University of Arizona in the News

Scientists around the world have recruited dogs and their owners to investigate the secrets of canine aging. "There's a lot we just don't know about how dog cognition changes with age," said comparative psychologist Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona and a collaborator on the Dog Aging Project. MacLean's collaborator Emily Bray, a psychologist at the University of Arizona and at the service-dog organization Canine Companions, is designing a battery of cognitive tests for dogs based on rodent-cognition studies.

An international team of researchers has confirmed that live animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, were the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed 6.4 million lives since it began nearly three years ago. Led by University of Arizona virus evolution expert Michael Worobey, researchers traced the start of the pandemic to the market in Wuhan, where foxes, raccoon dogs and other live mammals susceptible to the virus were sold immediately before the pandemic began.

There is a massive monster lurking at the beginning of the universe, 10 billion times the mass of our Sun. And one of the James Webb Space Telescope's first tasks will be determining if the object is a supermassive black hole, likely one of the largest yet found. The search, part of JWST's first cycle of observations, is being led by Jinyi Yang, an astronomer and the Peter Strittmatter Fellow at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory.

The moon has no atmosphere to speak of, and no protection from a constant stream of radiation, whether from the sun or deep space. During a lunar day – about as long as 15 of our own – nonstop sunlight makes the surface hot enough to boil water. A lunar night lasts just as long, only it's unfathomably cold. Yet, at least one spot on the Moon offers the potential to be hospitable: a cavern, a portion of it anyway, that has a pleasantly cool temperature of 63°F. If the temperature alone wasn't a draw, the perspective should be.

Nearly 800,000 additional doses of the monkeypox vaccine will soon be distributed across the U.S. This comes as the world struggles to stop the largest monkeypox outbreak ever recorded: More than 18,000 cases detected in at least 78 countries. University of Arizona professor Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, thinks the data indisputably point to Nigeria as the place where it all started. "Yeah, I think, in many ways, it's really clear.

For more than a decade, researchers have constructed forecasts of climate change's likely economic impact. A 2018 paper found, for example, that the annual growth rate of state-level economic output declined 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points for every degree the average temperature crept higher in the summer – which could take up to a third off economic growth over the next century. And that's just in the United States.

A 2021 aerial survey of the Permian Basin, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border, detected 33 methane "super emitters" – oil and gas operations that continuously spew methane into the atmosphere – with ongoing leaks, and gushers going unfixed. "We see the same sites active from year to year. It's not just month to month or season to season," said Riley Duren, a research scientist at the University of Arizona who led the mapping effort.

The new Oxford Dictionary of African American English, edited by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. will collect the definitions and histories of words that originated in the African American vernacular. Differences in language evolve from separation, said Sonja Lanehart, a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and a member of the dictionary advisory board. Those barriers can be geographical, like oceans or mountains, she said, but they can also be social or institutional.

University of Arizona assistant professor of planning and sustainable built environments Ladd Keith participates in a roundtable discussion about how cities are responding to and trying to mitigate extreme heat caused by climate change.

An international team of researchers has confirmed that live animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, were the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed 6.4 million lives since it began nearly three years ago. Led by University of Arizona virus evolution expert Michael Worobey, researchers traced the start of the pandemic to the market in Wuhan, where foxes, raccoon dogs and other live mammals susceptible to the virus were sold immediately before the pandemic began.