Nick Houtman is director of research communications at OSU and edits Terra, a world of research and creativity at Oregon State University. He has experience in weekly and daily print journalism and university science writing. A native Californian, he lived in Wisconsin and Maine before arriving in Corvallis in 2005.
Schools in Kenya have become crucial partners with TAHMO by installing weather stations and collaborating with sister schools in Europe and the United States. In Corvallis, Adams Elementary School installed a Decagon weather station last September and has just started communicating with the St. Scholastica Primary School north of Nairobi.
The reliability of a weather station is subject to the wanderings of wildlife. Frogs crawl into rainfall collection buckets. Insects build nests in air tubes. Rodents chew through wires. And that’s on top of damage from dust, high winds, ice and hail — or simple equipment failure.
A drug developed in Corvallis and Perth, Australia, to treat a genetic disorder may also represent a promising advance in personalized medicine.
If science were the Pacific Ocean, Kylie Welch would be halfway to Japan by now. With the persistence of a long-distance swimmer, she has plunged through a double major in biochemistry and anthropology, worked in an oceanography lab and traveled abroad. Still amazed by new experiences, the Oregon State University senior sees herself as a connector between science and the public, between the machinery of biology and the richness of culture.
“If a person with facial paralysis walks into a room, people can tell that something is different, but they can’t quite figure out what it is,” says Kathleen Bogart, OSU psychologist.
Our decisions carry implications for health, livelihoods, communities and the environment as well as for the well-being of the animals. Ethical principles — whether codified in law or community practice — guide decisions in each of these arenas and evolve with social norms.