Science News

Plants can adapt their water use according to how much water is available, a team of scientists including UA rangeland ecologists reports in the journal Nature. However, this resilience has a limit, and in some of the world's more arid areas, including the American Southwest, prolonged drought conditions threaten the survival of these plant communities.

Two UA engineering senior design teams, as part of the UA Engineering Senior Capstone Design Program, are working with manufacturing facilities in Mexico to design solutions to real-world engineering problems. This is the first time the students have collaborated with companies that have facilities in Nogales, Sonora.

Awards to 19 researchers kicked off Tech Launch Arizona's Proof of Concept Program, which aims to enable faculty with promising discoveries to address technological hurdles, moving the inventions closer to commercialization. Tech Launch Arizona is a new UA initiative with the primary mission of ensuring greater cohesion among University researchers and the business community.

Cheating is rampant among microscopically small algae, UA biologists have discovered. Their study adds to the emerging view that microbes often have active social lives. Future research could potentially open up new approaches to control or counteract toxic algal blooms.

State-of-the-art fish passage facilities built into river dams have failed to help fish migrate upstream from the sea to reach their spawning grounds, a study has revealed. The research, led by a UA graduate, concludes that only dam removal would enable up-river migration in the three large and historically important river systems studied – the Merrimack, Connecticut and Susquehanna.

Hailed as the most comprehensive and inclusive national effort to date to assess the science of climate change and its impacts, the National Climate Assessment will contribute directly to the U.S. climate policy debate. The UA has a total of six authors on the draft report, more than any other university in the country.

Research-based inquiries today should lead to answers for tomorrow. To that end, 125 high school and undergraduate researchers connected through the UA's Undergraduate Biology Research Program will present their research during an annual conference on Jan. 19.

IBM recently awarded a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant to the city of Tucson and Tucson Water, which will work with the UA College of Engineering on technology to improve water reliability. The UA department of civil engineering and engineering mechanics will advise the utility as the Smarter Cities technologies are implemented over the next year.

A luminous supernova in a galaxy 67 million light years away from us has finally exploded for good, a UA-led team of astronomers has discovered. The result is of special interest because it provides new critical information on the final death throes of massive stars in the years leading up to their explosion.

Research by the UA's Rodger Thompson finds that a popular alternative to Albert Einstein’s theory for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe does not fit newly obtained data on a fundamental constant, the proton to electron mass ratio. His findings impact our understanding of the universe and point to a new direction for the further study of its accelerating expansion.

A UA-led team of astronomers has discovered inner asteroid belts and outer comet-filled belts similar to the arrangement found in our solar system around nearby stars Vega and Fomalhaut. A wide gap between the inner and outer belts strongly hints at the existence of yet undiscovered planets circling the bright stars.

Pointing the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes simultaneously at a brown dwarf, a UA-led team of astronomers has obtained detailed images of the stormy atmosphere that enshrouds these strange objects, which are not quite planets and not quite stars. The forecast shows planet-sized storm systems and showers of sandy and iron rain.