University of Arizona in the News

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston this week agreed to return a bust of the Roman emperor Maximianus Herculius believed to have been looted during the second world war to the Italian government. MFA researchers conducted an internal review of the sculpture's provenance after University of Arizona professor Irene Bald Romano, an antiquities expert, identified it while conducting research on items stolen from a dig site in central Italy during the Nazi era.

University of Arizona associate professor of geosciences Jessica Tierney, who studies ancient climates, is one of three scientists to be named a 2022 recipient of the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award. The award, which comes with $1 million over five years, is the nation's highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers, and recognizes outstanding individual achievements in NSF-supported research.

Experts discuss the explosive start of fire season in the southwestern U.S. – an indication of what's to come in the warming months. Once confined to specific times of year, wildfire conditions are stretching across more months, and will likely continue until the region gets additional rain."Climate change is taking a situation that would be bad for us normally and turning the dial up," said Gregg Garfin, a climatologist at the University of Arizona.

A new University of Arizona partnership with Sunnyside School District helps recruit low-income and first-generation students to the university by helping students apply for college and navigate the financial aid process. "That visibility makes the University of Arizona seem more approachable – like a school they could actually make happen," said Nadia Rodriguez, program coordinator of Connecting for Access and Transition Success.

New research finds the genes that shape dog behavior predate modern breeding efforts, which primarily have focused on appearance and, on average, breed only accounts for about 9% of the variations in any given dog's behavior. "This is one of the first papers to really do impressive dog genomics work using mixed breed dogs. And this paper just shows how valuable those populations can be," said Evan Maclean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.

Most scientists are confident that life exists on many of the 300 million potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way galaxy and some may be home to intelligent life. University of Arizona Distinguished Professor of Astronomy Chris Impey examines the wisdom of broadcasting our location to anyone who may be out there listening.

Phyllis Taoua, a professor of Francophone studies at the University of Arizona, writes about the work of activists fighting corruption in Burkina Faso.

Five decades after the park service took over the Buffalo National River in Arkansas, the Cherokee can once again gather plants there to create medicine, food and supplies. An employee at the National Park Service came up with the idea for such a pact around 2014 and worked with researchers at the University of Arizona to propose the agreement to the Cherokee.

This story recounts the 1985 theft of Willem de Kooning's "Woman-Ochre" from the University of Arizona Museum of Art and the making of the new documentary about the crime, "The Thief Collector." The film premiered at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where the filmmakers took part in a panel at the University of Arizona Wonder House.

Columnist Zeynep Tufecki examines the delayed rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5. The author writes: "As Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, explained to me, a singular measure doesn't capture all the benefits of vaccination. Vaccines train the immune system to recognize and more quickly respond to a virus, giving it a head start that he notes can 'reduce severity and reduce the period of time that you are contagious.'"