Pritha Biswas presented her work on TiO2 polymorphs at the 2021 Symposium of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the American Vacuum Society held at Oregon State University from 8-10 September. She received an Honorable Mention in the Graduate Student Oral Presentation category and a cash award. Congratulations!
Rosalyn Fey, OSU Astronomy Club Secretary
On May 17, 2021, the Astronomy Club hosted a virtual star party featuring Tom Carrico, local amateur astrophotographer and instructor of astrophotography at OSU. Tom used his telescope in Dark Sky, New Mexico to remotely image the night sky and give everyone a chance to make astronomical observations from the comfort and safety of their homes.
The party started with a presentation from Elaine Swanson, a post-baccalaureate student and founder of OSU’s Astrobotany Research Group, and continued with 2 hours of real-time astrophotography image capture and processing. Tom imaged some classic astronomical objects, such as the Sombrero Galaxy (M104), and also took requests from participants. Favorite objects included the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), the Owl Nebula (M97), the Ring Nebula (M57), and the Great Globular Cluster (M13). Other objects of astronomical interest included M87, the galaxy which hosts the supermassive black hole first imaged in 2019 by an international collaboration using the network of telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope.
Participants learned about each imaged object, and about the equipment, software and procedures used for remote astrophotography. Tom covers many of these topics in PH299: Astrophotography and Astronomy, currently offered in spring term.
The Astronomy Club plans to continue hosting virtual star parties with Tom in the future to increase accessibility of night observations, and engage more people in this exciting experience! Please join us at our next virtual star party! For information about our club and events, visit our website at https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/astronomyclub/.
OSU Astronomer in Residence, Senior Physics Instructor and man-about-Corvallis Randall Milstein has been featured by Samaritan Hospital in an article and a huge billboard on OR34. See https://www.samhealth.org/randallm for the full article. You can meet Randy in person in Physics 104 (Descriptive Astronomy), the class he teaches to hundreds of students every term at Oregon State.
With departmental funding and an SPS travel grant, undergraduate student Acacia Patterson attended PhysCon, the 2019 Physics Congress, in Providence, Rhode Island 11/14-11/16. Over 1000 people attended the conference, which is hosted by the jointly by Sigma Pi Sigma and the Society of Physics Students and has occurred every 4 years since 1928. A group of OSU students attended the last conference in San Francisco, California.
The 2019 Congress began with tours at Harvard, MIT, and Brown physics departments and at Optikos Corporation, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Naval Submarine Base New London, and Rhode Island Hospital. The conference included speeches on the work of Einstein and Eddington from Dame S. Jocelyn Bell-Burnett and on the projects of GoogleX and how physics majors can prepare for a career in industry from Sandeep Giri. In addition, there were talks on the use of disruptive technology to mitigate climate change from Ellen Williams, on intellectual property rights from Jami Valentine Miller, and on the Big Bang and the future of astronomy from John Mather. Finally, Jim Gates shared a talk on how to use physics to become like Indiana Jones. A Congress workshop was held in which students brainstormed solutions to the issues that they and their organizations face.
The most important issues which the conference identified were imposter syndrome, mental health, and inclusiveness in physics. Two breakout sessions were offered with topics including science policy and communication, physics careers, physics and astronomy outreach, inclusivity, climate change, and graduate student panels.
Acacia, who is a member of Janet Tate’s research group, was among the 150 students who presented their research during two poster and art exhibit sessions. Other activities included a lunch with scientists, a demo show at Brown and a tour at the LADD Observatory, a game night with Brown’s SPS chapter, and career and graduate school fairs. Acacia is grateful for this rewarding experience and looks forward to bringing what she learned to OSU.
Tyler Parsotan has been awarded a NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award for 2019 in the extremely competitive Astrophysics category. His proposal, titled “Demystifying the Interplay between Explosion Dynamics and Electromagnetic Radiation in Gamma Ray Bursts”, was one of the 11% of selected proposals in this category.
Originally from NY, Tyler is a first generation student. His family is from the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. He acquired a BS in Space Physics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is now working on a PhD in Physics at Oregon State University.
Tyler is currently a fourth year graduate student working with Dr. Davide Lazzati on understanding the most powerful explosions in the Universe known as Gamma Ray Bursts. These events are so energetic that in the first few seconds of the explosion, they release more energy than our sun will emit in its entire lifetime. Understanding these events allows us to get a better handle on how matter behaves in extreme conditions and may eventually lead to using these Gamma Ray Bursts as tools that can uncover new cosmological truths.
Besides working on his research project, Tyler is the president and co-founder fo the OSU astronomy Club. The club is focused on fostering interest in astronomy at OSU and the community of Corvallis in general. Tyler, with the help of many other undergraduate and graduate students, has hosted the Astronomy Open House events where members fo the public are invited to Weniger Hall to learn about astronomy though interactive demos and rooftop observations. More information regarding OSU Astronomy can be found at: https://physics.oregonstate.edu/astronomy-club
Reposted from impact.science.oregonstate.edu
“Unlike class, where there is always an answer, research is open-ended. It was difficult for me at first, but I came to appreciate that even if you don’t solve a problem, you are contributing to a much larger research effort with scientists around the world that will one day lead to a solution.”
“Have as much fun as you can freshman year. Talk toeveryone. You will have the most free time this year and so it’s a great time to meet new people and make friends. It gets harder after that.”
“Talk to professors. Go to office hours. Not just to talk about academics, but just to talk about life. It’s helped me out a lot.”
“I was overwhelmed and my confidence was shaken. Was I good enough? I had imposter syndrome. The only thing that got me out of it,” Abe reflects, “was just to endure. I just kept going step by step, every single day. I had to keep going and I did and it finally got better.”
“[The junior-year Paradigms in Physics] was hard, but it was great and everyone in the class bonded together. We came out feeling that we could do anything!”
The Ostroverkhova group’s work on bee vision had attracted a lot of attention!
KATU has an interview with Oksana Ostroverkhova at: https://katu.com/news/local/wild-bees-are-attracted-to-blue-fluorescent-light-oregon-state-university-research-finds
Sci-news has an article http://www.sci-news.com/biology/bees-blue-fluorescent-light-06121.html
and there is a press release to go with their recent paper in Journal of Comparative Physiology A. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00359-018-1269-x
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University have learned that a specific wavelength range of blue fluorescent light set bees abuzz.
The research is important because bees have a nearly $15 billion dollar impact on the U.S. economy – almost 100 commercial crops would vanish without bees to transfer the pollen grains needed for reproduction.
“The blue fluorescence just triggered a crazy response in the bees, told them they must go to it,” said the study’s corresponding author, Oksana Ostroverkhova. “It’s not just their vision, it’s something behavioral that drives them.”
The findings are a powerful tool for assessing and manipulating bee populations – such as, for example, if a farmer needed to attract large numbers of bees for a couple of weeks to get his or her crop pollinated.
“Blue is broad enough wavelength-wise that we needed to figure out if it mattered to the bees if the light emitted by the sunlight-illuminated trap was more toward the purple end or the green end, and yes, it mattered,” Ostroverkhova said. “What’s also important is now we’ve created traps ourselves using stage lighting filters and fluorescent paint – we’re not just reliant on whatever traps come in a box. We’ve learned how to use commercially available materials to create something that’s very deployable.”
Fluorescent light is what’s seen when a fluorescent substance absorbs ultraviolet rays or some other type of lower-wavelength radiation and then immediately emits it as higher-wavelength visible light – think about a poster whose ink glows when hit by the UV rays of a blacklight.
Like humans, bees have “trichromatic” vision: They have three types of photoreceptors in their eyes.
Both people and bees have blue and green receptors, but the third type for people is red while the third kind for bees is ultraviolet – electromagnetic energy of a lower wavelength that’s just outside the range of human vision.
Flowers’ vibrant colors and patterns – some of them detectable only with UV sight – are a way of helping pollinators like bees find nectar, a sugar-rich fluid produced by plants. Bees get energy from nectar and protein from pollen, and in the process of seeking food they transfer pollen from a flower’s male anther to its female stigma.
Building on her earlier research, Ostroverkhova, a physicist in OSU’s College of Science, set out to determine if green fluorescence, like blue, was attractive to bees. She also wanted to learn whether all wavelengths of blue fluorescence were equally attractive, or if the drawing power tended toward the green or violet edge of the blue range.
In field conditions that provided the opportunity to use wild bees of a variety of species – most bee-vision studies have been done in labs and used captive-reared honeybees – Ostroverkhova designed a collection of bee traps – some non-fluorescent, others fluorescent via sunlight – that her entomology collaborators set up in the field.
Under varying conditions with a diverse set of landscape background colors, blue fluorescent traps proved the most popular by a landslide.
Researchers examined responses to traps designed to selectively stimulate either the blue or the green photoreceptor using sunlight-induced fluorescence with wavelengths of 420 to 480 nanometers and 510 to 540 nanometers, respectively.
They found out that selective excitation of the green photoreceptor type was not attractive, in contrast to that of the blue.
“And when we selectively highlighted the blue photoreceptor type, we learned the bees preferred blue fluorescence in the 430- to 480-nanometer range over that in the 400-420 region,” Ostroverkhova said.
Findings were recently published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A. The Agricultural Research Foundation and OSU supported this research.
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Editor’s note: Images are available at http://bit.ly/2JO7ypl and http://bit.ly/2MA4080
See the IMPACT article (link below) for a long writeup on the Gilfillan Lecture that Prof. Manogue gave on April 5th. But here is the video https://youtu.be/U23SnDlqOHQ.
Gilfillan Lecture: Catalyzing the transformation of science learning
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A research team led by Prof. Weihong Qiu and collaborators from University of California, Davis has discovered a novel motor protein that significantly expands current understanding of the evolution and design principle of motor proteins.
The findings of the research team, led by of the OSU College of Science and Bo Liu of UC Davis, were published today in Nature Communications.
Read the full OSU announcement at: http://today.oregonstate.edu/news/molecular-motor-mystery-solved-novel-protein-rounds-out-plant-cells%E2%80%99-machinery
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