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The Corvallis-based Inpria Corporation, which got its start in the chemistry department of Oregon State University, has agreed to be acquired by Japanese firm JSR for $514 million. Inpria's revolutionary material used in microchips, enabling more cost-effective and energy-efficient production, has attracted investors such as Intel and Samsung.
University promotion and tenure criteria and processes should be broadened and made more inclusive to value innovation, entrepreneurship and other forms of scholarly impact, a collaboration led by Oregon State University asserts today in a paper published in Science. Led by principal investigator Rich G. Carter of the OSU College of Science, the coalition’s efforts were supported by a grant awarded to Oregon State from the National Science Foundation in 2019, with additional support from VentureWell and the Lemelson Foundation.
Oregon State researchers are part of the leadership of the National Science Foundation Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, which aims to transform the current understanding of Earth’s climate system by both discovering and recovering some of the oldest ice on the planet. The multidisciplinary team will drive this new science and discovery while building climate literacy and action in classrooms and communities across the United States.
After four years as executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, Oregon State alumna Frances Leach will take on a new mandate as the owner of Capitol Compass, her own Juneau lobbying firm.
NASA has granted $750,000 to fund a project proposed by Oregon State and UC Irvine to expand access to science, technology, engineering and math learning opportunities for underserved students. OSU is one of 10 institutions receiving the Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry award, which is intended to improve understanding of climate change and its effects.
Oregon State University Professor of Statistics James Molyneux is involved in the development of the Introduction to Data Science program, a National Science Foundation-funded partnership between UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District that aims to increase the amount of students going into STEM careers and to bring computational and statistical thinking to underrepresented high school students
Schools of herring, herds of wildebeest and countless other groups of organisms that act in concert can help complex ecosystems maintain their diversity and stability, new research by Oregon State University shows. When individuals band together to consume resources as a collective group, the surrounding ecosystem is prone to be more resilient and able to support a wider range of species, according to a study by Ben Dalziel of the OSU College of Science and collaborators.
When the global pandemic forced the closure of college science departments across the nation Oregon State University professors had to think fast to adapt their senior-level research methods course to support remote and hybrid models of learning.
Researchers at UConn and Oregon State University, including OSU physics Professor Kevin Brown, are working to understand phonetic constancy in humans with help from automated speech recognition systems. This work is supported by a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation to the teams at UConn ($437,000) and Oregon State ($179,000).
A new climate report released by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was headlined by preeminent OSU ecologist and White House deputy director for the environment Jane Lubchenco. This is the first of three major climate assessments scheduled to be released over the year.
Scientists surveying the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico discovered a “dead-zone” — where low oxygen levels make the area inhospitable to fish — “equivalent to more than four million acres of habitat.” The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the survey’s findings this week. “Low dissolved oxygen levels have become the norm on the Pacific Northwest coast, but this event started much earlier than we've seen in our records,” Oregon State University Professor Francis Chan, director of the NOAA cooperative institute CIMERS, said in a release. “This is the earliest start to the upwelling season in 35 years.”
Hypoxic areas in Oregon, researchers found, have surfaced every summer since they were first recorded in 2002 — leading scientists to determine a recurring “hypoxic season,” akin to wildfire and hurricane ones. However, climate change has exacerbated its effect, said Francis Chan, the director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University, resulting in increasingly frequent and extensive hypoxic areas that can morph into “dead zones,” where the total lack of oxygen kills off species that cannot swim away, much like the Dungeness crabs.
Oregon State University research has identified a 100-million-year-old weevil unlike any other known fossilized or living weevil. George Poinar Jr., an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn about the biology and ecology of the distant past, calls the male specimen a "mammoth weevil" because of its "monstrous trunk"—also known as the weevil's rostrum or beak.
More and more people are tossing out the harsh chemicals from their daily cleaning routine and instead turning to natural products, such as baking soda and vinegar, to remove grime, disinfect surfaces and leave spaces shiny and clean, according to Reader's Digest. So why are these household items such effective cleaning agents? "When you are cleaning using baking soda or vinegar, you are actually doing very complicated manipulations of molecules," said May Nyman, a professor in the department of chemistry at Oregon State University.
An Oregon State University researcher has identified a 100-million-year-old weevil unlike any other known fossilized or living weevil. George Poinar Jr., an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn about the biology and ecology of the distant past, calls the male specimen a “mammoth weevil” because of its “monstrous trunk." Findings were published in Cretaceous Research.
The closer dead zones get to the shore, the more impact they have on fisheries, including the crabbing industry. Researchers are continuing to monitor the ocean, check on marine life, and track yet another result of climate change they think is here to stay. “One of the ways climate change is expressed in the ocean is through the expansion of things like these low dissolved oxygen zones,” said Oregon State University Marine Ecologist Dr. Francis Chan. “This is one of the harbingers of climate change.”
Low oxygen levels measured off the coast of Oregon and Washington are raising fears of large “dead zones” that could wipe out crabs and bottom-dwelling fish within. Year after year of low oxygen levels starting in the early 2000s led researchers to determine Oregon now has a “hypoxia season” just like it has a fire season — and this year’s hypoxia season has come far earlier than usual. “When it starts really early, we’re giving [oxygen levels] many more months to get lower and [the dead zone to] get bigger in space,” said Francis Chan, who directs the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resource Studies at Oregon State University.
Oregon dunes are present on about half of the state's coastline. Natural infrastructure such as vegetation on dunes is one of the most important measures to protect the ocean coast from storms, coastal flooding, and erosion. An OSU collaboration led by integrative biology Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Mostow and professor Sally Hacker evaluated current grass growing on the dunes using multiple analytical techniques.
Research by an Oregon State University doctoral candidate has shed new light on the status of a toad previously thought to be endangered. Anne Devan-Song of OSU's integrative biology department used spotlighting — shining a light in a dark spot and looking for eye reflections — to find large numbers of the eastern spadefoot toad. The study illustrates how confirmation bias, a tendency to interpret new information as ratification of existing theories, can hamper discovery and the development of better hypotheses.
Dave Lytle, professor of integrative biology, and Ph.D. students Angelika Kurthen and Jared Freedman teamed with scientists from the United States Geological Survey during the March 2021 project to examine the quantity and diversity of invertebrates in the river.
