Year: 2015

Categories
Advantage Healthy Economy

Small World

Game-changing technology sometimes comes in small packages. For example, with two magnets and a lightbulb filament — a package thinner than a deck of cards — Joe Beckman and a team of Oregon State University collaborators may revolutionize the mass spectrometry (aka, “mass spec”) industry. Their device amplifies the sensitivity and precision of technology that is the workhorse of chemistry labs. And it requires minimal retooling of existing equipment.

Categories
Healthy People homestories

Gut Check

Thousands of species of bacteria, viruses and fungi live on and in our bodies. Microorganisms teem in every pore and crevice, from mouth to stomach to intestines to colon.

Categories
Healthy People Student Research

Stormy Waters

Maneuvering a tiny boat over thundering ledges in places like Oregon’s Opal Creek Wilderness is no more dodgy than facilitating a series of community meetings in a tiny Coast Range town.

Categories
Healthy People homestories Inquiry

The Language of the Sublime

The panoramic Colorado landscape — the thunder and lightning, the mountains jutting shardlike to the sky, the palpable wildness — helped form Henry Sayre’s aesthetic sensibility.

Categories
Healthy Planet

Sequencing the Beaver

A beaver on exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. © Oregon Zoo / Photo by Deidre Lantz

It has orange teeth that grow throughout its lifetime. It chews relentlessly on trees and builds dams that shape habitats across the continent. In earlier centuries, its fur was the currency of empires. While a lot is known about the North American beaver (Castor canadensis), the animal’s complete genome has never been sequenced. Until now.

Categories
Healthy People

A Poison in Small Doses

Thousands of wells in Bangladesh are contaminated with arsenic from groundwater aquifers. Oregon State University researchers are studying the health consequences of low-dose exposure in rural communities.