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Wine and Wildfires: A Journalistic Essay of Climate Change, Grapes, and Science (PRAx 2024-2025 fellowship project)

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  Imagine you are a winemaker overlooking your 10 acre vineyard. These vines have never failed to produce the caviar of grapes, used to make a wine that reflects the land as much as it does your craft. Just before harvest, a slight shift in the wind blows in wildfire smoke, turning the sky hazy yellow orange. While these grapes are seemingly unscathed, the smoke catalyzes invisible chemical reactions in your grapes. You are told they cannot be used for wine but must be harvested and dropped to compost in place, as you suffer the crushing loss of watching your year-long toils turn to compost. This worst case scenario has been a shared experience of grape growers and wine makers facing unprecedented wildfire events in recent years. Post 2020 wildfire season, the Oregon wine industry lost over two billion dollars and ten thousand jobs, largely attributed to grapes and wine rendered unusable from wildfire smoke. This is why my research is developing the first pre-harvest protective c...
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Tour de Agriculture

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 A little project I made to experience local Oregon agriculture via bicycling! 
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Happy Pi Day!

 Any other Calculus afficionados out there?  ~~ Approaching Perfection   Stepwise by approximation Like words stacked together Fewer = poetic But when slicing functions into infinitesimal portions More = precision Polar opposites Limit approaching infinity Almost. There. But always traveling.   A virtuosic symphony Is strung from motifs That flow like a cascading waterfall, Each black marking summoning a droplet, Converging into roaring thunder Or flying in a light, racing trance Reverberating Ebbing to a deep, desperate melody As the nuances of boundless notes Assemble into a masterpiece.                                                 Or a portrait, coaxed into being from delicate brushstrokes ...
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in honor of pi day...and piano...just 'cause

 3.1415 I strike the first chord and press the pedal, anticipation reverberating throughout the auditorium. 92653 My fingers fly through a light, racing trance of notes, 58979 ebbing to a deep, desperate melody in a sublime 6 versus 7 rhythm, 32384 Like a perfect circle, requiring an inexplicable, infinite march of digits known as pi to delineate. 62643...
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First Post

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  On my research exploits to "catch" m-cresol in the lab. m-cresol is a smoke taint indicator compound.  The scientific method Just not the one you were taught The one where Earth whispers in your ears As you let your imagination soar Running through the woods The wind in your face The warm sun on your back Free Uninhibited Where Answers are clear as the gurgling creek And blue sky Then, aside you Appears the molecule That you are trying to catch               It’s hexagonal phenol ring rolling like a tire               The methyl group waving a cartoon gloved hand at you               The hydroxyl group swinging from damp branches Here it lives and breathes freely As your feet patter in its rhythm With the vision It barrels past you, goes off-...
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