Think Out Loud

The Ross Island Lagoon, which sits in the center of the four-island complex known as Ross Island, is a byproduct of decades of mining. In addition to industrial purposes, the lagoon also has a long history of being used recreationally and provides habitat for a variety of vulnerable plant and animal species. In 2015, researchers began to see cyanobacterial blooms in the lagoon. Cyanobacteria is a...

A growing number of Oregon tribes have been investing in equine therapy for youth struggling on reservations and in foster care. Both the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs have developed programs in the last three years. And the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Klamath Tribes and Burns Paiute Tribe have plans to launch programs, some...

Live Nation wants to develop a 3,500 capacity venue in Portland’s central eastside. The company, which also owns Ticketmaster, controls an estimated 60% of concert venues across the country and also serves as one of the nation’s biggest artist management companies. Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice sued Live Nation, seeking to break up their “monopoly and restore com...

Since the extreme heat dome in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, researchers have been busy trying to identify all the different effects that heat had on trees and forests. One of those researchers is Chris Still, a professor in the college of forestry at Oregon State University. He says a collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service using satellite data is revealing the swaths in the region that were...

Cities across the Pacific Northwest are struggling to handle a growing number of requests for public records such as court documents, police reports and emails between public officials. To test those systems, the investigative news outlet InvestigateWest sent the same records request to 15 cities across Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Some took months, or charged hundreds of dollars, to fulfill the...

President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election is reverberating across the nation and the Pacific Northwest’s political world. The news comes less than a month before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin in Chicago. Earl Blumenauer, Democratic Congressman representing Oregon’s 3rd district, and James Manning, state senator representing Eugene, are amo...

Peter Courtney died this week at the age of 81. He was first elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1980. He moved to the Senate side in 1999 and became Senate President four years later. Courtney, who grew up in what he liked to call “West  by God  Virginia,”  served for 38 years in the legislature, including a  record 20 as the senate president. In an i...

Artificial Intelligence is radically changing how we work, learn, play and socialize, from virtual assistants helping organize our day to bots that can score Taylor Swift tickets or write college-level essays. But that vast computing capability may also come at a cost, generating results that are rife with bias if the data that was used to train AI systems is itself biased against or excludes cert...

Wildfires in the West are becoming more common and severe. Nationwide, national disasters are becoming worse and insurance premiums are rising. In Southern Oregon, residents are seeing spikes in their premiums or are deciding to change insurance companies. One Ashland insurance agent saw a premium on his rental property jump 86%. And for residents in remote, wooded areas, the insurance options are...

Have you ever heard a color, or seen a piece of music? Maybe you’ve tasted a sunset, or felt a particular smell? If so, you might have synesthesia. It’s a phenomenon in which one or more sensory pathways blend in the brain to create a new experience. Researchers aren’t sure how many people have synesthesia, but estimates range from 1 in 200 to 1 in 20 people. Elizabeth Schwartz i...

Earlier this year, the Washington state Department of Ecology wrote new rules to regulate methane emissions from landfills that surpass federal emission regulations set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality wrote its own rules in 2021 and has been collecting data from landfills for the last two years. About 30% of today’s global warmi...

Oregon conservation groups will sue on behalf of the red tree vole LONG SYNOPSIS: Four conservation groups including Cascadia Wildlands, the Bird Alliance of Oregon, Oregon Wild and the Center for Biological Diversity, released a notice of intent to sue the US Fish & Wildlife Service in June for failing to protect the red tree vole. The red tree vole is a small, hamster-like species that's nat...

About 75 years ago, Jackson Pollock revolutionized the art world with his distinctive style of painting. He would lay the canvas on the floor and with his arms outstretched, pour or drip cans of paint directly onto its surface. The technique invited admirers and detractors alike, along with scandals involving forged canvases turning up decades after his death.  Richard Taylor, a professor of...

Between 2012 and 2020, new HIV cases were generally declining, according to data from the Oregon Health Authority. But in recent years, the trend is headed in the opposite direction. What’s behind the change? How have attitudes shifted around HIV more recently? We dig into these details with Dean Sidelinger, health officer and state epidemiologist for OHA. 

A recent New York Times article shed light on how some fishing communities are grappling with opioid abuse and overdoses in fishing communities. Overdoses at sea are much more difficult to stop than on land. A program founded by Oregon State University in partnership with Oregon Sea Grant called “Fishermen First Aid and Safety Training” (FFAST) trains communities in general first aid i...

Portland and Multnomah County have been working together for decades on how to get people experiencing homelessness off the streets and ultimately into permanent housing. Since 2016 that collaboration has taken the form of a Joint Office of Homeless Services. The five-member city commission, three of whom are running for mayor this fall, narrowly approved a new agreement governing that joint offic...

The Republican National Convention is underway in Milwaukee. On Monday, Donald Trump picked Ohio senator and author JD Vance as his running mate. Tracy Honl is the RNC national committewoman from Oregon. She joins us with details from the convention. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, veterans have a 57% higher risk of suicide than the general population. But little is known about how that risk differs between men and women. In the first study of its kind, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University followed a group of veterans for roughly a year after a nonfatal suicide attempt. They found that the women...

Earlier this month, a new journal based in Portland launched online with its first set of published scientific articles. But the Stacks Journal isn’t your typical academic journal, according to its founder, David Green, an ecologist who previously worked at OSU’s Institute for Natural Resources. He says that it removes some of the main obstacles associated with traditional academic pub...

In late June, it was announced that the city of Bend was awarded one of 21 grants given out by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through the Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing, also known as PRO Housing initiative. The 21 communities received grants between $1 million and $6.7 million from a pool of $85 million. Bend is the only city in Oregon to receive this grant, which...

An exhibit at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Stevenson, Washington, features a collection of quilts made by an enslaved woman and her family, carefully preserved for more than 150 years. The exhibit, titled “Ms. Molly’s Voice: Freedom and Family Spoken in Fabric,” runs through July 31. It’s one of the first times the quilts have been publicly displayed, and one of the first n...

Over the last few years, Washington state has funded five “health engagement hubs” to help treat people with fentanyl addictions. The model offers drop-in buprenorphine or methadone at no cost to people suffering from opioid addiction, as well as harm reduction services and other health care. The idea is to make treatment as easy to access as the drugs themselves, says Caleb Banta-Gree...

In 2016, Nike pledged to cut its global carbon emissions in half. But in the last year, it laid off many of the employees who worked on sustainability. An investigation from ProPublica and the Oregonian found that Nike has managed less than a 2% cut in emissions. We’ll talk to the Rob Davis, investigative reporter at ProPublica, who worked on this story with Matt Kish, reporter at The Oregon...

Last month, a boys volleyball team from Portland won the 18 and under American division title at the 2024 USA Volleyball Boys Junior National Championship in Dallas, Texas. It’s the second consecutive appearance at the national tournament for the members of the Portland Chaos 18U boys volleyball team who attend high schools in the Portland metro area.  Last year, the Oregon School Activ...

Because there is no constitutional guarantee, every state in the country has different regulations about who is allowed to vote. But in many states, people with intellectual disabilities are denied the right to vote. Paul Collins, an English professor at Portland State University, wonders why his 25 year-old son with Autism Spectrum Disorder can’t vote … or can he? Collins explores th...