University of Arizona in the News

About 13.5 million children in the U.S. have had COVID-19, about 19% of all U.S. COVID-19 cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. How many will have symptoms for weeks or months afterward isn't yet clear, but researchers estimate that it could be 20 to 30%. Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy, who is co-leading two studies of long COVID at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, said better research is needed to accurately project how many children will battle COVID symptoms once the acute stage of illness has passed.

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.

A University of Arizona-led team of astronomers created a detailed, three-dimensional image of a dying hypergiant star. The team, led by UArizona researchers Ambesh Singh and Lucy Ziurys, traced the distribution, directions and velocities of a variety of molecules surrounding a red hypergiant star known as VY Canis Majoris. Their findings, presented June 13 at the 240th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, offer insights, at an unprecedented scale, into the processes that accompany the death of giant stars.

Unemployment in Arizona currently sits at an all-time low of 3.2%, causing a labor shortage that has left businesses scrambling to find workers and vacancies. Arizona's job gains might not provide the full picture, however, said George Hammond, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona. He noted that the state has so far only been able to replace jobs lost in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Incident commanders report 40% containment on the lightning-caused Contreras Fire southwest of Tucson. The blaze forced the evacuation of the Kitt Peak National Observatory and destroyed four non-scientific buildings. However, initially assessments indicated other buildings on the property, including the University of Arizona 12-meter Telescope, escaped damage.

University of Arizona associate professor, electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering Wolfgang Fink, a prominent artificial intelligence researcher, gave an interview to Software Development Times in which he noted the titular character in 2015's "Chappie" "has a self-sustaining drive" that is one of the hallmarks of sentience as we understand it.

University of Arizona assistant research professor Zack Guido and colleagues have created a fantasy monsoon game, Southwest Monsoon Fantasy Forecasts, where people make predictions for this year's monsoon for a chance to win prizes. Players make a total of 15 forecasts over a three-month period, July through September. They can earn points through the riskiness and accuracy of their guesses.

NASA is scheduled to release the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12. They'll mark the beginning of the next era in astronomy as Webb – the largest space telescope ever built – begins collecting scientific data that will help answer questions about the earliest moments of the universe and allow astronomers to study exoplanets in greater detail than ever before.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday nominated Roopali H. Desai, a professor of practice in the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Desai earned her bachelor's, master's and Juris Doctor at the University of Arizona.

An American Bar Association committee has recommended ABA accreditation standards no longer require an entrance exam, such as the Law School Admission Test or Graduate Record Examination. If the association adopts the recommendation, law schools could use the LSAT or GRE, but would not be required to do so. Historically, law schools only used the LSAT to determine a student's acceptance. But in 2016, the University of Arizona College of Law began using the GRE as well.