University of Arizona in the News

In a 2019 paper, researchers led by University of Arizona assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science Robert Wilson used machine learning to determine the ideal difficulty level to learn new things. The neural network they created, meant to mimic the human brain, learned best when it was faced with queries set to 85% difficulty, meaning it got questions right 85% of the time. "If you never make any errors, you're 100% accurate, well, you can't learn from the mistakes," Wilson said.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will rendezvous with Earth Sept. 24 to drop off the sample it collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020. After it burns through Earth's atmosphere, scientists will collect the capsule from a landing site about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Though they aren't sure what they'll find within the canister, University of Arizona Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences Dante Lauretta and other mission managers aren't expecting microscopic aliens.

Astronomy aficionados were all abuzz this past weekend over the newly discovered Comet Nishimura. University of Arizona professor of planetary sciences Vishnu Reddy received the alert from the Japanese photographer who discovered the ball of ice and dust just last month. "The era of some random individual finding comets is thought to be long gone," Reddy said, because most comets are detected by automated surveys conducted by professionally run observatories on Earth and in space.

The sprawling new Arizona Scale Model Solar System is designed to provide a true picture of the vastness of our corner of the cosmos. The project consists of 10 informational signs and markers stretching from the Kuiper Space Sciences Building on the University of Arizona Mall to just west of the university's Main Gate. "Astronomical scales can be difficult to grasp," said project lead Zarah Brown, a doctoral student in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

The University of Arizona College of Law announced on Friday it would grant Aspen Publishing an exclusive five-year license to oversee the law school entrance exam, JD-Next.

While cases of COVID-related severe illness and hospitalization remain low, infection counts are spiking again, new variants are emerging, and flu and respiratory syncytial virus loom as winter approaches. This story surveys several medical experts to learn what precautions they continue to take to avoid infections. "After the last three years, I have used up my 'worrying' capacity. It has been depleted," said Elizabeth Connick, chief of the infectious diseases division and professor of medicine and immunobiology at the University of Arizona.

Gov. Katie Hobbs and University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins joined leaders in the field of topological acoustics to announce the New Frontiers of Sound Science and Technology Center, where researchers exploit the properties of sound in ways that could vastly improve computing, telecommunications and sensing. The National Science Foundation has granted the University of Arizona $30 million over five years to establish the center.

In the United States, the matter of unidentified aerial phenomena has often been treated as a closely guarded secret and, compared to its counterparts in other countries, the U.S. government has often been less willing to publicize or publicly engage on questions about UFOs for fear of ceding a strategic advantage to adversaries and jeopardizing national security. "The U.S. has always tended toward secrecy," said Chris Impey, a Distinguished Professor of Astronomer at the University of Arizona.

Just after it endured historic fires, Europe now faces record heat and floods intensified by climate change. Some models predict more than 30 inches of rain will deluge central Greece this week, reminiscent of hurricane flood disasters in the United States from Harvey in Texas in 2017 and Florence in North Carolina in 2018. "If this forecast is correct, it would be a truly catastrophic flood event in Greece," Christopher Castro, a hydrologist at the University of Arizona, wrote Monday on social media.

The University of Arizona is among the vanguard of higher education institutions in using a new model for teaching calculus to students in life sciences courses that focuses more strictly on math concepts and real-world biological questions, rather than on procedural rules for derivatives and integrals – which its advocates describe as a paradigm shift for calculus instruction.