Natural Sciences

Tiny Invisible Universes

The world looks different in the laboratories buried 17 feet beneath campus, where you can pick up an object 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair and peer at its individual atoms. In UO’s underground materials characterization labs, researchers are pushing the boundaries of what can be observed through a microscope. Read more in the December sci-fi issue of CAS Connection.

A century beneath the waves

BIOLOGY - In 1924, the University of Oregon began teaching marine biology classes in a ramshackle collection of tents in a cove along the southern Oregon Coast. But what started as a couple of professors bringing some students on a summer camp has now become a permanent, year-round marine field station with a hundred years of coastal research and education.

Strange New Worlds

PHYSICS - Could life exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy? A group of College of Arts and Sciences undergraduate planet hunters are helping NASA discover unknown worlds beyond our solar system. Read more in the December sci-fi issue of CAS Connection.

Researchers unravel how a breast cancer gene affects fertility

BIOLOGY - Women with a harmful mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes have a 60 percent chance of developing breast cancer at some point in their lives, and a many-fold increased risk of developing ovarian cancer. UO College of Arts and Sciences biologists have uncovered how BRCA1 gene influences fertility. “This is a breakthrough discovery that enables potential therapeutic avenues for understanding how to correct or treat fertility issues in BRCA1 patients,” said Diana Libuda, an associate professor in the Institute of Molecular Biology at the UO.

UO scientists rewrite eruption history of Oregon’s South Sister

EARTH SCIENCES - Graduate student Annika Dechert at the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences and a team of researchers are working on studying the eruption history of South Sister volcano in the Oregon Cascades. The results of the study will inform the way the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory draws up hazards maps for Central Oregon and help shape the way scientists think about other similar volcanoes. The research team published their latest findings in August in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems.

UO ecologists secure $2 million to boost soil health of Oregon hazelnut farms

BIOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES - Ecologists from the University of Oregon have designed a soil health management system to strengthen the long-term vitality of the state’s hazelnut industry. Oregon produces 99 percent of the nation’s hazelnuts, but the escalation of global extreme heat, which brings dry soil and scalded plants, threatens the agricultural productivity of the region.

At the eye of the storm

MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE PROGRAM - When Clark Honors College and CAS senior Erin Morrison set out to witness the historic launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission in Florida in mid-October, she had no idea she’d also be facing a Category-5 hurricane. Morrison was there to be with Carol Paty, an earth sciences professor with the College of Arts and Sciences, who worked with a team of scientists to create some of the tools to help Europa Clipper study a moon 1.8 billion miles away.

Student-created app helps travelers stay connected and save money

COMPUTER SCIENCE - In a course where innovation meets real-world challenges, three computer science students took their classroom project beyond the grade book and put it into the hands of global travelers. Over the summer, computer science majors Adrian Heider, Raj Gill and Manu Shukla developed and launched a fully functional app: Constella, an iOS application aimed at reducing the cost of international phone plans.

Space probe carrying UO research takes off for Jupiter moon

EARTH SCIENCES - Carol Paty, a comparative planetologist in the College of Arts and Sciences helped develop one of the scientific instruments aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper, which blasted off Oct. 14, on the world’s first mission to conduct a detailed study of Jupiter's moon Europa. Paty, an Earth sciences professor, is a member of the research teams behind two of the nine scientific instruments the spacecraft will use to confirm and measure what scientists strongly suspect is a vast sea of salty water buried under a sheet of ice enveloping the moon’s surface.
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