The Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) catalyzes genome transcription repression through the methylation of lysine residue 27 in the amino terminal region of histone 3 (H3K27me1/2/3) [2], [7]. PRC2 is made up of three highly conserved core subunits: Kmt6, Eed, and Suz12. Accurate distribution of PRC2 is essential for proper...
Previous research has shown that women are increasingly sexualized in a variety of media contexts. I conducted a content analysis of film trailers from 2018 and 2019 to examine the relationship between the sexualization and objectification of female-presenting characters to the popularity of the film and its trailer. A random...
The increased severity of unseasonal drought conditions in the American Southwest have resulted in herbivorous species, like the desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni), receiving lower quality forage in their diet at less reliable frequency. The Mojave Desert and the Peninsular Mountain ranges also contain large variations in elevation, which...
There is a lack of research surrounding people with facial differences (FD), particularly on how their FD identity is interwoven with their other identities and how they relate to it. With a note on how it relates to their experience of stigma. This study is designed to utilize the narratives...
Pantoea agglomerans pathovar betae (Pab) is a bacterium that causes galls on the roots of beet plants, resulting in reduced marketability of beet roots and crop loss. Pab uses a type III secretion system (T3SS) to infect and cause galls on beets. The T3SS is a molecular syringe-like structure that...
The anticonvulsant drug carbamazepine (CBZ) is a commonly prescribed drug that is used to treat patients with neurological disorders including epilepsy and bi-polar disorder. CBZ has a narrow range of efficacy: Below the therapeutic dose, seizures and other conditions are not controlled, and above the recommended window, patients experience side...
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) sought to reform the health care system of the United States in a number of key ways, including by expanding access to health insurance to low-income Americans. The legislation provided for the expansion of Medicaid, the jointly funded federal-state public...
Coastal communities rely on the abundant ecosystem services derived from robust conservation areas in offshore marine waters (Campbell, 2019). United Nations member states support the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework, wherein the 14th guideline asserts the importance of life under water. Protected marine environments are critical to the survival of...
There has been an extensive amount of information and research circulated regarding baseball injuries in both the shoulder and elbow, though there has been a lack of research on female softball athletes who have the same injuries. The purpose of this paper is to compare baseball and softball shoulder and...
In the United States, 58.7% of the spinal cord injuries that occur each year result in some degree of tetraplegia, this leads to reduced control of upper limb muscle. One surgery that can restore some upper limb function is a brachioradialis (BR) to flexor pollicis longus (FPL) tendon transfer surgery,...
While the use of powered mobility devices for young children with mobility challenges has taken off in recent years following evidence that the use of powered mobility at a young age augments other traditional mobility skill interventions, the research is still limited and focuses on physical impacts more. Recently, the...
Severe cases of COVID-19 have been associated with cytokine storms, leading to widespread inflammation, tissue damage, and organ failure. Pro-inflammatory cytokines have also been shown to play a role in liver diseases, including alcoholic liver disease. To investigate alcohol consumption as a risk factor for SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 severity,...
Metallic glasses (also referred to as amorphous metals) have been gaining interest in the materials science community in recent years. These amorphous materials demonstrate promising properties compared to their crystalline counterparts that include much higher strength and elastic strain limit, better corrosion and wear resistance, superior soft magnetism, and an...
Flesh & Blood is a 118-page horror-drama screenplay about a single mother struggling to control her cannibalistic urges while caring for her young daughter and evading an increasingly suspicious detective. Two primary themes of this screenplay are control and motherhood. The protagonist of the film, Christine, grapples with controlling her...
Rhizopogon salebrosus is an abundant ectomycorrhizal fungus common throughout Western North America that forms mutualistic partnerships with Pinus species. Studied for its systematics, use in sapling nurseries, post-fire seedling establishment, and unique evolutionary history, R. salebrosus holds many secrets within its genome. This thesis aims to characterize the mating system,...
The types and rates of label noise in real-world data sets present a challenge to machine learning projects. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to address this issue. Our method combines a noise modelling technique for correcting label noise across the entire data set with a robust loss...
Since the 1970s, the United States government has offered federal tax subsidies for employer-sponsored health insurance. The tax exclusions for contributions to Employer Sponsored Insurance (ESI) has become the largest subsidy for private health insurance. These tax subsidies make up 21.4% of our national healthcare expenditures and 1.4% of the...
Oysters are a large part of the American aquaculture market, and the oyster farming industry was valued at over 1 billion dollars in 2021. However, oyster farmers often face issues surrounding the mortality rates of their stock. One cause of this is infections caused by Vibrio coralliilyticus (Vcor), a bacterium...
Forests are important to Oregon for their beauty as well as economic value, and Douglas fir trees are among the most common and important in the state. Managing and monitoring Oregon’s forests is imperative to ensure they can remain healthy and productive. One tool that helps forest scientists to understand...
Accurate estimation of water stress in vineyards could prove vital for optimizing irrigation and grape quality in a changing climate. The ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on the Space Station (ECOSTRESS) offers potential to remotely sense vineyard water stress but lacks validation against in-field measurements in vineyards. In this study,...
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted family dynamics, specifically with mothers experiencing unique stressors and challenges. This study explored the association between mothers' anxiety induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and their children’s executive function outcome during preschool. A quantitative approach was used with a sample of 219 families in Oregon, utilizing...
This is a report on the Workforce Development: Youth Training and Work Experience program provided by Casa Latinos Unidos (CLU) in Linn County. The program is best described in three phases. Phase one consisted of the outreach, recruitment, and retainment aspects of the program. The second phase of the program...
Ceratonova shasta is a myxozoan fish parasite that impacts hatchery and wild populations of salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest. Levels of the parasite in river water can be effectively monitored through direct filtration of parasite spores from water, extraction of total "environmental DNA" (eDNA), then quantitative polymerase chain...
Oil is notorious for its volatility. Often as an indicator for economic wellbeing, the commodity employs millions across the country. Entire communities in the western United States are centered around oil extraction, with employment, livelihoods, and revenues dependent on oil’s success. This combination of factors begs the question, how do...
Menstrual health and hygiene insecurity is a global health issue people across the world face, particularly in developing countries. According to the World Bank, an estimated 500 million lack access to adequate menstrual products, and “to effectively manage their menstruation, women and girls require access to water, sanitation, and hygiene...
Users curate music playlists based on emotion to focus or relax, so streaming services often create playlists of songs to aid this process. Prior research focuses on generating playlists of a single mood or genre, although a few studies work to construct automatic playlists that transition between the genres of...
We construct a website to explain how Gaussian mixture models can be optimized using the expectation maximization algorithm. Previous free, online material on this process has been extremely limited. All sources surveyed failed to entirely describe our identified criteria for an in-depth description and useful visualizations. After surveying a variety...
As coral reefs continue to experience decline from human-related stressors, the countless species that depend upon them for food and shelter are likely to follow, constituting a loss of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Though laboratory studies of corals remain difficult, promising model organisms may hold...
Each community of scientists brings with it a set of values. Many of the urgent problems facing our planet require interdisciplinary science teams, but these teams often hold values that conflict. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) offers templates and guidance designed to help interdisciplinary teams of scientists recognize and address...
In this work we introduce some basic concepts within homotopy type theory (HoTT), a proposed alternative mathematical foundation to classical set theory. In particular, our discussion revolves around the Axiom of Choice (AC). In Part I, we introduce the classical AC and some of its most important equivalents. In Part...
Ubiquitous pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa coordinates population-wide activation of virulence genes through quorum sensing (QS), where individuals transition from solo to social behaviors to benefit the population. QS is complex and mechanisms vary from species to species, but the concept is common to the bacterial world and has implications in various...
The design of a novel Tabletop Role Playing Game was conducted with the aim to create a game system that provides both rigid rules and more creative outlets compared to existing games. The project focused on player-developed mystical abilities known as Spells, whereby the rule of the game guides the...
Level measurement in liquid sodium systems has been studied in the U.S.’s past during the 1970’s, but locally little was done to advance the subject until a resurgence of interest in the last few years. As a result, to create a functional continuous fluid level measurement probe for the OSU...
In the United States, rates of youth vaping are alarmingly high. In 2018, the U.S. Surgeon General declared youth vaping as an epidemic (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2022b). However, LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately affected. In 2021, current e-cigarette use among high schoolers was 16% with heterosexual students...
Cobalamin (vitamin B12) is a water-soluble vitamin that plays a role as an indicator of gastrointestinal disease in dogs. In addition, supplementation of vitamin B12 to dogs deficient in cobalamin has been shown to improve clinical signs of intestinal disease.1,2 Low serum cobalamin has been found in dogs with food-responsive,...
Females do not seek out pelvic exams routinely, which can lead to an increase in undetected pelvic cancers. While there are studies depicting women’s perspectives during gynecological exams, there are not many compilations of negative experiences during pelvic exams with individuals of other identities and recommendations for providers. This scoping...
Period poverty is the inability to access menstrual products and more generally the lack of knowledge surrounding menstruation. About one in ten undergraduates suffer from period poverty, a number that almost doubles for first-generation students (Haneman, 2021). Previous research and current legislation aimed at addressing period poverty largely revolve around...
Food insecurity (FI) is a commonly understood issue in colleges including Oregon State University (OSU), yet examining FI yields deeper complexities of great interest. Food insecurity at OSU is a symptom in a greater complex of basic needs pressures experienced by students in the higher education system, including financial, social,...
Fiction facilitates the attribution of unrealistic character traits to scientists, and skews general understanding of the scientific process-- a fatal flaw resulting in self-doubt within undergraduate scientists, and apprehension and distrust in several communities. Misconceptions and the absence of significant ideas were identified by analyzing novels within the “Lab Lit”...
We present a tool that converts any image into a painterly rendered one, or one that looks as though it was hand-painted. To do this, we implemented the Sobel filter to calculate the edge field that is used to create streamlines, which serve as the foundation for brush strokes. We...
Nuclear fusion reactors comprise a significant field of study due to their potential to provide a limitless, clean, and sustainable source of energy. The inertial electrostatic confinement fusor is a type of fusion-generating device that accelerates deuterium gas to the conditions required for fusion. The goal of this research was...
Parenting is important to a child’s development of empathy. Specifically, parental warmth provides children with emotional connection and a model to learn how to manage their emotions and respond to others’ emotions. Yet warmth is just one dimension of parenting. Supportiveness may also be important but has not yet been...
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a pervasive public health issue that continues to affect women globally. GBV is estimated to impact 37% of Botswanan women, exceeding the average global prevalence of 30%. This investigation takes place within the Botswana Global Health Initiative, a collaboration led by OSU researchers, the community of...
The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel written by an enslaved Black woman, borrows heavily from other texts and genres to investigate what freedom looks like in the context of slavery. Crafts rewrites characters, scenes, and plots, adapting them to her setting and placing herself as a heroine within them. Scholars...
The reason for reading for pleasure falling out of popular fashion is ambiguous, and there is an ongoing drive to identify the source in order to encourage more reading. I attempted to see if liking the books assigned to one in middle and high school had an effect on reading...
Activism is the action of promoting and campaigning for political or social change and a growing concept in the United States for the past few decades. This has included a Civil Rights movement, a Disability Rights movement, gender equality movements, and other movements - activist groups have been pushing for...
BACKGROUND. Residues of pesticides on crops can result in mortality to foraging bees. The likelihood of mortality can be mitigated by applying pesticides in the evening so that their residues dissipate by the following morning when bees resume foraging. The dissipation rates of different pesticides, or their residual toxicity, is...
Food insecurity is a common issue among college students in the United States with recent research suggesting that between 10-75% of college students are food insecure. In comparison, an estimated 10.2% of U.S. Households are food insecure. Food insecurity is associated with many negative health outcomes. The purpose of this...
The oceans are one of humanity’s greatest resources, providing food, raw materials, livelihoods, and protection. More than 3 billion people around the world rely on marine life as a source of protein as well as their livelihood. Seafood is one of the highest traded commodities globally and many major cities...
Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons are able to trigger the release of luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone which control the maturation of oocytes and ovulation which is vital for reproduction. They are the most downstream neurons that project to the median eminence into the pituitary portal where they release GnRH. Modulation...