University of Arizona in the News

As spring blooms across much of the state, University of Arizona researchers hope the public will contribute to The Great Arizona Tick Check. By sending in ticks when they find them, Arizonans can help build the state's first-ever distribution database of ticks and the diseases they carry, notably the deadly Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

The University of Arizona and the Coronado National Forest Service on Wednesday signed a 60-year lease agreement on the Santa Rita Experimental Range. University researchers have studied the ecology and management of semiarid grasslands on the now 53,000-acre site since its creation by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902.

The Supreme Court seemed divided on Monday as it weighed Arizona v. Navajo Nation, in which Nation contends the U.S. government denied it sufficient access to water from the Colorado River. An amicus brief filed in support of the Nation's case urges the justices to respect the Winters water rights doctrine, which the court established 115 years ago, and to enforce the tribe's trust relationship with the U.S. concerning water for the Nation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports three people have died in the United States after being infected by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a drug-resistant bacterium linked to eyedrops. The outbreak, which has now infected at least at least 68 people in 16 states, also been connected to eight recent reports of vision loss and four reports of surgical removal of an eyeball.

A new study estimates food-borne E. coli strains likely cause more than a half-million urinary tract infections annually in the United States. "These findings illustrate the connections between animals in the food supply and humans, and underscores the importance of avoiding unnecessary antibiotic use in animals, which will lead to drug resistant bacteria that will find their way into humans," said Elizabeth Connick, professor of medicine and immunobiology at the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study.

University of Arizona researchers led by Brittany Miles of the Steward Observatory recently used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a gas giant orbiting a binary system of brown dwarf stars, just 40 light years from Earth. Webb's sensitivity and the planet's enormous orbit – 10,000 Earth years – make it easy to see.

Three years after COVID-19 forced a worldwide shutdown, the origins of the virus that has claimed upwards of 7 million lives remain the source of questions for some. Photos taken in 2014 at a market in Wuhan, China show raccoon dogs in cages for sale alongside poultry, rodents and snakes in the same area of the market where positive samples of COVID-19 would be found in 2020.

University of Arizona researchers led by Brittany Miles of the Steward Observatory recently used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a gas giant orbiting a binary system of brown dwarf stars just 40 light years from Earth. Webb's sensitivity and the planet's enormous orbit – 10,000 Earth years – made it easy to see. "VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, which makes it a great target for Webb," Miles said. "That means the planet's light is not mixed with light from its stars."

A decades-old tree-planting project in Tucson's Dunbar Spring neighborhood has transformed it into a rainwater-fed urban food forest where more than 1,700 trees and thousands more understory plants provide food to residents as well as shade to cool the streets. "If climate change continues at its current pace, cities in the Southwest such as Tucson could experience as much as 45 days more per year with temperatures above 90 degrees by 2100," said University of Arizona assistant professor Ladd Keith, who studies the intersection of urban planning and climate change.

Operators of a gene database that holds samples taken in late 2019 from animals sold at a public market in Wuhan, China, face scrutiny and criticism both for allowing Chinese researchers to withhold related data and for cutting off archive access to researchers who last week published a report supporting the case that the coronavirus pandemic originated with illegally traded wild animals.