University of Arizona in the News

Footage from the British TV show "Mastermind" gave University of Arizona psychologists a chance to examine human physiology under conditions of stress that would be impossible to reproduce in the lab.

For many people, the winter holidays can amplify feelings of loneliness, and the changes to personal interaction wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic can make this time even more challenging. University of Arizona professor of communications Kory Floyd discusses how people can counteract that condition and make connections with loved ones.

Worries about future water supplies bubbled up in recent months following reports that foreign agribusiness firms were taking advantage of a lack of regulation in Arizona. "Water shortages have driven companies to go where the water is," said Robert Glennon, Regents Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law.

The University of Arizona Indigenous Resilience Center earlier this month hosted the One Water Summit, which brought hundreds of policy makers, scientists and other stakeholders to Tucson for three days of discussions on sustainable, integrated and inclusive approaches to managing water.

A University of Arizona study on office productivity found a noisy workplace is bad for your health, but so is a place that is extremely quiet. Report co-author Dr. Esther Sternberg, the research director at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and director of the Institute on Place, Wellbeing and Performance, said the optimal noise level in an office comes in at about 50 decibels, comparable to moderate rain or birdsong. "When people were in quiet offices, their physiological well-being increased for every 10 decibels up until 50 decibels of sound," Sternberg said.

Research has shown there can be more bacteria on shopping carts than on surfaces in public restrooms, airports, bus stations and shopping malls. The bacteria may have originated from many things, including children with dirty diapers riding in the cart, cross-contamination from handling raw meat products while shopping or bird droppings while sitting in the grocery store parking lots, said Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona and senior author of a 2012 study.

Science and commerce may soon clash on remote terrain: the Moon. For the first time in half a century, NASA is sending a craft to the lunar surface, with the launch at the end of this year of Peregrine Mission 1, a lander built by the private company Astrobotic. Dozens of other craft will soon follow, many as part of NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon.

The heat death of a 23-year-old woman during Taylor Swift's concert at an open-air stadium in Rio de Janeiro this past Friday prompted the pop star to postpone a second Rio show, citing safety concerns. In Arizona, it's become increasingly common to delay sports practices and other events until later in the evening when it cools off, said University of Arizona assistant professor of planning and sustainable built environments Ladd Keith, who noted that heat can affect anyone, including young people and those in good health – as Friday's concert demonstrated.

Mosquitoes that can carry West Nile virus and dengue fever are moving into northern Wyoming and southern Nevada, according to the fifth National Climate Assessment. "I mean, if drastic climate action isn't taken, I think we're going to be facing a lot of different threats and mosquito- and tick-borne diseases is going to be one of those threats," said University of Arizona professor of epidemiology Kacey Ernst, who co-authored the report's chapter on human health.

University of Arizona aerospace engineering graduate researcher Maanyaa Kapur and materials science and aerospace engineering major Zach Purdie served as NASA interns and members of the sample analysis team on the OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned NASA's first-ever asteroid sample to earth. Their work involved developing experiments to determine the makeup of the material collected from the asteroid Bennu.