Associate Editor Lee Sherman is reporting from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland, on research by Gregg Walker, Oregon State professor of speech communications.
Oregon State University students increasingly use the globe as their campus. They might live with a family in the Amazon rainforest, go scuba diving in the Caribbean and hear life-changing stories in health clinics in South Africa and India. They witness wildlife management on an African safari ranch and in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal.
For Courtney Jackson, everything began when she saw a shark swim across a television screen. She was in second grade, and the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week took her underwater and face-to-face with fearsome predators. At the end of it, she came to one conclusion: She wanted to be the scientist swimming with the sharks. A decade earlier, the movie Jaws might have terrified the world with dramatic shark attacks, but Jackson was more inspired than frightened.
OSU science writer Lee Sherman holds a 20-pound Chinook salmon in the fish trap at Oregon Hatchery Research Center.
The Vapor, built by Pulse Aerospace of Lakewood, Colorado, can fly as high as 15,000 feet and be flown autonomously or under the control of a ground-based pilot. In a trial run near Corvallis, Michael Wing used the unmanned aerial system to study imaging techniques in a search-and-rescue operation.
In the Northwest, where tons of biomass rots in forests or burns in slash piles, the conversion of waste into biochar is an environmental and economic win-win.