University of Arizona in the News

Underneath the stands of Arizona Stadium, a spinning furnace has fired up to cast the sixth mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope. Once it becomes fully operational, the telescope's viewing power will be 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hundreds of butterfly species across the American West are vanishing as the region becomes hotter, drier and more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a study released Thursday. "Even if you just took the professors that were on this paper, all of us, we couldn't cover that geographic area," said Katy Prudic, an entomologist at the University of Arizona who helps run one of the online butterfly database. "There's just not enough of us. So this work, the comparison across the entire West, could not be done without citizen science."

Mercury and Jupiter will be in conjunction and appear just above the horizon, according to NASA. A conjunction is when two objects appear close together in the sky, but they can actually be millions of miles apart, according to Thomas Beatty, an assistant astronomer at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.

Five years ago, the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law became the first law school to accept GRE scores. An article analyzes the impact that move has had on the higher education landscape.

The University of Arizona is one of the top 10 public universities in the West, according to the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings.

The first detailed studies of the so-called P.1 variant show how it devastated a Brazilian city. Now scientists want to know what it will do elsewhere. Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it was time to pay attention to P.1 in the United States. He expected it would become more common in the United States, although it would have to compete with B.1.1.7, which may soon become the predominant variant in much of the nation.

Experts say that even after the pandemic is over, masking up on a plane is a smart idea — and for some, it should be common practice. "We still have high levels of transmission, the threat of new variants and limited vaccine access," said Kacey Ernst, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, noting that global access will probably stay low even after the vaccine is readily available in the United States. "Air travel brings together people from all across the world, meaning risk gets pooled.

The Maricopa County Department of Public Health in partnership with University of Arizona's Mobile Health Units delivered COVID-19 vaccines to underserved community members at the Fillmore Gardens in downtown Phoenix.

A new report by University of Arizona researchers finds that 20% of Arizona grocery store workers surveyed have experienced severe levels of mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the major sources of that stress: customer behavior.

The U.S. government has increased its spending to boost the economy during the pandemic. History suggests that high levels of public expenditure will continue to be a norm for a long time to come. "People come to benefit from it and then to expect it," said Price V. Fishback, a professor of economics at the University of Arizona. "That makes it harder to go back to a time of low spending."