University of Arizona in the News

A new company has acquired eighteen Spanish-language radio stations, serving ten of the largest Latinx-populated cities in the country. Experts say radio remains a powerful medium among Latinx communities. "Radio listenership is higher among Hispanic consumers than among any other ethnic group. Ninety-five percent of Hispanic consumers tune into the radio in an average week," Jessica Retis, the recently named director of the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona and an expert on Latinx media, wrote in a 2019 report.

University of Arizona astronomers have identified five examples of a new class of stellar system located in the relatively nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. Not quite galaxies, the new systems – which astronomers say appear through a telescope as "blue blobs" – contain only young, blue stars, which are distributed in an irregular pattern and seem to exist in surprising isolation from any potential parent galaxy. "It's a lesson in the unexpected," said Michael Jones, a postdoctoral fellow in the UArizona Steward Observatory who led the research.

Lake Mead's water levels this week dropped to historic lows, bringing the nation's largest reservoir less than 150 feet away from "dead pool" status – when the volume falls to a level so low that water cannot flow downstream from the dam. That possibility remains years away however, says University of Arizona Regents Professor of Law Robert Glennon. "This is deadly serious stuff," said Glennon. "Electricity generation in our western reservoirs becomes a problem as the water level in the reservoirs goes down."

Continuing coverage: Incident commanders report 83% containment on the 29,482-acre Contreras Fire burning southwest of Tucson. On Friday, the blaze consumed four non-research buildings at Kitt Peak National Observatory. "As a wildfire area gets larger and larger – the area burned and fires become more severe, all of this driven by climate change – then we have to expect that the infrastructure that we put in these areas is going to be at risk in a way that it wouldn't have been 50 years ago," said University of Arizona professor of natural resources Don Falk.

More U.S. law schools plan to begin offering undergraduate degrees as they seek new ways to give students a head start on legal careers and help them better understand the role of law in society. Three law schools recently announced plans to offer a bachelor's degree in law this fall. This follows the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, which in 2014 became the first to offer a undergraduate degree in law. Arizona currently has 1,600 undergraduates in its in-person and online tracks, according to dean Marc Miller.

Communal bathrooms can harbor plenty of germs and other potentially dangerous microbes, but simple precautions will help keep them at bay. Most pathogens find their way onto bathroom surfaces via the toilet bowl, because feces and even urine can contain many bacteria and viruses, said Charles Gerba, a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona. Flushing the toilet then disperses the tiny microbes in an aerosolized plume, which can reach five feet into the air and remain suspended for an hour or more before settling on surrounding surfaces, studies show.

This story reports on the level of consumer protections for medical patients in North Carolina, which ranks 28th on a national scorecard of medical debt policies developed by the Innovation for Justice lab at the University of Arizona and the University of Utah.

"Climate anxiety" – the unease triggered by a slowly warming planet and its cascading consequences – is on the rise. Research led by Sabrina Helm, an associate professor of retailing and consumer sciences at the University of Arizona, finds young people who say they may not have children because of climate change cited overconsumption, overpopulation and uncertainty about the future as significant factors.

University of Arizona professor of astronomy Feryal Özel, one of the pioneers of black hole photography, is interviewed. With two pictures in the album, she explains what we have learned about the gravitational monsters she studies – and what comes next in her research.

Most people in the U.S. now carry some COVID immunity, whether from vaccines, infection or both. "Our level of community immunity heading into this wave was much higher than it's ever been due to the combination of infection and vaccination," said Dr. Joe Gerald, an associate professor of public health at the University of Arizona. "A lot of people who weren't vaccinated, and were infection-naive – most of them were infected with Omicron over the period from January to early March."