UO E-clips, June 19

Rooms now available for Olympic Trials (Register-Guard): People still looking for a place to stay during the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials, which start on June 27, may be in luck. For the past several months, local hotels and motels have been reporting that they were booked tight. But now about 25 properties show some openings. There are probably about 100 available rooms out of roughly 3,500 total rooms in the Eugene-Springfield area, said Lisa Lawton, community relations director at the Convention & Visitors Association of Lane County Oregon. It may just be a single room, or a night here or there during the 10-day event, “but we are seeing some last-minute cancellations, and we just want to make sure people know there are some rooms available in the Eugene-Springfield area,” she said.

Teen's death renews scrutiny of faith-healing group (The Oregonian): The painful and apparently preventable faith-healing death of a 16-year-old Oregon City boy this week brings the secretive Followers of Christ Church back under legal scrutiny, just four months after the boy's infant niece died in similar circumstances. But unlike the girl's death, which resulted in criminal mistreatment and manslaughter charges against her mother and father, Oregon law may protect the parents of Neil Jeffrey Beagley, who under state statute was old enough to make his own medical decisions. Professor Leslie Harris, a University of Oregon law school faculty member who specializes in children and the law, said the legal issues are complicated. Harris said Oregon law generally confers the right of consent for medical care to 15-year-olds. "But the right to consent to medical treatment may not be the same as the right to refuse medical treatment," Harris said. "Those may be very different questions." Also unclear, Harris said, was whether the state would have to prove who decided to decline conventional medical care or whether the law would assume the choice was the boy's.

Researchers confirm benzene-like electron delocalization of important molecule (PhysOrg.com): UO team's findings could pave way for synthetic compounds useful in drug discovery and materials science Researchers in the lab of University of Oregon chemist Shih-Yuan Liu have successfully synthesized and structurally characterized boron-nitrogen compounds that are isoelectronic and isostructural to the fundamentally important benzene molecule. Given the appearance of benzene derivatives in biomedical research and materials science, the boron-nitrogen substituted analogues could potentially play a pivotal role in these areas.