Kombucha is a fermented sweet tea beverage of Asian origin which has become popular in the West due to its distinct flavor and possible health benefits. Kombucha is fermented by inoculating sweet tea with yeast and bacteria until a pellicle, referred to as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and...
Our experiments aimed to investigate responses of the marine cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus to toxic arsenic species, such as arsenate, and to understand cellular mechanisms that contribute to arsenic tolerance. We used two strains of Prochlorococcus, a high-light adapted MED4 and low-light adapted MIT9313, both axenic, for cultivation experiments. For...
The spring bloom is a key oceanic phenomenon in the Northern Gulf of Alaska (NGA), where it supports the regional ecosystem, fisheries, and CO2 sequestration. Despite its significance, mechanisms that trigger NGA blooms are still debated, largely due to a lack of sufficient data from late winter through spring. New...
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable forms of energy in the United States and the world. However, interactions between wind turbines and wildlife have the possibility to injure animals such as birds and bats. Strategies to assess and minimize wind turbine interactions with wildlife are critical for...
As the development, processing, and manufacturing of plastic has improved over the years, so has our amount of plastic waste. Currently, only approximately 9% of post-consumer plastics get recycled. The other 91% is buried in landfills, burned, ends up in the ocean, or is accumulating in communities without access to...
Tooth decay in the form of dental caries and cavities is estimated to be among the most common health conditions globally, with treatment of these oral diseases resulting in a massive, world-wide economic burden. The cause of this demineralization of teeth is rooted in the action of complex microbial biofilms...
Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...
Aperiodic structures cause significant challenges to subtractive manufacturing methods due to the common features such as inaccessible voids within the structure. Additive man- ufacturing presents an appealing alternative for this purpose. The aim of this research is to test analysis heuristics for validity through application to periodic structures. First, a...
Executive function (EF) is an extensively researched topic as a predictor for academic achievements for children. Delineated as qualities of self-regulation, EF prepares a child to produce successful behaviors for their learning and social environments. Entering school with sufficient self-regulation skills is proven advantageous for scholarly performance. Within the early...
The concepts of cancer and chemotherapy are not unheard of to children, but are often scary and confusing. This paper addresses the need for children’s books on difficult concepts (such as cancer), the creation of a script for a children’s book explaining chemotherapy on a cellular level, the creation of...
At the macroscopic scale, we have pumps that use the classical laws of physics to move liquids at a well defined rate. In the microscopic world, physicists are exploring pumps that make use of quantum mechanical behavior to build analogous pumps for quantum particles. The importance of such “quantum pumps”...
The corrosion and heat resistance properties of nickel alloys are hallmarks of their importance in infrastructure and industrial catalysis processes, but these properties are highly dependent on the chemical composition of the alloy surface. Density functional theory was used for analysis of surface oxidation of four combinations of chromium and...
There is significant evidence that an increase in social media usage causes changes to mood and feelings about the self. It has also been found that there is a significant relationship between the extent of social media usage consumption and self-perception. Mimicking social media exposure, I focused on how participants...
The electrical conductivity data of ceramic material at high temperatures can be useful in the application of modeling, solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD). The existing data is considerably lacking at extreme temperatures. Our research focuses on bridging this gap by reporting the electrical conductivity measurements of sets...
Sonification, or the “technique of rendering sound in response to data and interactions” [1], is an alternative to visual graphs and has the potential to make data more interpretable and accessible. As a combination of the arts (music) and the sciences (data), sonification is an interdisciplinary tool for connecting people...
This thesis investigates the effect of participating in political activism on mental health. Participants (N = 187, 72% female, N = 135, 77% female) from an Oregon university were randomly assigned to one of three or four conditions (depending on the study) in which they participated in activism related to...
The “why” of any situation is one of the most important questions to ask. Inventors have ideas every day. Some ideas are the brilliant ideas that lead to a better tomorrow. To protect these ideas, inventors turn to patents, a governmental grant of the right to stop others, for a...
The present study was a program evaluation of KidSpirit that investigated how gymnastics coaches’ growth mindsets changed over an eight week period after a training intervention. A mixed-method approach was used to measure growth mindset and self-determination theory (SDT). There were three aims of this study: (1) participants would improve...
The use of genetic algorithms to compose music and generate sounds is an area of interest in the artificial intelligence field. Music and instrument sounds have known rules and structures that can be followed which make them well-suited for genetic algorithms. However, genetic algorithms still struggle to generate sounds comparable...
The development of simple, rapid, and sensitive methods for thiophenol detection is of great importance in various fields, including environmental monitoring and food quality. Here, we present a novel approach for the colorimetric detection of thiophenols using gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as the sensing platform. AuNPs aggregate in the presence of...