Barley is an important grain for many different human and animal uses. But the grain is just darned hard to remove from its hull. Unless it's "naked barley." This is a variety mutated to allow easier separation of grain and hull. Oregon State University is at the center of an effort to study the potential uses of naked barley.

Enrollment is at record levels in the California State University system, which includes Humboldt State . But CSU is considering raising tuition for the next academic year, as is the University of California. UC trustees recently put off a decision until May, in the hope that the governor and legislature will deliver more money and make higher tuition unnecessary. Meanwhile, the University of Oregon is considering a 3% tuition hike for next school year. We delve into the cost of higher education

We are not kidding when we say the media landscape changes at lightning speed in today's world. Who would have thought major news organizations would quote the purported comments of the president and say "s**thole" on the air? But it happened, just hours after the last Signals & Noise segment. That's our monthly conclave with members of the Communication faculty at Southern Oregon University .

The opioid crisis in America brings attention primarily to two groups: patients who take the pain pills, and the doctors who prescribe them. Dr. Mark Greenberg of Ashland is a pain management specialist, and he has been both doctor and patient in pain situations. He was mentioned in a recent article on opioids in the Wall Street Journal, telling his story of not taking the meds prescribed for him after surgery last year.

Not all of the Democrats sat in silence during President Trump's recent State of the Union address. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley stayed busy during the speech, or at least his Twitter account did. Merkley tweeted many responses to the president's remarks, and he's had much to say in the days since.

Susan Jacoby scanned the American culture and found a prevalence of what she calls "junk thought." So she wrote a book, The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies . And that was nine years ago. Just think of how much more there is to talk about now, in the age of daily lies from public figures and cries of "fake news." Susan Jacoby updated her book to include the current political players and the likes of Breitbart News and Twitter, all contained in a new paperback edition.

The White House proposal for the next federal budget is out. Like the previous one, it proposes to cut all funding for the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system. But Congress keeps funding in the spending plan that passed recently.

For all the attention we lavish on St. Valentine's day, very little is known about the person for whom it is named. If he even existed... it's almost like a blind date, we know so little. While we're on the subject of dating, let's bring in Skyler Wang , a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. He studies and leads classes in the subject areas of love and romance. Some of his work focuses on the difficulties and opportunities in dating in rural areas (of which we

Are you ready to be a "kindness warrior?" Tara Cousineau considers herself one; the rest of the world would probably pigeonhole her as a clinical and research psychologist. And she focuses her work on the tremendous benefits of people being nice to one another and showing some compassion. She lays out the science and the practices in her book The Kindness Cure: How the Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart & Your World .

Maybe a third of a million people came to California for the gold rush of 1849, and easily thousands more have come to the West since. Many of them had little to show for their efforts. But not Glenn Wadstein. He mined Jackson County's Sterling Creek for gold for a decade and a half at the end of the last century, and he claims to have pulled POUNDS of gold out of the stream. What did he do with his gains, and what kind of shape did he leave the creek in? These and more questions are answered in