Inspiration Dissemination

Fallout material from a nuclear detonation is obviously a bad and scary thing. But how are these materials identified, imaged, and quantified? Well, our guest this week, Dr. Ari Foley, built a system that includes a camera and a crystal to do just that. Tune in to figure out exactly how!  Hosted by Lisa Hildebrand and Bryan Lynn Check out the ID blog at: https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/inspiration/2...

The bacteria in your gut can talk to your brain. No, really. It might sound like science fiction, but you’ve probably heard the phrase ‘gut-brain axis’ used in recent years to describe this phenomenon. What we call the “gut” actually refers to the small and large intestines, where a collection of microorganisms known as the gut microbiome reside. In addition to the microbes that inhabit it, your g...

Plants can get rusty. No joke! There is a fungal pathogen called rust which can cover the leaves of plants. Fortunately, it seems like plants have a natural ally that helps it fend off rust – yeast! Tune in to hear about PhD student Maria-Jose Romero-Jimenez's research on the PNW native plant black cottonwood, the rust that attacks it, and the mysterious yeast helping black cottonwood protect itse...

Women were excluded from science for a long time. Their solution? Make a subject, that men had no interest in being involved in, scientific! Enter: Home Economics. Never considered Home Ec as a scientific subject? Well, our guest this week, Kathleen McHugh, is here to convince you otherwise by explaining her research on Ava Milam.  Hosted by Miriam Lipton and Lisa Hildebrand Check out the ID blog!...

If the super-villain Magneto ever discovered these new metals he would probably drool. Metallic glass, or amorphous metals, have 2-3x the strength of steel, are incredibly elastic, have very high corrosion and wear resistance and have a mirror-like surface finish. Our guest, PhD Candidate Jaskaran Saini in the College of Engineering, collected two world records in the last two years helping make t...

Nuclear energy has a bit of a sordid history which has led to a persistent, albeit fading in recent years, negative reputation. Like it or not, it represents the largest source of carbon-free energy (about 20% of all US energy production) and generates as much as energy as wind, solar, and hydroelectricity combined. Our guest this week is Dusty Mangus who takes us through some of the history of nu...

What happens when there is too much water promised to too many people? Whether you're a farmer, rancher, or part of a Tribal community, it's no exaggeration that your lives depend on the dwindling water resources in the Klamath River Basin. We speak to a visiting scholar and PhD Candidate Hannah Whitley about the complicated history of the area, the overlapping water use and land rights issues, an...

Due to COVID-19 travel issues, we could not record in the booth this week. Instead, we have a rundown of our new co-hosts we've brought onto the team recently, our upcoming guests for the quarter, and advertising our SciComm event in Spring quarter. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled show next week! Safe travels all! ID Blog: https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/inspiration/2022/01/14/covid-conundr...

This week we have on the show Dr. Bo Wu – he recently graduated from Oregon State University with a Ph. D. from the Electrical Engineering department where he developed new sensors to monitor three different neurotransmitters that are correlated with our stress, mood, and happiness. Even though so much of our bodily functions rely on these neurotransmitters (cortisol, serotonin, dopamine), there a...

Science strives to be apolitical, but that was not possible for bacteriophage research during the Cold War era. Bacteriophages are viruses that attack very specific bacteria; antibiotics also attack bacteria but they are not targeted and can kill both the good and bad bacteria. The Cold War saw the initial phases of Soviets researching bacteriophages while the Americans and their allies levied hea...

Have you ever thought of how a pregnancy test works? You probably know you can get a pregnancy test at a hospital to be 100% sure, but that test requires lab work, people power, time, and money (cough cost of healthcare cough) to get that answer. Instead, you can pee on a small piece of plastic and get an answer within minutes! But under the hood of the at-home pregnancy test is a lot of physics a...

“I always loved science class and science questions, and I went to science camps – but as a kid I didn’t really put it together that being a scientist was a career or something other than sitting at a microscope in a lab coat,”. Our guest this week, Dr. Samara Haver, has come a long way from not realizing the myriad of careers in science when she was a child. She now works as a marine acoustician,...

Jason J. Dorsette is a Black man with a family full of civil rights activists and leaders with a rich history in the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As he described, “I was a country boy from the Jim Crow South and went to Oregon.” The NAACP of his upbringing did not exist here in Corvallis; literally, there was no collegiate branch in the Pacific Northwest when...

In a rapid fire interview, Rebecca Mostow connects her research on dunegrasses along the coastline of the Pacific Northwest and Dune, the new film adapted from a SciFi book series. The book series envisions a planet with constantly shifting sand dunes, an idea that the books’ author originally had when he visited Oregon’s sand dunes in Florence in the 1950’s. During this time period, federal and l...

It’s been nearly 20 months since we’ve been back in the radio booth. Science has not stopped, but we as a team needed a break. Some of us on the Inspiration Dissemination team have graduated, some spent weeks at sea following whales, while others pivoted to research COVID-19 itself. It has been a wild ride, but we’re happy to be back doing regular shows again, even happier to have the opportunity...

In this episode, science historian Aimee Hisey talks with Inspiration Dissemination hosts Daniel Watkins and Adrian Gallo about her research on the lives of Jewish surgeons living in the 1600s Latin America. In the viceroyalties (similar to what we in the US think of as colonies), Jewish medical practitioners found ways to get around royal mandates forbidding Jews from attending medical school. Ai...

Cedric Hagen is a PhD candidate in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences who uses numerical algorithms to puzzle out the timeline of 500 million year old fossils from around the world. In this episode, Daniel chats with Cedric about his work, about the Cambrian era, and about how algorithms from totally different areas of study can be helpful for earth science. Please find us on soc...

Megan is a first-year Marine Resource Management Masters student who is working on a project to map the distribution of an invasive mud worm (Polydora websteri) that infects native shellfish such as the commercially grown Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) and wild populations of Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida). Working with ODFW, Megan visits shellfish farms located in estuaries along the Oregon...

Amidst the challenges of a global pandemic, the Inspiration Dissemination podcast will strive to be an avenue of human connection and inspiration during a more isolated time. This week, we sit down with Joaquin Rodriquez for the first podcast of a special series covering the COVID-19 outbreak and its impact on the research and lives of our OSU community. Joaquin is a student from Lima, Peru and st...

Trigger warning: some topics discussed include homelessness and brief mention of abuse. Grad Inspire is a special event months in the making, where six Oregon State University graduate students share their personal stories of failure, perseverance, and triumph through life. This episode was originally recorded on March 2nd 2020 in the Memorial Union Ballroom hosted by the Graduate School with dona...

Even though seagrasses occupy less than 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans, they account for more than 10 percent of all carbon trapped in the sea. In a world and time where we are producing more carbon than we should be and can manage, making sure that seagrasses are healthy and abundant is extremely pertinent. Winni Wang is one such seagrass scientist working to understand the biology of seagrass...

Somewhere, in a local government meeting, an idea is proposed, a policy brief is written, some voting occurs, paperwork is pushed around, money is allocated, and a new highway is built. In the same region, some bighorn sheep are off trekking in search of their favorite grasses to eat. They come upon a road they can’t cross that wasn’t there before. The sheep stay put and eat the same old grass the...

Linus Stoltz is a graduate student in the Marine Resource Management Master’s Program. Only in his second term, Linus is already diving in to a project that means a lot to Oregon coastal communities. More and more instances of crab fishermen pulling up their gear full of dead crabs prompted them to reach out to scientists for help. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists and researchers...

Robots don’t all look like R2-D2. In fact, some robots aren’t hard or made of metal at all. Some are soft and pliable, and they’re the kind that Nick Bira, 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Robotics, is working on. A soft robot can mold into the shape that you need it to. Soft robots are also being used in the medical field. After all, you don’t want some hard, klanky thing poking around i...

For graduate teaching assistant Alex Szarabajko, being part of the team teaching the 3,000-plus students who take Lifetime Fitness for Health (HHS 231) every term is not just a job. “It’s the last time students are able to learn about physical activity, nutrition and mental health before adulthood, ” says Alex. That course also tied for 1st place from undergraduate voting of all classes at OSU. Al...