More than a few baby boomers can probably remember statements in their youth like "you can't tell the boys from the girls anymore." And a young person today might well answer: so what? Gender HAS been a factor in determining many rights and responsibilities through human history, and seldom for good. Gender roles and even identities are more fluid now; sociologist Barbara Risman examines the situation in Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure .

People are dying in Northern California at alarming rates. Drug and alcohol abuse are among the causes of death that are killing white people at rates above the national average. The Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh assembled a report that shows high rates of increased mortality across most of the counties of the Northstate.

It can be a little jarring to visit the Oregon Dunes a while after your last trip... things move around. And they're supposed to, in a healthy dune ecosystem. The winds blow the sand around into new shapes and positions. Unless someone planted vegetation to “stabilize” the dunes, and that has happened. The invasive plant species gorse is now a major concern, and the focus of the Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative .

The United States has been at war non-stop since the fall of 2001, almost a lifetime. And by some counts, up to 30 percent of the people fighting for the United States come home with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. David J. Morris is one of them. He explores his own experiences and the effects of PTSD on many people in his book PTSD: The Evil Hours .

It's not a big farm, but it's a significant farm. Southern Oregon University cultivates a little more than five acres of land in the city of Ashland, in a plot called--not surprisingly-- The Farm at SOU . It is a laboratory not just for agricultural techniques, but also for sustainability practices, so the land can be used over and over without harm.

Not all the great ideas in the world come from adults. Just ask any child. In essence, that's what The Future of Good project does... asking children to talk about their ideas for helping their communities. This year's national finalists include Nicole Cleland from Klamath Falls, who helps students combine the STEM skills with agriculture. And Jessica Salgado from Sutherlin helps students with disabilities take part in sports.

Just the title of Patrick J. Deneen's book might raise a few hackles on America's left wing: Why Liberalism Failed . Deneen, a political science teacher at Notre Dame, examines the tenets of liberalism and points out how they work against their professed goals. Example: encouraging members of society to work for a common good WHILE also elevating the rights of the individual. CAN liberalism be made to add up? And does it have a future?

Oregon remains one of the whitest states in the union, a legacy of the state's exclusion of all people of color upon entering the Union. But African-Americans have made significant contributions to the state throughout its history. And those contributions are recognized in the first-ever Black History Month observance at the Oregon State Archives. "Black in Oregon, 1840-1870" is now on display, and it is the subject of this month's edition of Underground History.

It takes a lot of ingredients for a forest to grow on a mountain. Snow in the winter is one of them. So what happens when snowstorms get few and far between, as in this winter? That's a question we will likely see the answer to in the years ahead. And it's a subject Dr. Anne Nolin has already been considering in her work at Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences . She talks about "Snow-forest Interactions in a Changing World" in the next geology lecture at

The winter Olympics in South Korea proved once and for all that American sports fans are not the only ones who take off their shirts in cold weather. Why DO people tempt frostbite and other maladies to cheer on their teams? Because they may be Superfans , a type of person examined in a book by that name by George Dohrmann. His sources range from sports psychologists to the man who gathered a huge cheering section for the Portland Timbers of Major League Soccer.