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Natural Sciences News

ANTHROPOLOGY - Teeth from an extinct monkey species are a clue to the ages of fossils of human ancestors throughout South Africa. A study from UO anthropologist Stephen Frost and a team of colleagues updates the proposed ages of key fossil sites in South Africa, sites that hold important clues to human evolution.
NEUROSCIENCE - The animal's sophisticated visual system could offer clues to brain evolution
BIOLOGY - Gut microbes encourage specialized cells to prune back extra connections in brain circuits that control social behavior, new UO research in zebrafish shows. The pruning is essential for the development of normal social behavior.
CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY - A University of Oregon chemist who is studying RNA structures that carry specific biological functions hopes to translate the findings into advances that will impact all of humanity, such as the COVID vaccine.
BIOLOGY - A new gene editing technique developed by UO researchers compresses what previously would have been years of work into just a few days, making new kinds of research possible in animal models.
A $4.2 million National Science Foundation grant will boost the UO’s efforts to build a support community for STEM teachers across 14 Western states through the agency’s Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program.
PSYCHOLOGY - A new discipline in psychology at the University of Oregon is broadening the department’s inclusivity with three new dedicated faculty hires.
BIOLOGY - Almost a decade ago, UO graduate student Jennifer Hampton Hill made a fortuitous find: A protein made by gut bacteria that triggered insulin-producing cells to replicate. The protein was an important clue to the biological basis for Type 1 diabetes.
BIOLOGY - It’s 6 a.m. on a summer morning on the Oregon coast, and a dozen undergraduate students wearing tall rubber boots are piling into vans. They’re juggling granola bars and notebooks, texting friends who are running late.
PSYCHOLOGY - Over the course of seventeen years as a school counselor in Eugene, Sara Matteri has supported students through just about every kind of challenge a kid can face. When she started as a high school counselor in 2005, the big ones were truancy, teen pregnancy, and drug and alcohol use, in addition to managing students’ class schedules and helping them plan for the future.
NEUROSCIENCE - As technology has improved, neuroscientists are now pushing the boundaries of traditional experiments and studying the brain in more naturalistic ways. UO neuroscientist Cris Niell is part of this growing movement. In two recent papers, his team has developed ways to study mouse vision that more realistically represent the way animals navigate the world beyond the lab.
Hiker, amateur mushroom hunter—and marshmallow? These are just some of the ways that Chris Poulsen, incoming Tykeson Dean of Arts and Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, is described by former colleagues at the University of Michigan.
CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY - At the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry, University of Oregon students and faculty members research how energy is generated, stored, and transported. And they’re leading the way for sustainable energy.
Seven faculty members have been recognized for their exceptional teaching with the 2022 Distinguished Teaching Awards. Recipients of the University of Oregon annual awards are tia north, Katie Lynch, Keli Yerian, Michael Aronson, Lara Bovilsky, David Steinberg and Tina Starr.
A University of Oregon computer scientist working to make artificial intelligence even more useful by improving the way networks handle the large volumes of data needed by machine learning.