University of Arizona in the News

Asteroid hunters from the University of Arizona set another record in 2020, despite a pair of earthly threats to their early-warning telescopes high in the Catalina Mountains. The NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey identified 1,548 new near-Earth objects last year, the most productive year yet in the decades-old search for dangerous space rocks in our immediate cosmic neighborhood.

Researchers in the Duke Lemur Center have developed an innovative plan to keep the animals social late in life: pair them with lemurs of another species. In the wild, lemurs generally do not want for company. Red-bellied lemurs form extremely tight, long-term bonds with their mates, and pairs rarely stray more than than three dozen feet apart, according to Stacey Tecot, a lemur primatologist at the University of Arizona.

University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins, Arizona State University President Michael Crow and Northern Arizona University President Rita Cheng write that they are particularly concerned that students who are in rural areas are not applying to college at the rate of their urban counterparts, and that they are united in their objective of addressing this trend.

On Feb. 10, the University of Arizona reported no positive COVID-19 tests out of the 1,791 tests it administered to students, faculty and staff that day.

Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona Department of Health Services announced today that the University of Arizona will become a high-capacity state vaccination site serving southern Arizona.

About 90 people were hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms in central China in the two months before the disease was first identified in Wuhan in late 2019, according to World Health Organization investigators, who said they pressed Beijing to allow further testing to determine whether the new virus was spreading earlier than previously known. Many scientists already believed that COVZID-19 was circulating for some time before enough cases occurred at once in Wuhan to be detected.

The University of Arizona has been using the Sofia tests developed by Quidel since May to test its athletes every day. So far, the university has administered almost 150,000 tests, and it has not reported spikes in COVID-19 cases in the past two months. David Harris, a stem-cell researcher in charge of the University of Arizona's mass testing program, said the different types of test have different uses: rapid antigen tests shouldn't be used to assess the prevalence of a virus in a population, he notes.

If Deb Haaland is confirmed next month as President Joe Biden's next Interior Secretary, the Democrat New Mexico congresswoman, who took office in 2019, will become not just the most powerful Native American politician in the nation, but also the first one to run a department whose centuries of broken promises and benign neglect has contributed to the slow erosion of Indigenous culture. While running for lieutenant governor, Haaland received an email from a college student who was inspired by seeing a Native American woman aiming for high office.

University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins and Wesley Kremer, president of Raytheon Missiles & Defense, write about the critical role hypersonic weapons and counter-hypersonic capabilities are going to play for our national defense and the importance of investing in our capabilities at the University of Arizona. "During the past 12 months, the Covid pandemic has changed the way we learn and interact with one another and reinforced the importance of investing in our research institutions.

The coronavirus variant that shut down much of the United Kingdom is spreading rapidly across the United States, outcompeting other mutant strains and doubling its prevalence among confirmed infections every week and a half, according to new research made public Sunday. "It is here, it's got its hooks deep into this country, and it's on its way to very quickly becoming the dominant lineage," said Michael Worobey, head of the University of Arizona's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a co-author of the new paper.