University of Arizona in the News

NASA has tasked Amy Mainzer, an expert in infrared astronomy at the University of Arizona, with delivering NEO Surveyor, a mission to find, track and characterize yet unseen asteroids and comets that may pose a threat to Earth.

Today, Type 2 diabetes is 24 times more prevalent than Type 1. The rise in rates of obesity and incidence of Type 2 diabetes are related and require new approaches, according to University of Arizona researchers, who believe the liver may hold the key to innovative new treatments.

Three scientific studies released on Monday offered fresh evidence that widely used vaccines will continue to protect people against the coronavirus for long periods, possibly for years, and can be adapted to fortify the immune system still further if needed.

Close examinations of more than a dozen vaccinated people found that immune cells were still organizing to fight the coronavirus months after inoculation. "Usually by four to six weeks, there's not much left," said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are "still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people."

Earlier this month, astronomers were flabbergasted when they caught sight of the largest comet they had ever seen. One of its discoverers, Pedro Bernardinelli, an astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, conservatively estimates the object's dusty, icy nucleus is between 62 and 125 miles long. That means this comet is as small as five Manhattan Islands, or it is larger than the Island of Hawaii. Hale-Bopp, which lit up night skies in the late 1990s with its 25-mile-long nucleus, was long perceived to be a giant among comets.

As temperatures rise and drought intensifies, fires grow larger and burn more severely. Experts say what happens to the landscape next is unknown. Don Falk, a professor at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona, and a research team plan to survey approximately 80 study plots across the Catalinas. The plots burned at different severities and a varying number of times in the Bighorn, 2002 Bullock and 2003 Aspen Fires. "A recovery is a beautiful ecological process," said Emily Fule, who is leading the study's field team.

The government still has no explanation for nearly all of the scores of unidentified aerial phenomena reported over almost two decades and investigated by a Pentagon task force, according to a report released on Friday, a result that is likely to fuel theories of otherworldly visitations. "Unfortunately, I don't think that landscape is really going to change," said Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. "It's still an area where scientists mostly fear to tread."

Researchers have found evidence that a coronavirus epidemic swept East Asia some 20,000 years ago and was devastating enough to leave an evolutionary imprint on the DNA of people alive today. The finding could have dire implications for the COVID-19 pandemic if it’s not brought under control soon through vaccination. "It should make us worry," said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Arizona, California and Texas account for about a third of the 700 average heat deaths a year in the United States. Heat-related illness and deaths are a "very big deal" in Arizona, which unfortunately leads the nation in the number of migrants who die in the desert, said Daniel Derksen, associate vice president for Health Equity, Outreach and Interprofessional Activities and a health policy expert at the University of Arizona. People often don't realize they need to drink much more water, even after the sun sets and folks go out to play tennis or baseball, he said.

About a year ago, genetic sequences from more than 200 viruses that caused early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan disappeared from an online scientific database. Now, by rooting through files stored on Google Cloud, a researcher in Seattle reports that he has recovered 13 of those original sequences – intriguing new information for discerning when and how the virus may have spilled over from a bat or another animal into humans.