Farewell-to-spring (Clarkia amoena) is native to the Pacific Northwest and commonly found in gardens, due to its aesthetic value and purported benefits to pollinators. Oregon and Washington are home to five subspecies of C. amoena, yet commercially available seed is limited to C. amoena ssp. lindleyi and C. amoena cultivars....
Transparent conductive oxides (TCO) are at the forefront of technology with their uses in
touch screen phones and televisions, solar cells and more. Titanium dioxide and tin dioxide are two TCOs that have been studied in depth on their own, so to further explore these TCOs, this project focuses on...
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) is an international collaboration that seeks to use perturbations in the time of arrivals of pulsar signals to detect gravitational waves in the nanohertz range of frequencies. The 15-year data set will be released as of June 2023. It is a...
Background
Feline injection-site sarcoma (FISS) is a rare and aggressive tumor associated with vaccines, drug injections, and skin trauma in cats. The understanding of FISS remains limited, posing challenges in its diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. In this study, we analyzed the differential expression of miRNAs and their target genes in...
Wheat is an important part of a healthy and balanced diet, requiring six servings per day to maintain a recommended 2000 Calorie intake (McRae, 2017). Because of this more land than almost any other kind of cereal is set aside for the purposes of growing wheat. To keep up with...
Crystals are solid materials with periodic and symmetric molecular patterns. The structure of a crystalline solid determines its properties, making it essential to study its structures. From the principle of minimum energy, a crystal will choose a structure with the lowest free energy F = U – TS. At low...
Onion thrips (Thrips tabaci) are pests found in onion fields of the Treasure Valley, which is located in Eastern Oregon and Western Idaho. Thrips cause damage to this high value crop by feeding on the onion’s extracellular fluid, making photosynthesis more difficult to occur. The feeding from the thrips can...
Brownian motion is the movement of a particle in a fluid resulting from collisions with surrounding molecules. It has modern applications in simulating fluid dynamics and the motion of proteins in biophysics. Brownian motion simulations generally evolve the initial state by applying Newton’s second law to every particle. These simulations...
Semiconductors serve an integral role in our technologies today. However, with new advancements in ultra-fast electronics, we are approaching the fundamental speed limits of traditional silicon-based semiconductors. Silicon-based semiconductors typically exhibit photocarrier dynamics in nanosecond timescales. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are 2D materials shown to exhibit photocarrier dynamics in picosecond...
There is a growing need to establish alternative approaches for assessing hazard from chemical exposure compared to the traditional method of animal testing. Approaches that relate chemical structure to biological activity are gaining acceptance in the field as in silico methods for characterizing and predicting chemical toxicity. In this study,...
Phytophthora ramorum is the causal agent of Sudden Oak Death (SOD), which is an economically and environmentally important disease causing up to 80% mortality of tanoaks in Pacific Northwest coastal forests (LeBoldus et al., 2022). There are currently four clonal lineages in the United States and Europe, named North America...
Cannabis production has gained popularity over the last 10 years. There is a growing demand for true-to-type grain, fiber, and resin crops. Breeding for homozygous trait development with traditional methods can take as long as 8 years. With dihaploid breeding, homozygosity can be achieved in 2 generations saving breeders time...
Organic semiconductors are a promising alternative to the traditional inorganic semiconductors, such as silicon. Organics are solution-processable, low-cost, sustainable, and have interesting optoelectronic properties. One such property is the formation of exciton-polaritons, quantum quasi-particles formed by an electron-hole pair in the semiconductor and a photon. This process can be induced...
Sweetpotatoes are a highly nutritious staple crop, playing an important role in global nutritional security. Although the majority of research in the United States (U.S.) focuses on the cultivation of the storage roots, both the leaves and roots are edible. Sweetpotatoes are indigenous to the Andes Region of South America;...
Wireless technologies advance rapidly in the recent time. The maJor initiative is the realization of the third generation wireless network that provides high bandwidth access to digital data on the Internet. Moreover, recent improvements in computer and embedded systems have enabled portable devices with sufficiently high computing capability.
The combination...
During the past year the rapid increase in the cost of copper and aluminum has led operating companies to investigate the feasibility of using iron and steel conductors for transmission and distribution purposes where small blocks of power are to be served. This Thesis gives the results of tests on...
The curriculum of technical degrees at higher education institutions in the United States needs to continuously adapt to ever changing technologies. One way to accomplish this is to adopt a more dynamic approach that separates the practical and theoretical components of the university education, and where the student concentrates on...
Female dairy cattle are particularly prone to infertility/subfertility with pregnancy rates ranging as low as 27% to a high 40%. On average it takes more than one breeding/insemination event for dairy cattle to become pregnant. This results in a loss of the number of calves a female would have per...
Infertility is an issue affecting millions of women across the globe, yet the causes are not fully understood, and treatment options are often ineffective. The evaluation of reproductive hormones has been a common tool used by fertility clinics as a way to predict the ovarian response to treatment and gain...