University of Arizona in the News

Erika Hamden leads a panel discussion with OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, mission implementation senior system engineer Anjani Polit and AZPM's John Booth, producer of the film "OSIRIS-REx: To Bennu and Back."

Los Angeles police arrested two people last month for spray painting graffiti across more than two dozen stories of an unfinished skyscraper in the city's downtown area. People are entitled to dislike graffiti, but they should "respect the effort to use the space that nobody else seems to be caring about right now," said University of Arizona associate professor of geography, development and environment Stefano Bloch, a LA native and former graffiti artist.

Research published Sunday in The New England Journal of Medicine indicates the drug Xolair, approved to treat allergic asthma and chronic hives, can limit children's dangerous allergic responses to small amounts of allergy-triggering foods. Xolair is an expensive medication that requires monthly injections "but will no longer provide protection once it has been stopped," said University of Arizona associate clinical professor of pediatrics Dr. Heather Cassell, an allergist and immunologist in the College of Medicine – Tucson.

More than a decade ago, Betsy Arnold and her team set out on a monthlong adventure deep into the wilderness of northeastern Canada to understand how fungi adapted across different microenvironments and how they might fare under future climate change. Arnold is a professor in the School of Plant Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Science and a member of the BIO5 Institute.

Experts say the storms that continue to batter California are almost certainly strengthened by El Niño, but does climate change contribute to the severity of them as well? "All weather is impacted by climate change now," said Michael Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. "And with the El Niño pattern we are experiencing this year, there has definitely been an influx of moisture and precipitation in these storms we have had recently."

The James Webb Space Telescope provides a new way for researchers such as University of Arizona Regents Professor of Astronomy Marcia Rieke to answer questions they couldn't resolve before about our origins. Rieke, the principal investigator for JWST's Near-Infrared Camera, and her team have spotted candidates for the farthest and oldest galaxies ever seen.

University of Arizona Regents Professor of Law Robert Williams, chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, writes in opposition to a number of environmental conservation efforts worldwide that involve the displacement of indigenous communities.

University of Arizona associate professor Jekan Thanga and a team of student researchers in the College of Engineering are developing smart, robot-built sandbag shelters for astronauts on future NASA missions to the moon. The structures take their inspiration from cathedral termite mounds, which can soar as high as 23 feet and stand for as long as 80 years.

In the same lab where University of Arizona scientists invented ways to decipher Earth's climate history in tree rings, associate professor Bryan Black is using a similar technique – but with tiny fish bones.

Laura Condon, an associate professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, built the HydroGen website, which combines artificial intelligence with advanced physical hydrology models and national observation networks to track the U.S. groundwater supply and forecast droughts and floods.