UA News Science & Technology

Long-term droughts in Southwestern North America often mean failure of both summer and winter rains, according to new tree-ring research from a UA-led team. The finding contradicts the commonly held belief that a dry winter rainy season is generally followed by a wet monsoon season, and vice versa.

Google, Inc. has granted a UA chemistry professor $50,000 to develop a free online course to teach chemistry to potentially hundreds of thousands of students. Katrina Miranda is creating a massive open online course, aiming to explain higher-level and abstract chemistry concepts that build on the science's fundamentals to students worldwide.

Antarctica's topography began changing from flat to fjord-filled starting about 34 million years ago, according to a new report from a UA-led team of geoscientists. Knowing when Antarctica's topography started shifting from a flat landscape to one with glaciers, fjords and mountains is important for modeling how the Antarctic ice sheet affects global climate and sea-level rise.

The UA, together with institutions in California, Florida and Texas, has been awarded a contract to develop new ways to protect citrus trees from Citrus Greening Disease. At the UA, the research is led by plant sciences professor Judith Brown, whose team investigates strategies to disrupt the interaction between the disease-causing bacterium and its host, a tiny insect invasive to the U.S. from Asia.

The discovery and UA analysis of an extremely rare African American Y chromosome pushes back the time of the most recent common ancestor for the Y chromosome lineage tree to 338,000 years ago. This time predates the age of the oldest known anatomically modern human fossils.

The UA's Water Resources Research Center will host a conference on water security March 5 on the UA campus. Organized in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, the conference will cover topics such as climate change, water management and Arizona's water future.

After 75 years in "temporary quarters" under the west side of the UA's football stadium, the world's first laboratory dedicated to tree-ring research now has a new home. To celebrate, the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research is hosting a 75th anniversary celebration and public open house at its new building on March 2 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

UUA entomologists are joining forces with scientists on the other side of the globe to protect cotton in China from potentially devastating insect pests. Xianchun Li, associate professor of entomology, and Bruce Tabashnik, head of the department of entomology, are partnering with Chinese scientists to combat insect resistance to genetically engineered cotton plants.

With an eye on trends in digital communications, the UA's new eSociety program will train students in the social influence of an Internet-based society. In addition to expertise in social media use, data gathering, analysis and computing, the program is designed to equip students with the critical skills necessary to live and work in a digitally mediated world.

Tech Launch Arizona has announced that Doug Hockstad is the new director of the revitalized Office of Technology Transfer at the UA. The Office of Technology Transfer helps to accomplish the broader UA mission by providing services to faculty, streamlining the technology commercialization process and finding applications for University research.

The UA's Chris Impey has taught cosmology to Tibetan Buddhist monastics in remote parts of India each summer for the past five years. With a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Impey, a Distinguished Professor and deputy head of the department of astronomy, detailed his experiences in a book, "Humble Before the Void," which likely will publish in 2014.

The UA has taken the lead in joining the growing number of U.S. regions planning their futures around water-based economies by creating water technology innovation clusters. Water clusters build networks of universities, governments and businesses that serve as catalysts for economic development and protect one of the world’s most precious resources.

Researchers have discovered four previously unknown viruses that infect the Earth's most abundant organism, the marine bacterium SAR11. Using data and methods developed by researchers with the UA's Tucson Marine Phage Research Lab, the analysis shows that, like their hosts, the new viruses are the most abundant on record. These tiny players have critical roles in the global cycle of carbon and other nutrients.

The UA has had a long-standing love for asteroids, from pioneering the search for potentially hazardous space rocks before NASA to sending a spacecraft to an asteroid to scoop up a sample (an upcoming mission called OSIRIS-REx). UA experts talk about the potential hazards from asteroids and why studying them is important.

The UA is the No. 1 university in the U.S. and second in the world for environmental science research, according to a study analyzing citation data from more than 180 journals. Environmental research at the UA involves many international collaborations, and the results directly inform management practices in pressing areas such as land use, water and food security and energy.

A new study details how the aerosol particles on Saturn's smog-shrouded moon got their start, suggesting ways such particles can form in the atmospheres of other worlds. Titan's trademark reddish-brown smog appears to begin with solar radiation on molecules of nitrogen and methane in the ionosphere - the uppermost layer of the moon's atmosphere - which creates a soup of negative and positive ions.

The selfish greed of a few may be the driving force behind mutually beneficial behavior in groups, according to a theoretical study led by a former UA evolutionary biologist. Social orders maintained by those who bend the rules play out in nature and human history: Tree wasps that police hives to make sure that no member other than the queen lays eggs often will lay illicit eggs themselves, and cancer cells can prevent other tumors from forming.

The UA and Pima County are entering the global water-energy sustainability arena by establishing the Water and Energy Sustainable Technology Laboratories at Pima County’s new Water Reclamation Campus. WEST Laboratories aspires to be a world-renowned venue for research and development of water treatment technologies, contaminant monitoring tools and energy minimization and production.

Medicinal chemists face a multitude of hurdles trying to discover new and effective therapeutics for the treatment of disease. In the UA’s BIO5 Oro Valley facility is a team of College of Pharmacy researchers attempting to address these "speed bumps" along the path from bench to bedside by utilizing new automated technologies and fast chemical methods to increase the rate at which new hypotheses in drug discovery can be effectively evaluated.

How can we improve what we know about animals, plants and other living organisms? One way is by improving the software used to analyze them. UA researchers John Kececioglu and Dan DeBlasio, working under a newly funded National Science Foundation grant, are achieving this goal.