Wildfires spreading throughout the state have caused multiple road closures and prompted evacuations. The Durkee Fire, which is burning in Malheur and Baker counties, is so hot it created its own weather. Record dry conditions combined with lightning strikes and human activity have set off over 60 fires across Oregon and Washington already this season. The U.S. Forest Service is bringing in resources from across the country to aid in fighting these blazes. Mariana Ruiz Temple, Oregon’s State Fir...
Jul 25, 2024•15 min
The Snoopy Senior World Hockey Tournament is an annual event that draws hundreds of hockey players to an ice rink in California. But unlike other tournaments, this one is specifically for older adults. Eugene’s Oregon Old Growth is a team with players ranging in age from 70 to 83. Mike Sheehan and Bob Carolan both just returned from the tournament last week. They join us to share more on the world of senior hockey and what keeps them on the rink.
Jul 24, 2024•18 min
Before telephone wires were coated in plastic, they were originally protected by a layer of lead. Lead-sheathed cables were largely phased out in the 1950s, but in Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, some of them still hang from utility poles. A recent study from Oregon State University tested lead levels in moss in some neighborhoods and found that lead levels are up to 600 times higher in places where the cables were once used than in other nearby areas. The findings raise concerns about whether ...
Jul 24, 2024•18 min
Family Connects Oregon is a program that brings nurses to the homes of newborns and their families, as NPR recently reported. It’s an opt-in service that aims to improve health and socioeconomic outcomes for parents and children. Family Connects continues to expand in Oregon and has visiting nurses in counties including Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington. We learn more about the service from Barb Ibrahim, a public health nurse for Jefferson County.
Jul 24, 2024•17 min
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 type of bacteria which can pose a serious threat to the health of animals and people who come into c...
Jul 23, 2024•14 min
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 as soon as this summer. Nancy Marie Spears is the Indigenous children an d families reporter for The...
Jul 23, 2024•16 min
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 competition for the benefit of fans and artists.” We hear from reporter Katie Thornton, who wrote about Live Nation’s que...
Jul 23, 2024•23 min
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 most damaged. Researchers have also found that tree growth after a heat event does not seem to be as...
Jul 22, 2024•12 min
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 requests. Daniel Walters reports on democracy and extremism for InvestigateWest. He joins us to shar...
Jul 22, 2024•15 min
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 among the local delegates heading to the convention. They join us to share their reactions.
Jul 22, 2024•26 min
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 institution that he cared about deeply, he was a kind of institution himself: passionate and bombastic, often dramatic and sometimes dour...
Jul 19, 2024•21 min
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 certain groups of people. To counter this issue, we hear about the efforts of two engineering and comput...
Jul 19, 2024•18 min
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 shrinking. We learn more from Juliet Grable, a JPR contributor covering the issue.
Jul 19, 2024•14 min
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 is a freelance writer and music historian from Portland; Forest Mountain Lion is a musician from Eugene; and James Duck...
Jul 18, 2024•43 min
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 warming is driven by methane. Heather Kuoppamaki, senior environmental engineer at DEQ, joins us to share what we kno...
Jul 18, 2024•10 min
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 native to Oregon’s coastal old growth forests. In 2011, the federal agency determined that the animal's...
Jul 17, 2024•12 min
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 physics, psychology, and art at University of Oregon has been using computers for more than 25 years to an...
Jul 17, 2024•23 min
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.
Jul 17, 2024•18 min
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 including instructions on how to use Narcan, a drug used to rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Up...
Jul 16, 2024•16 min
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 office – albeit with some changes. We hear more from Dan Field, the director of the Joint Office of Homel...
Jul 16, 2024•25 min
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.
Jul 16, 2024•12 min
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 who were surveyed reported more social rejection and lower levels of self-compassion than men, sugge...
Jul 15, 2024•12 min
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 publishing by being more affordable and available to anyone online. And it offers an alternative to the traditional...
Jul 15, 2024•24 min
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 had applicants from over 175 different communities across the country. The PRO Housing grant awarde...
Jul 15, 2024•16 min
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 new exhibits the museum has put on in many years. Jim Tharpe is the caretaker of the quilts, and Louise Palermo is the museum...
Jul 12, 2024•22 min
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-Green, a researcher at University of Washington who has championed the model. Washington U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a...
Jul 12, 2024•17 min
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 Oregonian/OregonLive.
Jul 12, 2024•14 min
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 Activities Association voted to make boys volleyball an “emerging activity,” with roughly 70 high school teams compet...
Jul 11, 2024•16 min
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 this issue in a new article he wrote for The Believer magazine. He joins us to talk about who votes and why it matt...
Jul 11, 2024•23 min
More than a decade ago, Linn-Benton Community College in Albany took a look at its data for students enrolled in career and technical education programs. What they found was that many students were able to progress through their degree program, but one course in many cases stopped them from completion: math. The school’s math department then began to design courses tailored to specific degree programs. Since 2017, 93% of students in a math course designed for welders have passed the class. Steve...
Jul 11, 2024•13 min
