University of Arizona in the News

Undergraduate students from the state's 22 federally recognized Native American tribes will no longer have to pay tuition and mandatory fees at the University of Arizona main campus in Tucson. This fall, new and continuing full-time, degree-seeking undergraduates will be eligible for the Arizona Native Scholars Grant, the first program of its kind in Arizona.

Research on guns and gun violence is seriously underdeveloped relative to the public health problem that guns represent.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently began tests on a new tool designed to better project summer rainfall associated with the North American Monsoon. "When we're thinking about really long lead times, and the ability of models to forecast if there's moisture available and the atmospheric patterns are in the right configuration, advancing beyond this traditional approach of looking myopically at temperature and precipitation is the way to go," said Chris Castro, an expert on the North American Monsoon at the University of Arizona.

Experts say heat is the top weather-related killer. On average, more people in the U.S. die from extreme heat than any other severe weather event, including tornados, hurricanes and flooding combined, according to the National Weather Service.

University of Arizona women's basketball head coach Adia Barnes talks about the investment in women's sports, what the next step in equity looks like, and what things might look like when her nearly 2-year old daughter, Capri, grows up.

A new company has acquired eighteen Spanish-language radio stations, serving ten of the largest Latinx-populated cities in the country. Experts say radio remains a powerful medium among Latinx communities. "Radio listenership is higher among Hispanic consumers than among any other ethnic group. Ninety-five percent of Hispanic consumers tune into the radio in an average week," Jessica Retis, the recently named director of the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona and an expert on Latinx media, wrote in a 2019 report.

After some restrictions on gun permits were deemed unconstitutional by the nation's highest court, legislators across the country announced plans to craft new laws consistent with the ruling while still creating limits. "This case reflects broad-based cultural changes already underway in most other states with regard to the lawful carrying of guns in public," said Jennifer Carlson, an associate professor of sociology and government and public policy at the University of Arizona.

It has long been known that intense periods of sleep deprivation are bad for your health. In the first experimental study of sleep deprivation, published in 1894 by the Russian scientist Maria Manasseina, puppies were forced to stay awake through constant stimulation; they died within five days. Studies like that were seen as extreme to the point of being irrelevant to humans. While research continued "that was where it was sort of pigeonholed," said Fabian Fernandez, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona who did not contribute to the new review.

More U.S. law schools plan to begin offering undergraduate degrees as they seek new ways to give students a head start on legal careers and help them better understand the role of law in society. Three law schools recently announced plans to offer a bachelor's degree in law this fall. This follows the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, which in 2014 became the first to offer a undergraduate degree in law. Arizona currently has 1,600 undergraduates in its in-person and online tracks, according to dean Marc Miller.

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.