University of Arizona in the News

CNN Aug. 1, 2022
Two ultra-rare floods in a single week; a wildfire generating its own weather. Here's how it's connected

Extreme weather on both ends of the spectrum has thrashed parts of the US over the past week – one of the many signals that climate change is here now, scientists say. "While extreme events and floods have sort of always been a part of a climate cycle, they can get more frequent and they can be a lot more intense as the planet is warmed," said Beth Tellman, co-founder of flood database Cloud to Street and assistant professor of geography at the University of Arizona. "The intensity of rainfall from the storm systems in both St. Louis and eastern Kentucky are the reality and the physical manifestation of (climate change) happening now in our lives."
Nature Aug. 1, 2022
Dust-up over dust storm link to 'Valley Fever' disease

Researchers are divided over whether rising cases of the fungal infection in the United States can be linked to dust storms. Andrew Comrie, a climate and health scientist at the University of Arizona, acknowledges that the Storm Events Database, maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could be more complete, but still thinks it is a robust enough representation of big dust storms that his analysis would have picked up subsequent spikes in Valley fever cases. "If there was a reliable signal, it should show up," he said.
ABC News Aug. 1, 2022
Heat suspected as cause of 10 fatalities following Pacific Northwest heat wave

Medical examiners are investigating whether the deaths of 10 people who died during a brutal heat wave in the Pacific Northwest last week were heat related, according to officials. Vulnerable populations, including impoverished and marginalized communities and those with pre-existing health conditions such as asthma and heart disease, are most at risk when temperatures begin to skyrocket, according to Ladd Keith, an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Arizona.
The Atlantic July 31, 2022
40,000 pet dogs, one big question

Scientists around the world have recruited dogs and their owners to investigate the secrets of canine aging. "There's a lot we just don't know about how dog cognition changes with age," said comparative psychologist Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona and a collaborator on the Dog Aging Project. MacLean's collaborator Emily Bray, a psychologist at the University of Arizona and at the service-dog organization Canine Companions, is designing a battery of cognitive tests for dogs based on rodent-cognition studies. Some of these tests require the dogs to learn to interact with another ubiquitous fixture in the human environment: touch screens.
The Washington Post July 31, 2022
Opinion | Six million died. We still don't know how the pandemic began.

An international team of researchers has confirmed that live animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, were the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed 6.4 million lives since it began nearly three years ago. Led by University of Arizona virus evolution expert Michael Worobey, researchers traced the start of the pandemic to the market in Wuhan, where foxes, raccoon dogs and other live mammals susceptible to the virus were sold immediately before the pandemic began. Their findings were published Tuesday in two papers in the journal Science, after being previously released in preprint versions in February.
Inverse July 30, 2022
This behemoth black hole got too big too early – the Webb Telescope could find out why

There is a massive monster lurking at the beginning of the universe, 10 billion times the mass of our Sun. And one of the James Webb Space Telescope's first tasks will be determining if the object is a supermassive black hole, likely one of the largest yet found. The search, part of JWST's first cycle of observations, is being led by Jinyi Yang, an astronomer and the Peter Strittmatter Fellow at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. It's one of 29 small projects focusing on supermassive black holes and other active galactic nuclei, which Yang notes are going to start a "whole new generation in astronomy." But for the time being, she adds, "it's a little nervous to wait for the data but very exciting."
NPR July 29, 2022
Morning Edition: A doctor in Nigeria warned the world about monkeypox years ago. Did anyone listen?

Nearly 800,000 additional doses of the monkeypox vaccine will soon be distributed across the U.S. This comes as the world struggles to stop the largest monkeypox outbreak ever recorded: More than 18,000 cases detected in at least 78 countries. University of Arizona professor Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, thinks the data indisputably point to Nigeria as the place where it all started. "Yeah, I think, in many ways, it's really clear. It's clear that there's been continuous cases or endemic transmission in Nigeria from 2017, maybe a little bit before 2017. And then something from there just got exported out," he said.
The Atlantic July 29, 2022
The moon's one spot of perfect temperature

The moon has no atmosphere to speak of, and no protection from a constant stream of radiation, whether from the sun or deep space. During a lunar day – about as long as 15 of our own – nonstop sunlight makes the surface hot enough to boil water. A lunar night lasts just as long, only it's unfathomably cold. Yet, at least one spot on the Moon offers the potential to be hospitable: a cavern, a portion of it anyway, that has a pleasantly cool temperature of 63°F. If the temperature alone wasn't a draw, the perspective should be. "The lunar surface is covered in regolith, which is just broken-up rocks from the eons of impacts that have hit the moon," said Amanda Stadermann, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who studies lunar rocks. "The idea of rappelling down the side of one of these pits, it's very exciting," she added.
The New York Times July 28, 2022
Climate change is probably a drag on growth, but it's unclear how much

For more than a decade, researchers have constructed forecasts of climate change's likely economic impact. A 2018 paper found, for example, that the annual growth rate of state-level economic output declined 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points for every degree the average temperature crept higher in the summer – which could take up to a third off economic growth over the next century. And that's just in the United States. "As a profession, we've been really focused on future economic impacts from climate change, because we've been focused on how you should be taxing carbon emissions,” said Derek Lemoine, an associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona. Lemoine recently wrote about how record-setting heat waves in cities across UK, US and mainland Europe could punish economies already reeling from inflation in The Conversation.
The Associated Press July 27, 2022
Hidden Menace: Massive methane leaks speed up climate change

A 2021 aerial survey of the Permian Basin, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border, detected 33 methane "super emitters" – oil and gas operations that continuously spew methane into the atmosphere – with ongoing leaks, and gushers going unfixed. "We see the same sites active from year to year. It's not just month to month or season to season," said Riley Duren, a research scientist at the University of Arizona who led the mapping effort.