UO E-clips, Feb. 20

UO opens new science building (Register-Guard): In what was described as “a big day for the science of small stuff,” the University of Oregon on Tuesday officially opened the doors of a new underground laboratory building dedicated to the study of materials a fraction of the width of a human hair. The $16 million Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories building is the first new science building on the UO campus in almost 20 years. Its nanotechnology equipment and labs will serve as a state-of-the-art research center and a kind of high-tech extension service that offers instrument time to researchers at universities and technology companies around the world. “The research conducted here will have profound implications for the Oregon economy,” UO President Dave Frohnmayer said. “In these laboratories, researchers will look at everything from the composition and structure of atoms, to molecules ... to the scope of human life.”

U of Oregon dedicates nanotechnology lab (Associated Press): The University of Oregon has officially dedicated its new nanotechnology lab. The Lorry I. Lokey Science Complex is full of millions of dollars of new high-tech equipment to help Oregon compete in the fast-growing nanotechnology industry. Research includes cancer treatments, developing cheap solar devices and cleaning up the environment. The underground research center is funded by private gifts and $9.5 million in state bonds and lottery money. The main donor was Lorry Lokey, an 81-year-old journalist-turned-philanthropist who founded the Business Wire news service. His gifts to the University of Oregon now total $132 million.

Underground nanoscience laboratories dedicated (Oregon Daily Emerald): The newly constructed Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories, located underground between Huestis and Deschutes Halls, had its official dedication Tuesday afternoon with a gathering of the many people who worked to build the state-of-the-art facility. A standing-room only crowd attended the event, which included several key figures in the project's planning and construction. The Lokey Laboratories building houses several labs and other facilities, and is equipped with cutting-edge machinery to further the study of nanoscience. The new research center is meant to facilitate the collaboration of all fields of science and unite the academic world with outside industries. "This setup is great because if we need information from other fields, we can just run across the way," said chemistry graduate student Noel Gunnings. "This helps to allow us to keep pushing the limit."

U of O expands in Portland (KGW-TV Channel 8 Portland (Newscast follows in its entirety): The University of Oregon's new home in Portland will be more than 50 percent bigger than initially planned. That's a story you'll see in tomorrow's Oregonian. The University's space in the Old White Stag building will have room for a larger library plus more law and architecture courses when it opens next month. The U of O may eventually fill up all three of the interconnected historic buildings there. In 2006 the university signed a lease for 67,000 square feet. That's now grown to more than 100,000 square feet across the three buildings. The move begins in mid-March and the first classes start with the spring term later that month. Again, you can read more about the U of O's Portland plan in tomorrow's Oregonian.

UO Professor weighs in on Castro transition (KVAL.com): Most people thought he'd die before he'd quit. "I'm very surprised," said University of Oregon student Rigo Hinojosa. "I honestly thought he'd be president until his death." Instead, early Tuesday morning Fidel Castro stepped down the way he's done everything else, on his own terms. "It means that Fidel Castro will be a witness and a participant in the transition so many people had been waiting for," said UO Director of Latin American Studies Carlos Aguirre.

Good parenting raises kids' mental skills, (CBS News): Growing up poor has insidious effects on kids' mental abilities, beginning when they are very young. But there is new evidence that parents living in poverty can improve their children's chances for a better life by changing how they relate to them at home. Researchers at the University of Oregon studied a unique counseling strategy in a small group of poor families enrolled in a federal Head Start program in Oregon. They looked at measures of thinking skills in young children before and after parents had special counseling. One of the researchers, Courtney Stevens, PhD, presented early results from the study at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Eyes a Window to Hearing Loss? (HealthDay.com News Service): The eyes may not just be a window to the soul, they may also provide a clear view to the state of your other senses. A new study reports that the eyes can provide clues that tell researchers how well a person can hear. This finding may be especially helpful for diagnosing hearing problems in babies, very young children and in people who can't actively take a hearing test, such as those with a traumatic brain injury. "When most animals detect a change in their environment, their pupils dilate. And, the quieter the sound, the less the dilation," explained study author Avinash Bala, a research associate at the University of Oregon in Eugene. "One of the things you can use this for is to see when a sound becomes detectable." …When Bala was working with barn owls, he realized that their pupils dilate in response to sound, and that the pupils responded in proportion to the volume of the sound. Bala said this is called an "orienting reflex response." … Bala and his colleagues thought they might be able to use this pupillary dilation response (PDR) to measure a person's ability to hear. To test this theory, they recruited 22 healthy volunteers and asked them to listen to a variety of noises. While they were listening to the sounds, their eye movements were tracked by a camera. … Results of the study were to be presented Tuesday at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology meeting in Phoenix.