Science and Technology

The University of Arizona Solar Racing Team continues to lead in the stock car class in the American Solar Challenge. Their car, Monsoon, also is ahead of most of the open class cars.

UA's solar car, Monsoon, was about 50 miles west of Tucumcari, N.M. at 9 a.m. this morning. Arizona Solar Racing Team members estimate they will arrive in Albuquerque, N.M. at 2 p.m. New Mexico time (1 p.m. Tucson time).

Optical scientists at the University of Arizona are working under an agreement with The Egg Factory, LLC, and its subsidiary company, eVision, to develop a proprietary technology that within a few years could provide next-generation eyeglasses -- glasses with lenses that actively focus so people can see clearly up close or far away.

When Mars Global Surveyor began mapping Mars in sharp detail early in 1999, it disclosed startling evidence that water has shaped martian landforms within the past 10 million years. It confirms the idea that internal heat periodically triggers short-term warmer and wetter conditions - conditions conducive to life - in the global martian hydrological cycle, UA Regents' Professor Victor R. Baker says in a review in Nature July 12.

The Arizona Solar Racing Team is racing its solar-powered car "Monsoon" over historic Route 66 -- more than 2,000 miles from Chicago to LA -- in the 2001 American Solar Challenge. Faculty adviser Dunbar Birnie has the daily updates.

George H. Atkinson, professor of chemistry and optical sciences, is the first to go to Washington, D.C., in a new post created to give U.S. foreign policy makers greater access to sound scientific and technological expertise.

Astronomers have discovered 12 more moons around Saturn - and evidence that these were once just 3 or 4 moons, orbiting the planet like all regular saturnian moons do today.

In their new study of desert-dwelling fruit flies, L. Lacey Knowles and Therese A. Markow have discovered that differences among populations are driven by an arms race between the sexes.

Astronomers from Lowell Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory have found an icy planetary body orbiting the sun beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt roughly equal in size to Pluto's moon Charon.