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.
When Dr. Richard Besser was reporting from the Ebola crisis in Liberia in 2014, he knew how to keep himself safe. But, says the health and medical editor for ABC News, there was more at stake than his personal welfare.
Obstacles still exist to the full participation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to Rita Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation. Failure to address these barriers threatens the ability of the world to solve pressing problems in the environment, human health and other fields.
Researchers at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences are trying to improve our ability to forecast a phenomenon known as the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO).
In 2010, the President’s Panel on Cancer reported that, in the course of their lives, about 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer and 21 percent will die of the disease. And, making a connection between cancer and the wide distribution of potential carcinogens in the environment, the panel added that only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals on the market have been tested for safety.
Carnivores eat their prey from the outside, author David Quammen writes in his 2012 book Spillover. Pathogens attack from within and are no less deadly. They enter our bodies unseen when we breathe, have sex, take a drink of water or just walk in the woods.
If you’re unlucky enough to get Lou Gehrig’s disease (aka, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), treatment options are few. One drug, Riluzole, has been shown to marginally increase survival. Other drugs can be used to manage ALS symptoms, but there is no cure.