Martha Bayless, Director of the Department of Folklore and Public Culture at the UO, provides expert commentary on humans being scared of eclipses. She thinks this a Bible reference is one of the first written associations between eclipses and misfortune in Western literature.

Recent rains have submerged the salt flats of Badwater Basin in a foot of water—a temporary lake large enough for park visitors to even go out in kayaks. “It’s really special,” said Marli Miller, an earth scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Recent polling for the November 2024 election shows that President Joe Biden is struggling with young voters, who have traditionally supported Democrats. A December 2023 poll showed that 49% of young people supported former President Donald Trump, while just 43% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they preferred Biden. Department of Political Science faculty members Neil O'Brien and Chandler James write about the general election in The Conversation.

Immigration is already a major polarizing issue in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high in December 2023, and cities like New York and Chicago are struggling to provide housing and basic services for tens of thousands of migrants arriving from Texas. Dan Tichenor writes about immigration reform in The Conversation.

In a Valentine’s Day episode of the Museum of Modern Art's Magazine Podcast, Stephanie Cacioppo, courtesy assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, discusses her research and how love appears in the most unlikely places. “We all have the 12 brain areas that are critical for love,” she says.

Annelise Heinz, a history associate professor and the author of “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture,” spoke to the New York Times about mahjong. “These tables massively increase the rate of play," said about automatic mahjong tables. "Whether or not you’re playing with money, you are getting way more rounds. You’re just cutting out that time.”

As a lab-based proof of concept, the new setup—reported this month in Nature Materials—is a long way from working at an industrial scale. But if successful, it could help heavy industries such as steelmaking and fertilizer production reduce their dependence on oil, coal and natural gas. “This is an innovative concept,” said Shannon Boettcher in Science Magazine. Boettcher is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences.

In TIME Magazine's recently launched Made in History series, Department of History PhD student Adam Quinn writes that the US's semiconductor industry must look to the past when the country was a leader in semiconductor manufacturing.

Sarah Cooley, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, is studying how climate change is altering ice in places like coastal Alaska and has found that when you zoom in, the way it affects people can be quite complicated.

If you have been watching Netflix recently, you might have noticed the hit show “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The series, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, had a moment — it captured 14 million viewers in just two weeks after its release this fall. And it has an Oregon connection — one of the co-writers for the fourth episode, Mat Johnson. Johnson is a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, teaching English, creative writing and comic studies.

“They have eyes like ours, and they have large brains, but the brain is organized completely differently because they evolved differently,” says University of Oregon visual neuroscientist Cris Niell. “And the fact that so little is known about it—as a visual neuroscientist, I was just captivated.”

“What we thought about in this paper is, instead of doing trial and error, maybe we could predict the effect of the stimulation before we stimulate,” said Luca Mazzucato, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Oregon and a study co-author.

A new working paper by Timothy Moore of Purdue University, William Olney of Williams College and Benjamin Hansen of the University of Oregon offers a novel way of examining the spread of fentanyl.

Christopher Hendon, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, said: “Water not only reduces static electricity and therefore reduces mess as you’re grinding, but it can also make a major impact on the intensity of the beverage and, potentially, the ability to access higher concentrations of favorable flavors.”

Tuong Vu, a professor in the Department of Political Science, is quoted in a Deutsche Welle story about a corruption scandal in Vietnam. Vu said that Prime Minister Nguyễn Phú Trong could now have his sights set on some more big-name targets, including the former party boss of Ho Chi Minh City, Le Thanh Hai, who is "known as the most corrupt official in Vietnam."