University of Arizona in the News

In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, reporters visit a spinning furnace tucked under the football stadium at the University of Arizona, designed to help build giant telescope mirrors.

Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough. Now, the debate over who deserves credit for pioneering the technology is heating up as awards start rolling out – and the speculation is getting more intense in advance of the Nobel prize announcements next month. But formal prizes restricted to only a few scientists will fail to recognize the many contributors to mRNA's medical development. In reality, the path to mRNA vaccines drew on the work of hundreds of researchers over more than 30 years.

Experts say people previously infected with the coronavirus may get a significant boost in immunity if they follow up with vaccination. "Antibody levels are really variable after recovering from infections, and those at the lower end of the spectrum might be more susceptible to reinfections,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunobiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. "But after a single vaccine in people who have recovered from COVID-19, antibodies skyrocket up, including those that neutralize variants of concern."

Because mosquitoes transmit a host of life-threatening diseases, many scientists are interested in the egg-laying behaviours of female mosquitoes and how they might be curbed. In 2019, a team of scientists from the University of Arizona managed to turn off a single gene (known as Eggshell Organising Factor 1), which affects the proteins that provide waterproofing to the developing egg. The result? A life raft that takes on too much water, eventually sinking and killing all the unhatched mosquitoes on board.

Although our sun is considered a quiet star, it is now thought to have repeatedly pelted our planet with enormous eruptions in the not too distant past. Could another occur in the near future? Charlotte Pearson of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona and a co-author on the paper that examines solar activity, is interviewed.

A new study, led by University of Arizona postdoctoral fellow Matthew Othman, provides insights into how the position and intensity of jet streams in the North Atlantic have changed over the last 1,250 years. The findings predict that by 2060, jet stream locations could move out of the range of natural variability under unabated greenhouse gas emissions, creating dramatic weather for societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Some people are trying to get COVID-19 booster shots. Others aren't sure if they need them. Mixed public health messages aren't making personal-health decisions any clearer. The complexity of the body's immune system makes the impact of a booster shot difficult to assess. Antibody levels from any vaccine or natural infection will decline over time, said Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunobiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson.

Several efforts designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have the added benefit that they reduce the excess heat in urban areas, said Ladd Keith, an assistant professor of planning and sustainable built environments at the University of Arizona. Energy-efficient buildings don't run air conditioners as hard, reducing the heat emitted from those systems. Increasing mass transit options and creating walkable and bikeable environments take cars – which can also heat up the area – off the roads. "We're already doing a lot of things related to heat," Keith said.

As long-term COVID continues to linger in thousands, young people suffering from its residual effects will undoubtedly return to schools and colleges needing more support and accommodation, but with disability infrastructure being underfunded and not widely understood in many colleges, schools will need to re-examine systems they have in place for these students, disability experts said.

An article analyzes the difficulty of identifying deaths caused by early cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, said that it's highly unlikely that any of those people caught the virus in the United States, but it's possible that some had recently been to China. "If any of them are real, they'd be travel-linked cases, and that's conceivable," he said.