University of Arizona in the News

As federal and state officials prepare to renegotiate the rules governing the Colorado River, the region's tribal nations are demanding seats at the table. Before the talks begin, Department of the Interior regulators will gathering feedback, including new strategies to account for the current and projected hydrology of the Colorado River system. But to make accurate hydrological projections, Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a University of Arizona indigenous resilience expert, said he believes all the outstanding cases concerning tribal water rights need to first be adjudicated.

With hot and dry conditions across much of the West, the Fourth of July weekend carries the risk of an explosive start to wildfire season. "We're entering into a really critical period for wildfire because of the hot temperatures (and) the lack of rainfall," said Molly Hunter, University of Arizona associate research professor of natural resources and the environment. "So that means all of the fuel, the vegetation, is really primed to burn."

In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission required companies to publish not only executive pay, but also a ratio that describes how the pay of a company's leader compared with the pay of its median worker. In a recent working paper, University of Arizona assistant professor of finance Jason Sandvik and co-authors used data from the employer review site Glassdoor to analyze how employees responded to those new rules. They found that worker satisfaction with pay improved, most likely because workers tend to overestimate how much their peers make.

Chris Impey, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, writes that even though members of the team behind this new discovery aren't yet certain, they strongly suspect that the background hum of gravitational waves they measured was caused by countless ancient merging events of supermassive black holes.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope report finding a thread-like arrangement of 10 galaxies that formed just 830 million years after the Big Bang. The 3 million light-year-long structure is anchored by a luminous quasar – a galaxy with an active, supermassive black hole at its core. The team believes the filament will eventually evolve into a massive cluster of galaxies. "I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is," said University of Arizona professor of astronomy Xiaohui Fan.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued an opinion gutting affirmative action policies. In Arizona, universities and civil rights experts say little is expected to change. The state is one of eight that already bans consideration of race, ethnicity or gender in admissions decisions at state institutions, including Arizona's three public universities.

Increased temperatures and a persistent heat wave in the Southwest have exacerbated an already difficult immigration crisis and endangered the lives of migrants who often undertake long and perilous journeys without food, water or sun protection. "Now it's not all that uncommon to spend three, four, five days in the desert," said University of Arizona associate professor of sociology Daniel Martínez, who co-authored a study of 2,746 migrant deaths between 1990 and 2022.

The University of Arizona earlier this year celebrated the grand opening of the three-story, 89,000-square-foot Applied Research Building. The facility expands the university's already considerable research capabilities thanks to state-of-the-art equipment and technology, including a 40-ton thermal vacuum chamber used to replicate the conditions in outer space – the largest of its kind at any university in the world. "Every year, we can continue to watch the incredible science that's done in this building," said University of Arizona President Robert C.

The University of Arizona received $3 million in federal funding to create Project ADELANTE – Advancing Culturally Responsive Place-Based Educational Opportunities for Latinx Students in the Borderlands – which provides academic support and career readiness programs for Hispanic and low-income students.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft remains on schedule for a September rendezvous with Earth to deliver the material it collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020. Researchers from the University of Arizona on Tuesday participated in a recovery rehearsal in Colorado. Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, called the cargo on board a "scientific bonanza," that could potentially reveal secrets about the formation of our solar system, even how life began here on Earth. "I've been poring over origin-of-life research.