Philosophy at Central Michigan University. After graduating he spent several years in North Carolina. Most of this was at UNC working as a medical research lab assistant using mice as model organisms, but some of his work also involved cognitive research with Rhesus Macaques at a Duke University field site in Puerto Rico. Matt currently live in Corvallis, OR where he attends OSU as a graduate student in the History of Science master's program. He is taking Science Education as a related minor, with an emphasis in Free Choice Learning. His interests in History of Science and Science Education meet on the practice of Science Communication. Matt is currently co-host of the weekly radio show 'Inspiration Dissemination', in which graduate students discuss their personal journeys. Inspiration Dissemination is open to all graduate students and airs every Sunday evening at 7pm on 88.7 FM, KBVR Corvallis.

Navigating Cultural Currents: Sharing Water in Central America

Between the Southeastern portion of the country of Costa Rica and Panama to the south runs the Sixaola River. For almost a hundred miles on its meandering path to the Caribbean the river forms the boundary between these two nations. But the Sixaola has many names. It is shared not only by the two countries to its north and south, but also by countless indigenous peoples who rely on its waters for the valuable resources that make their livelihoods possible.

When determining how the river is to be managed as a valuable resource politics inevitable come into play. This is called “hydro diplomacy“. Waste and chemical pollutants that one group dispose of in the river flow downstream to contaminate the lands of other groups. Complicating the situation is the fact that some of the peoples sharing the river reject the conventions of typical society: the value of the river is not the same for all peoples along its length.

Dacotah in one of her favorite places: the water.

This is what Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova aims to better understand. As a masters student in Water Resources Policy and Management at Oregon State, Dacotah meets with and interviews many of these peoples to bring their unique cultural values concerning the river into the ongoing governmental discussion of water usage and regulation.

Dacotah’s work differs from other resource management studies in that it is not just about the relationships between people with different points of view, but about the special relationship human beings have with water itself. As a basic resource that all humans need to survive, people have an almost spiritual relationship with water. For Dacotah water is a powerful force for overcoming differences, and a symbol for peace.

You can find more information about her work at http://waterpax.org/

Intertidal Interdependence and Environmental Change

Low tide in the rocky intertidal ecosystem, near Depoe Bay Oregon. At the edge of the water is the “low zone”, where plants and algae thrive. Photo: Allie Barner

When you say “ecosystem”, most people think of a food chain. There are links in the chain, and each species is a link that keeps the chain together. This encourages a view of the world in which we see the importance of individual species. Traditionally, this means that when we try to understand how an ecosystem might react to a sudden environmental change we look at how individual species might react.

For Allie Barner, however, an ecosystem is more like a web. Each strand in the web is supported not just by one or two others, but by every other strand. In an ecosystem, the relationships between all species present are often just as important as any individual species’ role. This view, focusing on the ways in which species rely on one another to survive in their environment, is called community ecology. To better understand what it takes to keep an ecosystem healthy, Allie believes we need to move past a “who eats who” perspective and start thinking about communities of species as a whole. Losing even one species due to environmental change might destabilize an entire ecology.

While the tide is out, Allie and company rush to install an experiment that excludes all herbivorous animals to try to understand how animals that graze on plants and algae affect entire ecosystems. Photo: J. Robinson/PISCO

Allie, a graduate student in Oregon State’s Integrative Biology program studying under Bruce Menge and Sally Hacker, explores this at the Oregon coast. Out at the beach, Allie inspects the intertidal zones, the areas that are sometimes submerged at high tide and sometimes exposed to the open air at low tide. Here a wide array of species are dependent on one another for survival, and they form an ecological web that is very sensitive to changes in the environment.

The rocky intertidal ecosystem in Oregon is incredibly diverse: in this picture there are dozens of species, from the greenish-yellow sponge, to the lettuce-like leafy red algae, to the large drooping kelp. Photo: Allie Barner

Today a pressing issue, especially in marine environments, is climate change. Ocean acidification, caused by excess Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, is having a profound effect on many species and increasing water temperatures are quickly altering ecosystems that have existed in relative stasis for many thousands of years.

Allie’s goal is not only to understand how climate change might affect intertidal ecologies, though. Allie hopes to use her data to understand how ecosystems react to change in a more general sense. By seeing the similarities across ecosystems, even from something as small as an intertidal kelp bed and as large as a tropical forest, Allie believes we can begin to understand the deeper rules that govern the environment we live in. Only then can we begin to more deeply understand our impact on it.

To learn more about Allie’s research and her journey to graduate school, tune in this Sunday at 7PM, PST! You can stream the show live online, or listen to the interview live on the air at 88.7 KBVR FM, Corvallis!

The Future of Farming Comes in a Container

As the number of acres used for agricultural production continues to grow annually, so too does demand, especially for out of season fruits and vegetables that often have to be flown in from around the world so that consumers in places like the Pacific Northwest can have a delicious banana or orange for breakfast in the middle of the winter. But with each passing season, the future of agricultural production in containerized form grows increasingly possible, a development that could allow local production of a variety of fruits and vegetables year round.

Here at Oregon State University Patrick Kingston, a student in Horticulture, is studying blueberries, which turn out to be very picky fruit. Like Goldilocks with her porridge, blueberries need their soil to be just right in order to grow, and in the Pacific Northwest conditions are often too rainy, and ideal soil is largely restricted to the Willamette Valley, limiting potential growing space. Working underneath a group of three closely allied advisors– Bernadine Strik, David Bryla, and Carolyn Scagel— Patrick has a wealth of knowledge at his fingertips about fruit fertility, irrigation, and container research (in other words, studying how to best pot your plants).

By growing fruits like blueberries under controlled conditions, potted in the ideal substrate and treated with vitamins and nutrients to aid growth, containerized plants have shown the potential for production in areas where growing them in the soil simply would not be possible, and some have even grown at up to three times the expected growth rate. Patrick hopes to accomplish the same with his blueberries, working with everything from peat moss and pine chips to coconut husk as potential substrates for his plants.

Coming from his own life of experience in the garden, the lab, and on the farm; Patrick has found that communication between researchers and growers is key. The importance of specific technologies and techniques for the farms of the future is at stake, and Patrick is here to tell us all about it this Sunday night, at 7PM on 88.7 KBVR FM, Corvallis!

Hungry, Hungry Microbes!

Today ocean acidification is one of the most significant threats to marine biodiversity in recorded human history. Caused primarily by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the decreasing pH of the world’s oceans is projected to reach a level at which a majority of coral reefs will die off by 2050. This would have global impacts on marine life; when it comes to maintaining total worldwide biodiversity, coral reefs are the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on the planet.

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that ocean acidification might proceed at levels even faster than those predicted. Large resevoirs methane hydrates locked away in deep sea ice deposits under the ocean floor appear to be melting and releasing methane into the ocean and surrounding sediments due to the increasing temperature of the world’s oceans. If this process accelerates as waters continue to warm, then the gas escaping into the ocean and air might accelerate ocean acidification and other aspects of global climate change. That is, unless something– or someone– can stop it.

The area of the seafloor Scott studies lies several hundred to a few thousand meters below the surface–much too deep (and cold!) to dive down. Scott gets on a ship and works with a team of experienced technicians who use a crane to lift a device called a gravity corer off the ship deck and into the water, lowering it until it reaches the bottom, capturing and retrieving sediment.

This is where methanotrophs and Scott Klasek come in. A 3rd year PhD student in Microbiology at Oregon State University, Scott works with his advisor in CEOAS Rick Colwell and with Marta Torres to study the single celled creatures that live in the deep sea floor and consume excess methane. Because of their importance in the carbon cycle, and their potential value in mitigating the negative effects of deep sea methane hydrate melting, these methanotrophs have become a valuable subject of study in the fight to manage the changes in our environment occurring that have been associated with anthropogenic climate change.

Here Scott is opening a pressure reactor to sample the sediment inside. Sediment cores retrieved form the ocean floor can be used for microbial DNA extraction and other geochemical measurements. Scott places sediment samples in these reactors and incubates them at the pressure and temperature they were collected at, adding different amounts of methane to them to see how the microbial communities and methane consumption change over weeks and months.

Most people don’t wake up one morning as a kid and say to themselves, “You know what I want to be when I grow up? Someone who studies methanotrophs and the threat of warming arctic waters.” Scott Klasek is no exception, in fact, he went into his undergraduate career at University of Wisconsin, Madison expecting to pursue an academic career path in pre med. To learn all about Scott’s research, and the twists and turns that led him to it, tune in this Sunday, April 10th, at 7pm to 88.7 KBVR FM or stream the show live!

American Agriculture is Getting Rusty

In the year 2000, a disease called Wheat Stripe Rust occurred in more than 20 American states. This was the largest incidence in US history. While fungicide can reduce losses, the disease no doubt hurt farmers across the United States. Wheat Stripe Rust continues to be widespread around the United States, and is particularly threatening in the Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades, where annual temperatures are cool and humidity is high. The weather in the Willamette Valley provides ideal growing conditions for the fungus, which looks like golden striations on the leaves of healthy wheat.

from phys.org, “PhD students fight Wheat Strip Rust”, 2014.

Joining us on the show Sunday, February 14th is Daniel Farber. Daniel is a PhD student in Botany and Plant Pathology here are Oregon State University, where he studies the disperal of a fungus called Puccinia striiformis triticina that is the causal agent for the disease Wheat Strip Rust. Dispersal from a single infection of this fungus can spread the disease over a single generation, and spores can travel through the air and remain viable up to 500 kilometers away from the source of infection!

Researchers in the past have looked at these large scale patterns of spread, but they may have missed the trees for the forest, since no one has done detailed studies of how such a process occurs at the level of a single spore. By examining the shape of dispersal gradients in local, isolated infections, Daniel hopes to understand the root of this phenomena by asking how airborne infection dispersal occur from one leaf to another, at the smallest observable level. Using modelling to predict disperal patterns, Daniel hopes that this deeper understanding might lead to a more sustainable agricultural practice that is less dependent on excessive fungicide use, and that the understanding of how to model airborne pathogen spread in this way might also be applied to human health issues ranging from bird flu to the current Zika virus epidemic.

To learn more about Daniel and his work, tune in Sunday night at 7PM PST or stream the show live!

Too Young for this Shtick

Have you ever started a job and wondered why no one around you seems to be able to tell you how to do it well? That may be because your boss simply didn’t bother to ask the last person in your position what their secrets were before they left.

Graduate students today often have parents who are members of the Baby Boomer generation, and many of the Baby Boomers are now retiring from jobs that they have held for the past several decades. Many of these men and women were on the ground floor of new innovations in science, technology, and engineering in companies that are hiring new graduates at spectacular rates. So we have to ask ourselves: are we gaining as much skill and knowledge as we’re losing when these men and women leave the workforce; or is their detailed knowledge of the field and their ability to innovate retiring with them?

from clomedia.com

The self-motivation a retiring employee has to pass on their knowledge to the next generation is part of a life stage that all people go through. This stage is called ‘generativity’, and it’s something that our guest this Sunday night, Drew Hatlen, knows quite a lot about. Drew is a Masters student in the Oregon State University Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) who focuses his research on a combination of Adult Education, Speech Communication, and Psychology. Where these three issues meet is on the topic of skill transfer in the workplace.

Drew will be joining us on 88.7 KBVR FM at 7PM PST tomorrow evening to talk about how knowledge and skill transfer can succeed or fail as people transition into retirement, and what some factors might be that influence people’s desire to share their wisdome with the next generation.

Drew is the Graduate Student Success Research Assistant for the Grad School at OSU. If you have questions about getting into graduate school or being successful in graduate school you can email your questions to Drew at drew.hatlen@oregonstate.edu.

Tune in or stream the show live tomorrow night at 7!

Looking For the Link Between Centromeres and Cancer

DNA, the “building blocks of life”, can be bent and broken. While it is the source code for every creature on the earth, DNA is also the source of some of the most difficult diseases that plague humanity. Tonight at 7PM PST, Steve Friedman joins us from the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics to discuss characterizing centromeres of a filamentous fungi called Neurospora crassa. Centromeres, the part of the chromosome that is targeted by proteins that aid in cell division, are studied to understand how genetic mutations and resulting abnormalities in cells can lead to genetic disease and cancer.

Flasks containing strains of Neurospora crassa

Fungi serve as a model organism for the study of centromeres in Steve’s work because their genetic code is more complex than the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) that have been used in older studies, but still easier to study and understand than the complicated human genome.

Understanding how the human genetic code controls the production of proteins that are implicated in diseases like cancer, and how these proteins relate to centromeres that are crucial parts of a natural and healthy process of cell division, is the long term goal of such research.

To learn more about Steve and his work, tune in at 88.7 KBVR FM, or stream the show live!

Microscopy images of GFP/RFP tagged centromere proteins (taken in Galya Orr’s Lab at PNNL).

Steve enjoys some time away from the lab

Fighting Fire with Flora

It has been a record breaking year for wildfires, with over 900,000 acres burned in Washington alone. This past summer in the Pacific Northwest families went to sleep wondering very seriously if they would need to evacuate before morning. Not all of their prayers were answered. Some abandoned land and possessions. In towns like Wenatchee, WA and John Day, OR people lost their homes and in the dense forests of the Cascades some firefighters lost their lives. Each year the damage done by wildfires grows in this country, and if climate models prove correct, this danger will only increase in the future.

Today the question of what to do with burned over land is deeply divisive in the state of Oregon. The damage wrought by wildfires is especially concerning because it affects both commercial timber stands and protected, often old growth, forest land.

Studying the question of what to do with burned over lands far from Corvallis, Lea Condon get her hands dirty in the deserts of Nevada. In an area called The Great Basin, Lea studies soil crusts, communities of organisms that live right on top of the soil which are important for ecosystem health among the cheat grass and native plant communities of The Great Basin.

Dinner in the works in eastern Nevada

Mosses and lichens under survey

In the field sites were Lea works, raising grazing animals is crucial to local economies. The increasing frequency of destructive wildfires, and the wear and tear on soil crusts caused by large animals grazing, has a disruptive effect on mosses and lichens that are important for maintaining optimal ecosystem health. A graduate student in Oregon State’s Botanty and Plant Pathology department, Lea studies under David Pyke, hoping to discover how these mosses and lichens can be restored after damanging events like wildfires occur.

Lea, moss growth experiment

To learn more about Lea’s story and research, tune in tonight at 7PM PST to 88.7 FM, or stream the show live here!

From the River to the Sea: Rare metal cycles and the Circle of Life

Sometime around 3.4 billion years ago, the planet earth was covered in an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide poisonous to life as we know it today. Then something changed. Tiny photosynthetic organisms called cyanobacteria started converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, and over billions of years seaweed, kelp, and finally terrestrial plants with roots systems covered the globe, making the entire history of animal life of Earth possible. We know this because a rare metal called molybdenum, found in ocean floor sediment cores, can be measured to show when the atmosphere changed.

Or maybe not. Maybe we’re wrong about all of that. Who can say? Here to challenge the accepted timeline of life as we know it is Elizabeth King. This Sunday Liz will walk us through a comparative study she has been working on in Oregon and the Big Island, Hawaii, underneath Dr. Julie Pett-Ridge. A Graduate student in Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry (CEOAS), and working with the Crop and Soil Science deparment through her advisor, Dr. Pett-Ridge, Liz hopes to uncover the truth about molybdenum. Showing that this metal travels from rivers to the ocean and back through precipitation in a cycle that is dependent on the soil and weathering processes in these different volcanic regions, Liz argues that scientists haven’t been seeing the big picture of molybdenum’s environmental history.

Liz at a sampling location

Molybdenum is increasingly recognized as an important agricultural nutrient, and understanding how it travels through the soil, streams, and waters of the Pacific Northwest and the world is highly valuable in keeping our land fertile and productive. To learn more, tune in Sunday night at 88.7 FM Pacific time, or steam the show live!

Liz at the mouth of a river she studies on the Big Island, Hawaii.

The Winds of Mars

False-color image of channel-confined TARs in the Amenthes Rupes Region, Mars (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

On our own world, dust storms can carry sands from the Sahara around the globe.On Mars, immense dust storms worthy of a Mad Max reference and formations called Transverse Aeolian Ridges up to a meter tall are common sights. Unlike Earth, where we constantly see geoactive forces like water, ice, and volcanic activity changing the landscape around us, the only force we can see actively changing the landscape of Mars is the wind. With desertification increasing on our own planet dune fields in many locations are moving into existing agricultural areas. Might we eventually be living on a world where the impact of wind on the land is as great as it is on Mars? Can the windswept world of Mars tell us what life will be like someday here on Earth?

Gravel ripple wind-formed bedforms in Puna de Atacama, Argentina (de Silva et al., 2013)

Rover image of Transverse Aeolian Ridges (TARs) in Endurance Crater, Mars (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Michelle Neely, a master’s student in Geology and Geophysics studying under Shan de Silva, is investigating just that. By studying wind shaped formations called symetrical bed forms in the high desert of Argentina, which are the Earth’s closest analog to the ridges formed by the winds of Mars, Michelle hopes to learn how wind processes work on both worlds. If terrestrial desertification leaves our Blue Planet looking a lot more like the Red Planet, this research will prove invaluable.

For more on the geological history of Mars and our own future, tune in to 88.7 FM Sunday November 8th at 7pm PST or stream live to find out!