University of Arizona in the News

The latest calculations from several science agencies showing Earth obliterated global heat records last year may seem scary. But scientists worry that what's behind those numbers could be even worse. "The heat over the last calendar year was a dramatic message from Mother Nature," said University of Arizona climate scientist Katharine Jacobs. Scientists say warming air and water is causing deadly and costly heat waves, floods, droughts, storms and wildfires more intense and more likely.

Only about 2% of public school teachers in Arizona are Indigenous. A program at the University of Arizona seeks to put more Native teachers into classrooms. Valerie Shirley, co-director of the Indigenous Teacher Education Program at the University of Arizona, is interviewed.

NASA's Johnson Space Center curation team members have successfully removed the two fasteners from the sampler head that had prevented the remainder of OSIRIS-REx's asteroid Bennu sample material from being accessed.

Artificial intelligence-based forecasting tools such as GraphCast offer a whole new way to predict the weather, but they have limits. Because of their reliance on past data, most AI models seem poorly equipped to forecast rare and never-before-seen events such as Hurricane Harvey, which dropped an unprecedented 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017, or the exceptionally rapid intensification of Hurricane Otis from a tropical storm to a Category 5 monster just before it hit Mexico's Pacific Coast last year.

University of Arizona assistant professor of geography, development, and environment Andrew Curley will join two other Navajo scholars to write and edit the first-ever government textbook by Diné authors for Diné high school students. The project will take three years and include collaborations with a graphic artist and an education editor to ensure that the chapters are written and formatted appropriately for secondary learners. Navajo-language teachers will be brought on board to translate the two-volume textbook.

On Tumamoc Hill, hikers climb and descend daily. Animals skitter across the desert floor for years. Saguaros will grow and die over decades, sometimes centuries. But for a millennium, a photographic camera will stand sentinel over Tucson, prompting passersby to stop and think about what the future may hold. Dubbed the Millennium Camera, the device was dreamed up by the experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, a research associate at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts.

Earth's orbits are filling with satellites at an astounding pace, with more than 9,000 satellites already circling the planet – the majority of them put there by Starlink. And with thousands more scheduled to join them in the decades ahead, ground astronomers must combine new and old technologies with ingenuity to deal with the proliferating obstacles to observation.

The Hearing Healthcare Assistance Project, a new partnership among the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing and the three state universities, will provide free hearing health care for eligible people age 21 or older who do not have insurance.

The University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-APEX mission on Tuesday completed the first of six close flybys of the Sun as it follows a newly-crafted route to observe the asteroid Apophis when it makes a close pass by Earth in April 2029. Coming to within an unprecedented 46.5 million miles of our host star exposed the spacecraft to much higher temperatures than it was meant to endure, prompting mission managers to turn off most of the on-board instruments and position one solar array to shade the most sensitive components.

U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced Thursday it will deliver migraine, diabetes and obesity medications directly to U.S. consumers through its new LillyDirect service. University of Arizona associate professor of medicine Dr. Shad Marvasti, director of the culinary medicine program in the College of Medicine – Phoenix, discusses the shortcomings of taking a weight-loss drug without also making changes to diet and increasing physical activity.