University of Arizona in the News

University of Arizona chemistry instructor Colleen Kelley developed a series of 10 comic books with graphic artist Mackenzie Reagan to bring chemistry to life for children between the ages of 8 to 12. "Comic books are not like textbooks. They're fun and exciting." said Kelley, who manages the instructional laboratories in the UArizona Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "When I look at molecules, I see them dance. I have come to understand that chemistry can be taught very similarly to the way we teach music, with its symbols, notation and imagery.

State, county and municipal planning for the deadly effects of climate change have largely failed to tackle a silent, deadly and depressingly ordinary killer: heat. That's according to Ladd Keith, a University of Arizona professor of landscape architecture who studies how cities adapt to climate change. Keith is interviewed on that topic.

This story recounts the 1985 theft of Woman-Ochre, by Willem de Kooning from the University of Arizona Museum of Art and the making of the new documentary about the crime, "The Thief Collector," which 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.

NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program provides seed funding for ideas that sound like science fiction, but just might work. This story reports that among the 17 NIAC-supported projects is UArizona astronomer Chris Walker's design of an inflatable space antenna, developed by the startup company he founded, Freefall Aerospace. A small version of the original concept, called CatSat, is now slated for launch this summer.

A team of astronomers led by University of Arizona research professor Kate Su of the Steward Observatory used the Spitzer Space Telescope to spot the first-ever example of a debris cloud orbiting another star caused by the collision of so-called planetesimals, enormous rocky bodies which may eventually form planets.

This story reporting on methods and techniques that improve people's quality of sleep includes advice from University of Arizona clinical psychologist and sleep expert Michael Grandner, who recommends against lying in bed, even with eyes closed, for more than 15 to 20 minutes because it will train the brain to associate bed with a lack of sleep, which can lead to chronic insomnia. "It's counterintuitive, but spending time in bed awake turns the bed into the dentist's chair," said Grandner.

While students may feel pressured to determine a precise plan for their college education and career from the outset, the reality is that their understanding of both their academic and professional opportunities is very limited. For the vast majority of folks, finding the right fit requires exploration. University of Arizona alumna Catherine Woodling reflects on how allowing her interests to evolve as she pursued a political science major and Spanish minor ultimately led her to a more optimal professional path than the one she had planned.

The University of Arizona and UArizona Health Sciences has announced the completion of a $23 million fundraising effort to build a new home for the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, part of the College of Medicine – Tucson.

When researchers want to understand the history of the environment, they extrapolate data from oral histories or peruse digitized weather observations, aging diaries and farmers' journals. But these records are spotty, subjective and only go back a few centuries. So scientists also look to the Earth itself and the vast timeline hidden in storehouses of earthly data – ice cores, seafloor sediments, oyster shells, even road cuts through layers of rock – which offer a far deeper look back in time than human records.

The James Webb Space Telescope's Near Infared Camera, which University of Arizona scientists developed and now manage, has captured its first focused image of a single star. The NIRCam previously helped align the mirrors to first produce an out-of-focus image but the image released Wednesday shows a single image of a fully focused star, as well as the galaxies and stars behind it. The image provides confirmation that the telescope is capable of meeting – and exceeding – the expectations its designers had for it.