David Mellinger, a marine mammal bio-acoustician at Oregon State University, said that, whatever the reason, the finding “is astonishing.” It recalled to him the first time he heard a blue whale sing.

Data from buoys off the Pacific Northwest coast found that since the mid-1970s the height of the biggest waves has increased on average by nearly four inches a year. That's about 10 feet over that period. "The waves are getting larger," said lead author Peter Ruggiero, an assistant geosciences professor at Oregon State University.

In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University, said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a "big one" that might occur in Haiti.

Scientists at Oregon State University’s department of geosciences, using data from buoys far offshore, have concluded that wave heights and the power of winter storms have been on the upswing over the past nearly 30 years.

Professor Chen, a professor for 23 years in the OSU Department of Mathematics and award-winning teacher, passed away this weekend.

The GenBank sequence database, the central repository of all publicly available DNA sequences, counted its thousandth complete microbial genome this month. "The broad brush strokes of microbial diversity are not adequately represented in that first thousand," says Stephen Giovannoni, a microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "It's absolutely important that we sequence more."

Oregon State University researchers reported Tuesday that they’ve found a dramatic long-term decrease in the winter snowpack in parts of the state. Rising temperatures have reduced the winter snowpack at a handful of points in the Cascade Mountains. Geologist Julia Jones says, in fact, in some places, the snowpack has been cut in half in just 77 years.

Results are just beginning to arrive for the 1000 Genomes Project, a genomic study of human diversity. However, an international group is already planning something even more ambitious — a 10,000 genomes project. David Maddison, who studies beetle phylogeny at Oregon State University in Corvallis, points out that, so far, only one beetle species has had its genome sequenced, despite there being about six times as many beetle species as there are vertebrates.