Research

Since hitting the market in 2003, personal locator beacons have saved hundreds of people from life threatening wilderness situations. The satellite-linked emergency devices alert search and rescue teams to the precise location of a person in danger and can often mean the difference between life and death.

Humboldt State’s Telonicher Marine Lab in Trinidad is wrapping up a year and a half long $350,000 renovation of its wet lab and public display area funded by alumni, grants and private donations.

At HSU, new concussion research is asking people to take a page out of Johnny Cash’s songbook and “walk the line.” While Cash kept a close eye on his heart, students working with the North Coast Concussion Program at Humboldt State are keeping a close eye on the head, specifically head injuries.

The California Center for Rural Policy at Humboldt State University has issued a series of policy options to encourage food donations, pare considerable local waste and stem the region’s food insecurity.

A two-year, $117,000 National Science Foundation grant will enable Humboldt State University physics students to conduct the most rigorous test worldwide of Einstein’s famous theory of relativity in the campus’s Gravitational Research Laboratory.

The College of Natural Resources and Sciences has received a half a million dollar grant to purchase an environmental scanning electron microscope, a cutting-edge tool that will boost faculty-led research in the earth, physical and biological sciences.

HSU Anthropology and Sociology major, Leslie Perkins, was awarded the Jane C. Waldbaum Archaeological Field School Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to only seven students in the United States and Canada and includes $1,000 to pay for their first fieldwork experience.

Imagine a towering ocean wave 60 feet high, racing with a tsunami’s obliterative force against the mouth of Redwood Creek in northern California.

When it comes to environmental literacy, Humboldt State students are ahead of the curve according to a spring 2011 study conducted by HSU students.

A gray whale that offered students a rare educational opportunity when it wandered into the Klamath River for nearly eight weeks this summer died this month after beaching itself on a sandbar.

Humboldt State University’s Department of Geography has installed a full-scale weather station atop Van Matre Hall to spur engaged learning in physical geography.

The first in a series of planned annual business surveys conducted by Humboldt State University and funded by the Humboldt County Workforce Investment Board suggests that membership in a business networking group contributes to local success.

Faculty members Nikola Hobbel and Rosemary Sherriff appear in an article about mentoring new colleagues in the July 29 Chronicle of Higher Education’s fourth annual special issue on the academic workplace.

Humboldt State University scientists have gathered unprecedented data about the impact of globe-girdling tsunamis on Humboldt Bay.

The Internet and telemedicine are part of the answer to the disproportionate health risks suffered by California's rural elderly from distance, isolation and lack of clinical services, according to a joint report by Humboldt State University's California Center for Rural Policy (CCRP) and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Three Humboldt State University science students are summer interns in the Woods Hole Partnership Education Program at the seaside village of Woods Hole in Falmouth, Cape Cod, MA.

Humboldt State University, Green Diamond Resource Company, Korbel, CA, and 10 other partners are teamed under a $5.3 million federal research and development grant to evaluate forest biomass-timber slash and other harvesting waste-as an energy-efficient source of feedstock to produce biofuels and other bio-products.

Spreadsheets, research groups and a large portion of the class grade were not the only outcomes of the second research project in Lonny Grafman’s ENGR 308 class.

As the Schatz Energy Research Center settles into its new building, researchers have welcomed a new piece of equipment as well. The machine–a torrefier–is on loan from Renewable Fuel Technologies (RFT), a San Mateo, Calif., start-up business, and is used to transform biomass into renewable energy. RFT and the center are expected to have the machine up and running in late March.

Primitive stone tools found on California coastal islands are evidence of seafaring and island colonization 12,000 years ago by Paleoindian peoples, according to a new report in Science magazine co-authored by Humboldt State University Professor of Anthropology Todd Braje.

Humboldt State University undergraduates are busy investigating local water quality, marine sedimentation and ocean nutrients under a CSU pilot project that harnesses federal work/study funds. Student research is under way at multiple locations, including Humboldt Bay, the Eel River and off Trinidad Head.

There is an old pirate legend about a forgotten place on the Trinity River named Sailor’s Bar. The place has all but disappeared in the riverside undergrowth, but historical memory of the saga has been newly revived—and revised—by a Humboldt State University undergraduate.

Budget cuts, low salaries and staff reductions are depriving Humboldt County families of needed child care, leaving preschoolers short-changed and making it harder for employers to fill jobs, according to a new analysis by Humboldt State University’s California Center for Rural Policy. The report was commissioned by the Local Child Care Planning Council.

In the old “Yogi Bear” cartoons, you had to be “smarter than the average bear” to steal a camper’s food. But Kate McCurdy (M.S. NRPI, ’06), found that improperly stored food can attract even the average bear to a backpacker’s campsite.

Death rates from all causes in the four-county redwood region were the highest in the state, 2000-2008, and Humboldt County’s was the highest of all, according to key trend data brought together for the first time by the California Center for Rural Policy at Humboldt State University.