University of Arizona in the News

Assisted living facilities and nursing homes are supposed to keep residents safe, but hundreds of seniors contend with violence at the ends of their lives. Dementia is often blamed for altercations, but that is not because all people with dementia are inherently aggressive. They may act out when frightened, confused or in pain. Some hurt others because of behavioral problems that facilities are not equipped to manage. "It is stressful, it's often thankless and there is often a high turnover of these underpaid positions," said Dr. Jordan Karp, professor and chair for the Department of Psychiatry at University of Arizona. "Providing better pay to folks that are working and taking care of the most vulnerable people in our life (is something) we need to be thinking about because it's really a systems approach to optimizing care homes."

The Chhieu family will have three college graduates in the household this week as brothers Harry and Anthony receive their University of Arizona diplomas – in mechanical engineering and criminal justice, respectively – alongside their 57-year-old mother Carol Kay, an education major who immigrated to the U.S. from Cambodia at age 15 and successfully raised her children by herself.

In this guest column, University of Arizona laureate professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky, and two colleagues, write that humanity's "supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of AI – machine learning – will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge."

A team led by University of Arizona astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to observe Fomalhaut, a young star about 25 light-years from Earth, with the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. An image shows nested concentric rings of dust, some of which had never been seen before, most likely are carved by the gravitational forces produced by unseen planets.