University of Arizona in the News

"The Heist," the true story of the theft of Willem de Kooning's "Woman-Ochre" from the University of Arizona Museum of Art, is in the works from "The Love Bugs" director Allison Otto.

Researchers working to show when and how the virus first emerged in China calculate that it probably did not infect the first human being until October 2019 at the very earliest. And their models showed something else: It almost didn't make it as a pandemic virus. "It was a perfect storm – we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," said Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona who worked on the study.

University of Arizona women's basketball player Aari McDonald writes a tribute essay to last year's seniors whose season was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "When I thought about our seniors, something didn't feel right about me leaving school early. I really took that to heart. I wanted to come back and achieve more. I wanted to take this program somewhere it’s never been. That's what I came here to do," McDonald writes.

Genomics studies are helping to reveal how bacteria and archaea influence one of Earth’s largest carbon stores as it begins to thaw. Although there are other efforts to study the microbes that dwell in permafrost, this project, known as IsoGenie, is one of the largest and longest-running field studies of its kind. "We put together measurements in geochemistry and microbial ecology, two things that are in completely different areas, to find out something new," said Scott Saleska, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a co-founder of the project.

Experts say pandemic survivor guilt may be pervasive, but it is hard to detect, leaving many struggling in silence. About 10-20% of people who live through a traumatic event like a serious accident or illness have persisting mental health issues, which can include survivor guilt, said Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona who studies loss and bereavement. She expects those rates to be similar for the pandemic, although "it's still early days," she said. "We don't have a lot of data yet."

Deepta Bhattacharya, an associate professor in the Department of Immunobiology and a member of the university's BIO5 Institute who studies immune responses to infections and vaccines, discusses how long people need to wait until they can consider themselves "fully vaccinated."

Researchers have used puppies to show dogs' ability to understand human pointing – a rarity in the animal kingdom and key to social intelligence – appears to be hardwired in canine DNA. Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona and study author, is interviewed.

Images of Mars from the past decade have shown amazing craters, dust storms and colorful mineral deposits. The photos come from the most powerful camera ever sent to a planet – the University of Arizona-operated High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. It is helping scientists understand the planet where NASA has sent rovers and where it may send humans.

University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga's ambitious, Noah's Ark-inspired project aims to preserve humankind – and animal-kind, plant-kind and fungi-kind – in the event of a global crisis.

Surveys have found that 47% of Americans aged 18 to 34 feel that stress related to climate change impacts their daily lives. That number is even higher for teens, at 57%. Climate anxiety is increasingly being seen as a public health issue, especially for young people and children. University of Arizona researcher Sabrina Helm has made this phenomenon a priority in her research. In a study published in 2017, she found that some people experience high levels of stress, and even depression, based on their perception of the threat of global climate change.