News and Events

Researchers at Oregon State University and other institutions have developed a new "plasmonic nanorod metamaterial" using extraordinarily tiny rods of gold that will have important applications in medical, biological and chemical sensors.

The name of Linus Pauling, the famed scientist and Oregon State University alumnus, will be front and center on the Linus Pauling Science Center when the building is finished in June 2011.

As the researchers report tomorrow in Nature, it was predominantly natural, a combination of vegetation buildup after the ice age and, more prominently, the slow reaction to this change by ocean chemistry. But humans, the team concluded, played a small part. "It's a much better picture than we previously had," says geochemist Edward Brook of Oregon State University, Corvallis.

OSU Professor Aaron Wolf discusses why water conflict has an impact on world peace. He has been facilitating solutions to water conflicts for years and sees many lessons in peacemaking emerging from the experience.

Oregon State University recognized the achievements of more than two dozen leading faculty and staff members in 21 award categories with some of its most prestigious annual awards this week as part of University Day, the annual kick-off of the new school year.

Paul Murtaugh, a statistics professor at Oregon State University, knows how touchy the subject is. While he normally studies mundane topics like the growth rates of endangered species of fish, his interest in the effects of family size was piqued one day when he took an online “carbon calculator” quiz to determine his footprint on the environment.

A team of scientists has broken the code to the pathogen responsible for the potato famine, which ravaged Ireland in the mid-1800s. "Scientists have studied this pathogen for 150 years and there's still a great deal we don't know about it," said James Carrington, a professor and director of the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University and a collaborator on the project.

Oregon State University appears to have one of the more extensive offerings of online chemistry courses. Not only does it offer general and organic chemistry online, it also offers inorganic chemistry and biochemistry. The general chemistry course includes a lab, which is performed through the Web-based simulation Late Nite Labs.

A study that tracked genetic mutations through the human equivalent of about 5,000 years has demonstrated for the first time that oxidative DNA damage is a primary cause of the process of mutation - the fuel for evolution but also a leading cause of aging, cancer and other diseases.

Louisa Hooven of Oregon State University and her colleagues now show that vulnerability to pesticides are among things that oscillate with a bug’s internal rhythms — its biological clock.