University of Arizona in the News

A growing number of scientists believe that the cure for disease can be found in our DNA. But that poses a unique problem for some Native Americans. Led by the National Institutes of Health, the All of Us Research Program aims to collect medical and genetic data from 1 million Americans by around 2025. To ensure that the benefits of this research go to every American, All of Us has been actively recruiting participants from racial and ethnic minorities.

With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advising Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving, experts say the holiday is also creating new conflict between family members with different ideas about how to celebrate safely. "The truth is conflict happens every year for families, and that can make holidays so stress-inducing because people know that potential is there," said Kory Floyd, an author and professor of interpersonal communication at the University of Arizona.

University of Arizona professors Shefali Milczarek-Desai and Tara Sklar write that in order to understand how nursing homes became the source of more than one-third of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, you have to look beyond just the vulnerability of the residents and examine how nursing homes pay and manage their employees.

In a new analysis, a team of researchers provided some of the first hard evidence of how the political divide drove behavior amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team, led by James Druckman, a political scientist at Northwestern University, found that the average Democrat "is more worried, is more likely to have changed behaviors and is more supportive of policies to stop the spread of infections than the average Republican," although there were substantial overlaps in attitudes.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control advised Americans against traveling for Thanksgiving, though it stopped short of issuing a mandate to that effect, and the warning may have come late enough that many won’t change their plans. "The airport is where all the bad behavior happens," said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiology professor at the University of Arizona, based on her own experiences flying during the pandemic.

Not thought to be volcanically active, a new paper suggests Mars may have experienced an eruption just 53,000 years ago. "If this deposit is of volcanic origin then the Cerberus Fossae region may not be extinct and Mars may still be volcanically active today," scientists at the University of Arizona and Smithsonian Institution, write in their paper – which was posted online ahead of peer review and has been submitted to the journal Icarus.

Continuing coverage: After two support cables broke at Arecibo Observatory, the facility is in danger of a catastrophic collapse, prompting the National Science Foundation to decommission the telescope. Michael Nolan, a former director of the observatory who is now a research professor in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, is interviewed.

According to an informal survey of 635 epidemiologists by The New York Times, the large majority of public health experts are not celebrating with people outside their household. "I live alone with my 5-year-old," said Alicia Allen, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. "We're going to skip the normal Thanksgiving plans, which for us means a road trip, and go on a hike and picnic locally instead, just the two of us."

Experts say national coordination of contact-tracing smartphone applications developed with Apple and Google may be necessary to curb the coronavirus. Assessing the effectiveness of COVID-19 tracking apps by looking at downloads may be misleading, said Joanna Masel, a professor of evolutionary biology and ecology at the University of Arizona, and a consultant to the state's Covid Watch app.

How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study – the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination. These studies "are all by and large painting the same picture, which is that once you get past those first few critical weeks, the rest of the response looks pretty conventional," said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the studies.