Tree nuts have been implicated in a number of foodborne outbreaks and recalls in recent years linked to enteric pathogens, particularly Salmonella. Therefore, prior to distribution and marketing, it is necessary to understand the biological risks associated with the consumption of tree nuts and to find effective methods to inactivate...
Influenza A and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) are both enveloped, negative strand
RNA viruses which infect the respiratory mucosa of animals and humans. Despite
decades of research and development of antivirals and vaccines, both of these viruses
continue to be a major health concern throughout the world. The focus of...
⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar incremental heating experiments were performed on volcanic rocks recovered by drilling during Ocean Drilling Program Leg 152, southeast Greenland Margin (63°N), and Deep Sea Drilling Project Leg 81, southwest Rockall Plateau (56°N). Both of these legs drilled into thick sections of submerged lava flows, known as seaward-dipping reflector sequences,...
Fast, reliable internet access is shown to have numerous economic benefits, including contributing to growth, increasing GDP, decreasing unemployment and depopulation of rural areas, and encouraging competition. However, in the United States, there are large sections of the population that are left severely underserved – mostly rural, low-income, and minority...
Here presented is a photographic catalogue, a key, and literature review for the 35 genera and 90 species of lepturine longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae: Lepturinae) found in the Pacific Northwest. Several nomenclatural changes, recognized by the global taxonomic community, but previously unknown to North American authors, are adopted, and one new...
When running for a political office, a candidate’s platform is important for the voter to understand what the that individual believes. Candidates do not always lay out a concrete platform and tend to stay away from salient issues, such as climate change and its effects, and run on platforms that...
With trust in the media reaching an all-time low among Americans, I wanted to explore what prompted this shift in attitude. This thesis analyzes how Americans’ perspectives on the credibility of modern-day media and the value they place on the freedom of the press are heavily influenced by their preferred...
An increase in anthropogenic activities since the industrial revolution, primarily due to burning of fossil fuels and changes in land cover, has resulted in a steady increase in the global mean atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While there is unequivocal scientific evidence on global warming and its multidimensional impacts on natural and...
For building robust software applications, it is important for the software engineer to make efficient use of the available building blocks. Learning the basic language constructs is only the first step in this process. It is becoming increasingly important for software engineers, especially students, to get acquainted with the available...
Visual programming languages (VPLs) have been widely used to support end-user programming. However, end users are still not able to reuse code as actively as professional programmers, even when given abundant resources such as a large VPL program repository. One reason may be that current VPL development environments lack features...
In the literature, a controversy persists over whether speaking multiple languages may result in what has been referred to as a bilingual advantage that is advantages for executive functioning (EF) skills. While evidence in favor of such a has been reported, the reliability of these findings has been questioned. To...
Debugging, an integral part of software development, is difficult for end-user programmers, especially in the case of complex programs. The process of isolating errors is time consuming without the help of debugging support provided by the tool. For example, the visual programming tool LondonTube supports creation of custom mobile-cloud-web applications,...
Software maintenance tasks often require finding information within existing code, which is time-consuming and difficult even for professional programmers. For example, programmers may need to know what code implements certain functionality or what is the purpose of certain code. In response, researchers have developed tools to help programmers find information...
The COVID-19 pandemic became the deadliest epidemic since the Influenza pandemic in the early 1900s. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023). Every government level across the United States had differing responses to COVID-19, and politicians have been the center of attention for their role in COVID policy support or...
Many older reinforced concrete deck girder (RCDG) bridges contain straight bar terminations of flexural reinforcement. Common bridge design practice of the 1950s did not consider the additional demands on the terminated bars from shear and flexure. Moreover, more stringent code specifications and heavier permit trucks contribute to the insufficient ratings...
Surveys are often used in health studies to collect data about participants for scientific research. An increasing number of health scientists are turning to online data collection methods because they are less costly and can reach a large diverse population quickly. Online surveys also make it easy to track and...
The topics in this dissertation are centered around the way that trees respond to environmental stress in the climates where they occur. Though forests across the planet are expected to experience change in local climate due to historic and ongoing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the effects of climate change will...
College is recognized by many researchers to be an exceptionally stressful period of development. Despite considerable theoretical and empirical attention, many questions still remain regarding the experience of stress among college students. There is a dearth of multivariate investigations in this area and, to date, no clear consensus exists among...
Continual growth of the world's energy consumption and the demand for long-term clean renewable energy resources has led to the development of ocean-based wave energy technologies. Emerging technologies are advancing potential solutions to the complex problem of energy generation in the harsh and corrosive ocean environment. To develop these technologies,...
Predators are fundamentally important for regulating and driving prey population dynamics as well as structuring ecological communities. Over-exploitation of marine resources has caused dramatic depletions of predatory fish species and shifts in marine community composition, with attendant declines in productivity and diversity of marine ecosystems. Despite the important ramifications of...
Forest management in the face of fire risk is a challenging problem because fire spreads across a landscape and because its occurrence is unpredictable. Additionally, management must be adjusted over time as unpredictable fire events are realized. Land managers have some control over the vegetation conditions that facilitate fire spread,...
Cloud reflectivity is a function of cloud liquid water content and droplet number concentration. Since cloud droplets form around pre-existing aerosol particles, cloud droplet number concentration depends on the availability of particles that can serve as cloud condensation nuclei. Given constant liquid water amount, increased availability of cloud condensation nuclei...
Adiabatic parcel models suggest specific relationships between cloud thickness and cloud properties. Such relationships govern cloud radiative forcing and thus cloud feedbacks in the climate system. Current remote sensing techniques work well at measuring these properties in low-level cloud systems that are overcast. Significant biases exist, however, when measuring cloud...
Truckload carriers operating under a Point-To-Point (PtP) dispatching method seek to minimize miles driven with empty loads. This results in driving tours keeping drivers away from their homes for weeks at a time causing high turnover rates industry wide. One proposed solution combines Relay Network dispatching with existing PtP. This...
Experiments were conducted to determine if the plagiotropic
growth habit of rooted cuttings of Douglas-fir might result from a
system favoring the accumulation of indoleacetic acid in the adaxial
side of the shoot in response to vertical placement.
Actively growing excised branch terminals were subjected to
gravitational disorientation to determine...
Vegetation along the banks of mountain streams in the western Oregon
Cascades comprises an integral part of the transition zone between land and
water based ecosystems, and as such, is a vitally important and unique natural
resource. Forestry is a major land use in this region, and harvesting riparian
vegetation...
An outbreak of western spruce budworm Choristoneura
occidentalis in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon in
1983 was treated with helicopter applied carbaryl. Effects
of the spraying on forest ants were determined from pre- and
postspray samples taken from two carbaryl sprayed and
two unsprayed plots. In each 0.75-ha plot,...
Current calls for prison abolition have been met with major public resistance.
It is time for movements for prison abolition to engage with these questions: How
have contemporary people of the United States come to accept mass incarceration and
the prison industrial complex, and, what is the impact? Using an...
The association of frontal formation, development, and movement with
large scale baroclinity is well documented. This investigation
deals with the mean large-scale baroclinic zones near the Asian East
Coast for the last two weeks of February 1975. Two deep, large-scale
baroclinic zones are found to be situated along the axis...
The objective of this project was to investigate the fate of ponderosa pine regeneration from seed to established seedling, and to determine the relative influences of several important stand elements on those fates. The project was carried out in a series of observational and experimental recruitment studies in central Oregon....
The host snail Biomphalaria glabrata and the parasitic trematode
Schistosoma mansoni are valuable subjects for studies evaluating and
defining immunological parameters that determine the outcome of
individual host-parasite encounters. In this thesis, both soluble and
cellular components of the snail's hemolymph were examined to gain
insight into the basis for...
Protein microcapsules (PM) were developed as a tool for investigating aspects of dietary protein utilization by mussels, Mytilus edulis trossulus. Digestion of PM in vitro by protease, trypsin, amylase and extracts from the gut of mussels varied significantly depending on the type of protein encapsulated or whether carbohydrates were added...
Polyfunctional thiols are sulfur containing compounds that are important to the flavor and aroma profile of some foods and beverages. S. Cerevisiae has been shown in wine yeast that it is capable of producing these thiols to create a fruity aroma and flavor profile. IRC7, a gene that codes the...
A new method for encapsulating low-molecular weight, water-soluble substances in lipid-walled microcapsules (LWMs) for delivery to marine bivalves was developed, characterized, and tested. LWMs produced by a spray technique (spray microcapsules, SMs) were demonstrated to encapsulate both aqueous (polymeric dye or oxytetracycline hydrochloride) and particulate (riboflavin) core materials within a...
This study quantified the frequency of simple versus
complex races of Puccinia striiformis Westend. in mixtures
of wheat cultivars possessing different race-specific
resistance genes. A simple race of a pathogen can infect
only one component, and a complex race of the pathogen can
infect two or more components of an...
Characteristics of bacterial clearance were investigated in the
purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (Echinodermata:
Echinoidea). Primary clearance kinetics were determined for three
bacteria, a marine Gram negative motile rod, a marine Gram positive non-motile
rod, and a fresh water fish pathogen, Aeromonas salmonicida.
Various doses of live bacteria were injected...
Repurposing internal combustion engines as petrochemical reactors (i.e., Reactor engines) could offer a smaller, scalable alternative to traditional full scale chemical processing facilities. For many chemical processes, incorporating catalyst particles in fluidized beds is expected to result in superior performance over both monoliths and packed beds. Conversion of ethane into...
Drone strikes have become a defining strategy in the US War on Terror. Since the first combat drone strike in 2001, the executive branch has intentionally increased the deployment of drones for counterterrorism operations throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This thesis explores the moral and legal justifications for...
Most studies of plant disease epidemiology have focused on epidemics in host
populations composed of a single genotype. But crop plant diversity can be a useful
means of improving the deployment of resistance genes. In a series of experiments with wheat stripe rust and potato late blight, we studied factors...
Deoxyribonucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) concentrations measured in cells are not symmetric. dGTP almost always represents only 5-10% of the total dNTP pools in cells. In an in vitro replication system involving semiconservative replication from an SV 40 origin, the mutation frequency of an M13 phagemid replicated by human cell extracts in...
Organic compounds which contain one or more nitrogen atoms are especially important as they are disproportionately represented among biologically active molecules. As a result, significant effort has been focused on the development of methods for the synthesis of nitrogenous molecules. We identified the aminal as an under-explored functional group. Despite...
Many conventionally reinforced concrete deck girder bridges (RCDG) and their intermediate supporting bent caps were designed during the Eisenhower interstate era of the 1950’s with the AASHO design equations at the time, which subsequently place higher demand on the concrete. The referenced components may exhibit diagonal cracking due to the...
Two experiments involving interactions between wheat
(Triticum aesitivium L.) cultivars and rust pathogens were
investigated. One experiment evaluated the aggressiveness
(measured by infection efficiency and latent period) of
populations of Puccinia recondita Rob. when inoculated on
the cultivar they were isolated from, their "own" cultivar,
and when inoculated onto other...
This dissertation focuses on the importance of pelagic subsidies in the Northeast Pacific to rocky shore community regulation. My results document the patterns of pelagic subsidy supply, determine if those subsidies are correlated with community structure, and examine if community regulation differs between areas of high- and low-subsidies. Understanding how...
Realizing the vast amount of energy available in ocean waves, an industry has emerged that is progressing towards the deployment of grid–connected wave energy converters. Likely to be deployed in arrays, a challenge to the wave energy industry is maximizing the energy production of such arrays. We have been developing...