University of Arizona in the News

Dogs may have earned the title "man's best friend" because of how good they are at interacting with people. Those social skills may be present shortly after birth rather than learned, a new study by University of Arizona researchers suggests.

A research study run by the National Institutes of Health has turned up evidence of possible coronavirus infections in the United States as early as December 2019, weeks before the first documented infection in this country. The earliest result from Illinois, when coronavirus cases were only beginning to spread in Wuhan, China, is the most likely candidate for a false positive, said Michael Worobey, a professor and head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

Mary-Frances O'Connor is a researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. For more than 20 years, she has been focused on understanding emotions – primarily as they relate to those who have lost loved ones. Now, O'Connor wants to better understand how people who have lost loved ones during the pandemic experience grief.

Menopause changes women's brains – but many of the changes are temporary, and the brain eventually compensates for some of them, according to new research. In one of the first studies to take an in-depth look at brain changes in healthy women before and after menopause, researchers from Weill Cornell and the University of Arizona found that the menopause transition changes the brain's structure, energy consumption and connectivity.

Amid a worsening drought across the southwestern United States, residents are hoping for rain from the upcoming monsoon season. But there may not be much luck this year. There is a "large divergence in solutions within the seasonal forecast models the Climate Prediction Center uses to make their forecast. Typically, the CPC has more confidence toward a wet or dry monsoon forecast if the majority of the seasonal forecast models are in agreement," said Christopher Castro, a professor in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona.

Curiosity and Perseverance are sharing the planet with China's Zhurong rover, which was spotted down on the Martian surface on June 6 by a NASA spacecraft in orbit around the red planet.

The widely studied metallic asteroid known as 16 Psyche was long thought to be the exposed iron core of a small planet that failed to form during the earliest days of the solar system. But new University of Arizona-led research suggests that the asteroid might not be as metallic or dense as once thought, and hints at a much different origin story.

Health experts, bioethicists, travelers and locals share their perspectives on whether it is fair, or safe, to travel to places where locals remain mostly unvaccinated. Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection preventionist at the University of Arizona, said there is no magic number of vaccinations in a community to look for when thinking about what destinations are best to visit. Instead, travelers should examine the guidance that authorities are giving to locals. Those will reflect vaccinations but also community case counts, she said.

Experts say there are mounting concerns about the slowing pace of coronavirus vaccinations in the U.S. as President Biden's July 4 goal nears. Southern states are struggling to convince people to roll up their sleeves. Dr. Shad Marvasti, an emergency medicine physician and the director of public health, prevention and health promotion at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix, is interviewed.

Several scientists are on a quest to spot asteroids before they crash into Earth. By studying how light reflects off different kinds of rocks, such as those with higher metal content and so on, scientists can then make predictions about asteroids flying towards Earth based on the light they themselves reflect, says Alessondra Springmann, a planetary radar astronomer at the University of Arizona.