Earth, Water, and Fire (& Politics too)

What does it mean to be at the intersection of science, policy, philosophy, and cultural norms? This week our guest Brian Trick, a Masters student in the College of Forestry, will discuss some tremendous hurdles we Oregonians have with how we perceive and need healthy forests for the most important resource of all.

Sometimes you get sent out on a fire, spend two days on it, and then it rains on you. Trying to stay warming until it's time to leave. This my best Wilson brother, "behind enemy lines" look.

Sometimes you get sent out on a fire, spend two days on it, and then it rains on you. Trying to stay warm until it’s time to leave. This is my best Wilson brother, “behind enemy lines” look.

We need water to live; considering Oregon receives about 80% of its freshwater from forests it only makes sense to protect areas that carry water from mountaintops to our taps. There are federally mandated safety boundaries (riparian buffers) that surround rivers and streams in forests applied on public and private lands alike. These buffers restrict activity to help minimize erosion losses, temperature spikes in water, as well as sediment and chemical inputs to keep ecosystems functioning. Most of the water purification process happens (literally) upstream. Research projects suggest larger riparian areas will keep ecosystems functioning at a higher level; perfect you might think, lets make the riparian buffers extra wide right?

Not so fast, what happens if you own a small parcel of forest and there are so many streams the riparian buffers prevent you from doing anything on your own property? How much of a buffer zone around a stream is needed for a healthy ecosystem, while simultaneously allowing small land-owners to manage forests? Can we arrive at a ‘one size fits most‘ for protected riparian areas? This is policy at its best, if it works!

This is a complicated intersection of forest management and domestic policy and Brian Trick will help discuss some current events and what this could mean for a judicial precedent. In the event we help Brian save the riparian-buffer world, we’ll also delve into his upcoming job as a Forest Service smokejumper, but don’t worry this isn’t the first time he’s jumped out of aircrafts!

Tune in on Sunday, March 27th at 7PM PST on 88.7 FM in Corvallis or stream us online at http://kbvr.com/listen to hear exactly why Brian is (literally) a Hotshot!

Brian working for the USDA Forest Service in a rappel operation located in Salmon, ID.

Brian working for the USDA Forest Service in a rappel operation in Salmon, ID.

CSI-Cultivated Squash Investigator: Murder in the Pumpkin Patch

Hannah Rivedal, PhD student in Botany and Plant Pathology, started working with plants before college in her neighborhood greenhouse and plant nursery. She loved growing and caring for plants that were destined to brighten her neighbors’ yards. Hannah believes, “You can’t be in a bad mood when you are holding a bunch of Petunias!” College-decision time neared and as a well-mannered Wisconsin go-getter, Hannah began college at University of Wisconsin, Madison seeking a degree in Genetics with a minor in Japanese which would lead nicely into medical school. All the while, she would travel back to her hometown on holidays and school breaks to work at the greenhouse where she first fell in love with Botany.

Hannah preparing an experiment in the greenhouses at OSU.

Mid-college Hannah has a revelation after taking a Horticulture class and doing a little volunteer work at the hospital that Pre-med is not the path for her. In total “Hannah-fashion” she takes the reins and sets up informational interviews with eleven academic advisors at UW Madison to try and figure out what she was going to do, and she knows three things: 1) she LOVES plants, 2) she enjoys the challenge of diagnostics, and 3) she loves the reward of getting her hands dirty and working toward a solution. She decided to switch her major to Plant Pathology because it had all of these elements and more! She loves that Plant Path allows her to work directly with growers.

Hannah got her feet wet in “the biz” through undergraduate research in many different labs in the Plant Pathology department, and completed a senior capstone project in a plant disease tolerance lab focused on potatoes. When her college career was nearing an end, Hannah knew that to become a fully-grown Plant Pathologist she would need to continue with a graduate degree.

Hannah in her natural habitat among her squash seedlings.

Hannah is currently working on many angles of this case under the supervision and guidance of her major advisor, Ken Johnson. Hannah hopes that her research with in Plant Pathology will lead to a position as a Plant Pathologist at an extension station working with growers and conducting research that is tailored to their unique situation.

That brings us to this breaking report: We have a Squash Killer on the loose! Willamette Valley growers want to know what is killing their Winter Squash. Plant Pathogens beware: Hannah Rivedal- CSI (Cultivated Squash Investigator) is on the case!

Victim: Cucurbit species, specifically Winter Squash (Cucurbita maxima), important pumpkin relative responsible for supplying the Willamette Valley and the surrounding region with ‘pumpkin’ soup, seeds, and pie filling. Did you know good’ole Jack-o-lantern pumpkin seeds are not the ones you find in the store? Those are most-likely Winter Squash seeds!

Symptoms: Wilting, crown rot, and root rot. Could cause a 100% yield loss.

Suspects: a soil borne disease that could be Fusarium oxysporum (Wilt pathogen), Fusarium solani (Rot pathogen), Plectosphaerella cucumerina (General wilt pathogen), or a combination.

Here all about it, this weekend on Inspiration Dissemination!

Hannah posing with some big beautiful Winter Squash Summer 2015.

Tune in on Sunday, March 13 at 7 pm to hear more from our own OSU Squash Sleuth, Hannah Rivedal, or stream the show live at www.kbvr.com/listen.

Winter squash collected and awaiting diagnosis!

Teaching Old Factories New Tricks

There’s more than one way to s 3172457 kin a cat, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This just about sums up the status of modern manufacturing. Although it may make an entertaining reality show, I don’t mean to imply that factories are trying to teach old dogs new ways to skin cats.

It used to be the manufacturing process was simple, design a part and pick a material to machine it out of. In the last decade or two, major breakthroughs in engineering have led to the development of drastically different manufacturing techniques. For example, additive manufacturing (e.g. 3D printing and friction welding) can reduce material waste while still yielding a part with the same strength and functionality as other methods. Although these new methods have caught the public’s attention, they don’t always transition into factories as quickly as one might expect.

Companies tend to be slow to adopt new techniques due to the cost of retooling and a lack of good comparisons between old and new methods. Working in Karl Haapala’s lab, Harsha Malshe hopes to bring some clarity to this process with a computer program that can help companies sort through all the new manufacturing options and compare them with the tried-and-true methods. The program Harsha is helping to build, along with his colleagues in the Haapala lab, will allow engineers to submit their part designs and get out a detailed comparison of all the manufacturing options for that part. Hopefully this information will encourage companies to embrace new manufacturing technologies that save money and resources, or maybe we’ll find out that the old dog already knows the best tricks. I’m guessing the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

We’ll be talking with Harsha on this week’s episode to learn more about the rapidly changing field of manufacturing engineering.

Adrift in a sea of noise

Imagine walking around your neighborhood in a dense fog as night settles in; you may be familiar with the layout, but everything seems different. Innocuous obstacles like low-hanging tree branches and broken sidewalks become invisible right until you stumble upon them. You must be extra vigilant in order to avoid blindly injuring yourself as visibility drops.

For many humans, sight is our most valuable sense, but for marine mammals like dolphins, whales, and seals, their hearing is most precious. As sound travels better through water than air, the ocean is already a noisy place with atmospheric activity and other animals passing around, but their senses have had millions of years to evolve in such an environment. Unfortunately, because of an increased human presence in the ocean, like a fog bank rolling in, the ocean is getting noisier and putting these already threatened animals in danger.

Samara ready to deploy a hydrophone in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

Samara Haver, a Masters student of Holger Klinck in Wildlife Science is interested in knowing about how the noise is affecting marine life. To do this, she must first characterize the ocean soundscape with hydrophones (pictured right) situated in various parts of the globe. With these data, she hopes to understand how loud the ocean is, how much noisier it’s getting, and where the noise is coming from. Tune in on Sunday, February 28th at 7PM PST on 88.7 FM in Corvallis or stream us online at http://kbvr.com/listen to hear Samara’s journey into the sounds of science.

No show on February 21st

We will not have a show on February 21st, 2016 due to a broadcast of a Women’s Basketball game.

Tune in on February 28th, 2016 to hear a whale of a tale from Fisheries and Wildlife Student, Samara Haver.

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!

Liver On The Edge

When thinking of the consequences of a diet high in fats, sugars, and cholesterol, many will think of weight gain and heart disease, but it may be the liver that suffers the most in the end. Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) affects as many as 35% of Americans and is caused by fat abnormally being stored in the liver. This disease can lead to irreversible scarring, inflammation, cancer, and even liver failure.

Healthy Mouse Liver

Currently, there is no known cure, but Kelli Lytle, RD, a Ph. D. student of Donald Jump in the department of Nutrition is looking for an answer; not with drugs, but with diet. If we change our diet to one that is low in fats, sugars, and cholesterol, can we nurse our livers back to health? By using a two-pronged approach with a mouse model and a cell culture model, she can better understand not only if restoration is possible, but how it works.

Diseased Mouse Liver. White circles indicate pockets of fat

Diseased Mouse Liver. White circles are pockets of fat

In this episode of our show, we will find out how Kelli found her passion for nutrition. We follow her journey from her beginnings studying Art History in Portland Community College, to becoming a registered dietician, and on to her five years at Oregon State University where she has not only published her work, but also communicated it to broad audiences in the three minute thesis competition.

So, tune in to hear Kelli’s passion for Science, Nutrition, and Science Communication on Sunday, January 31st at 7PM PST on 88.7FM or stream it live at http://kbvr.com/listen.

Photo credit: Kelli Lytle

The Earliest X-file: Mysterious Killer of the Tudor Era

Edwin, Ed, Wollert hails from the History of Science Department in Oregon State’s School of History, Philosophy, and Religion. Ed is a third year PhD student and is currently preparing his dissertation. His topic? A mysterious disease that affected Europe during the reign of House Tudor. Symptoms include: an intense episode of chills, giddiness, and pain followed by a stage of perceived heat, sweating, headache, delirium, unquenchable thirst, and exhaustion. Fatalities from this disease were swift with many deaths occurring within twenty-four hours. The unknown killer still evades historians today and is known as Sweating Sickness.

After pouring over documents at the British Library and National Archives last summer, Ed visited The George and Pilgrims Inn in Glastonbury. This is the site where the local abbot had to face the wrath of Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s…

Imagine the challenge of studying a disease that has not affected Europe since its last outbreak in 1551. In his research, Ed works as a detective slowly uncovering clues about Sweating Sickness amid thousands of legal documents. Late fifteenth and early sixteenth century documents were constructed before a published unified code of grammar. Ed sifts through handwritten documents sometimes with a rough guidebook for deciphering vague descriptions of symptoms piecing together a possible agent or vector in retrospect.

Ed has dabbled in just about every field and his academic journey has lead him to many different locations around the United States and Internationally. He describes his pursuit of history as obeying an annoying curiosity. Originally trained in Philosophy with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from midwestern universities, Ed has served the past 13 years as an adjunct professor in Philosophy at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. That’s not all, he has a second Master’s in Medieval History from American Public History, and has authored two novels. When applying to Oregon State for his PhD, Ed came prepared with a proposal to ignite the curiosity of his major advisor Paul Kopperman. And the rest… is history.

Tune in to KBVR Corvallis 88.7 FM this Sunday at 7PM PST to hear from a true detective or stream the show live.

No Show This Week

We will not have a show on January 17th, 2016 due to the broadcast of OSU Women’s basketball game. Tune in on January 24th as we interview History of Science Ph. D. student, Edwin Wollert.