University of Arizona in the News

The first green leaves of the season are rapidly expanding north as spring awakens in the United States. Persistent and sometimes unprecedented warmth has driven an early onset of the season, a common theme in recent years because of human-caused climate change. The warmth can be linked to the El Niño climate pattern and the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

University of Arizona Regents Professor of planetary science Dante Lauretta will speak about the OSIRIS-REx space mission, and his new book about the experience, during two panel discussions March 9 at the Tucson Festival of Books on the University of Arizona campus.

Feb. 29, or Leap Day, works as a bit of cosmic bookkeeping to ensure human calendars keep pace with the actual movements of the solar system, since the Earth's orbit falls about six hours short of a whole number of days. "Our calendar is constantly in need of monitoring," said University of Arizona professor of planetary sciences Renu Malhotra. "Every now and then, you'll hear about a leap second being added to a year.

Astronomers want to build giant telescopes, potentially stronger than the James Webb Space Telescope, on the moon to see and hear the universe more clearly. University of Arizona professor of astronomy Roger Angel has studied the possibility of an array of 18 optical and infrared telescopes near the moon's south pole. It could be done for $10 billion, he estimates – the same cost as the James Webb Space Telescope, with 20 times its aperture.

Assessing COIVD symptoms isn't a foolproof way to tell how contagious someone is. In general, asymptomatic people are less likely to spread the virus, but it is possible to spread it without having symptoms, said Dr. Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunobiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson.

The Millennium Camera, an artistic effort developed by experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, a research associate at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts, will capture an image of Tucson from Tumamoc Hill over the course of the next 1,000 years.

The University of Arizona New Frontiers of Sound Science and Technology Center will focus on topological acoustics. The center's director, professor of material science and engineering Pierre Deymier, discusses how researchers in the emerging field exploit the properties of sound in ways that could vastly improve computing, telecommunications and sensing and better prepare us for the effects of climate change.

A major step forward in stem cell researchers now allows researchers to transform lab-cultivated cells into specialized cell types, promising a potentially endless supply of replacement parts for ailing and aging bodies. But such therapies must be customized to the patient – a slow and expensive process – or rely on donor cells, which runs the risk of immune system rejection.

Off the charts "crazy" heat in the North Atlantic ocean and record-smashing Antarctic sea ice lows last year are far more severe than what Earth is supposed to get with current warming levels. They are more like what happens at twice this amount of warming, a new study said. "There is no doubt that the impacts (of warming) are accelerating and much more visible than they were in the past," said University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs.

NASA's GUSTO mission, led by University of Arizona professor of astronomy Christopher Walker, on Saturday set a new NASA record for the longest scientific balloon flight – 55 days, 1 hour and 35 minutes.