University of Arizona in the News

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returns from its seven-year mission September 24 when the probe will drop off a canister holding about a cup of pebbles and dust from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. About 200 scientists will receive portions of that material – some of the only pristine bits of primordial asteroid ever to reach Earth's surface – which mission managers hope will reveal the state of the solar system when it first formed, including which amino acids and other chemical compounds important for biology were present.

These days, it's widely acknowledged that the five stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – were overhyped and misconstrued. They were based on interviews with people dying from terminal illness (not those grieving the death of a loved one) packaged into a theory that got refashioned in the public imagination.

Researchers at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory report the discovery of tiny salt crystals which could only have formed in the presence of liquid water in a sample from a class of asteroid known to mostly lack water-bearing minerals. The discovery strongly suggests many of the solar system's asteroids may not be as dry as previously thought.

The Giant Magellan Telescope will be made from seven individual mirrors, each 27.6 feet in diameter. Six have already been cast at the University of Arizona's Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab. The seventh is planned for casting later this year.

Lawmakers, conference commissioners, NCAA President Charlie Baker, coaches and athletics directors attended The Future of College Athletics summit, hosted by the University of Arizona.

How did the very first stars and galaxies form after the Big Bang? To find answers, a group of astronomers at the University of Arizona is using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to peer deeper into the universe and farther back in time than ever before.

A survey of nearly 13,000 Icelanders pinpoints for the first time a genetic variant that shapes whether a person's voice sounds high. Large-scale genetic studies peering into human voices like this one are "sorely needed," says Julie Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona.

Kristen Pogreba Brown, Leslie V. Farland and Jennifer Andrews, professors at the University of Arizona, argue for more robust infrastructure to understand and research long COVID-19, which impacts one in five Americans.

Experts say the ability to conjure up possible futures or alternative realities is the flip side of memory. Both faculties cohabit in the brain region called the hippocampus. In this context, the hippocampus seems to be acting to combine past events in new ways, something that "is more like imagination than it is just replaying the past or predicting the future," said Lynn Nadel, an emeritus professor of cognitive science and psychology at the University of Arizona.

The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law has been working on developing the JD-Next exam as an alternative law school admissions test since 2019, and on Friday the Council of the American Bar Association's Section of Legal Education and Admissions approved a variance for the law school to use the JD-Next exam for admission.