University of Arizona in the News

Woman Ochre finally returned to the University of Arizona under the watchful eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, Tucson Police, and museum staff and security on Sept. 14.

A new modeling study has found that, while the two planets may have once been in sync, Saturn has since escaped Neptune's pull. A missing moon may be responsible for this planetary realignment. William Hubbard, a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is a study co-author.

The body of a woman buried in a 17th-century Polish graveyard has been unearthed with a sickle placed carefully across her neck, a folk practice intended to stop her rising from the dead. Poles used such supersitious burial practices over fears of vampires returning from the grave. "Locally, they're calling it the 'Vampire of Lugnano.' I've never seen anything like it. It's extremely eerie and weird," said University of Arizona professor of anthropology David Soren.

University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins is interviewed.

University of Arizona researchers found that young men and women who shared musical experiences with their parents during childhood – and especially during adolescence – report having better relationships with their moms and dads as they enter young adulthood. "With young kids, musical activity is fairly common – singing lullabies, doing nursery rhymes," said Jake Harwood, head of the University of Arizona's Department of Communication and co-author of the study.

As the joys of fantasy football begin, the drama of the second annual Southwest Monsoon Fantasy Forecasts game winds down. Project co-leader Zack Guido, director of the Arizona Institute for Resilient Environments and Societies at the University of Arizona, confirms 400 people signed up this year to predict the monsoon precipitation totals in the Arizona cities of Flagstaff, Tucson and Phoenix, as well as Albuquerque and El Paso, Texas. "I think people have lost some of the natural wonder that the climate can bring," Guido said.

An Italian cubesat will watch NASA's DART spacecraft smash into asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26 – a first test of a proposed system that would deflect asteroids that might hit Earth. While astronomers know plenty about the orbits of most of the 26,115 currently known near-Earth asteroids, they know surprisingly little about those space rocks' composition. The University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission discovered asteroid Bennu consists mostly of gravel and debris that nearly swallowed the craft.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has plunged the royal household and much of the country into a period of mourning, with black armbands and flags at half mast. While such traditions may seem far removed from everyday experiences of bereavement, experts say rituals can help us cope with death. Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and the author of "The Grieving Brain," agrees that traditions are important. "Mourning rituals can offer constancy and comfort in a moment when everything can feel very uncertain," she said.

This story recounts the 1985 theft of Willem de Kooning's "Woman-Ochre" from the University of Arizona Museum of Art, its rediscovery in 2017 at an estate sale, and the making documentary film about the heist – "The Thief Collector" – which premiered at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Sheila Tobias, a science-education researcher who worked at the University of Arizona under a contract with the Sloan Foundation and studied the gender gap in math and science at the college level, died on July 6, 2021. She was 86. As part of her research, she paid liberal arts graduate students to take first-year chemistry and physics courses at the University of Arizona and another institution and to take notes on their experiences.