UA News Science & Technology

An ancient tree that stood on a Nevada mountaintop for nearly 5,000 years - as civilizations rose and fell and humans explored the Earth - now finds its home in the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. A member of the long-lived Bristlecone pine species, the tree called Prometheus is the oldest individual ever known to have lived.

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.

UA physics professor Andrei Lebed has stirred the physics community by suggesting that Albert Einstein's iconic equation, E=mc2, may not hold up in certain circumstances. To test his finding, Lebed has proposed an experiment using a space probe carrying hydrogen atoms away from Earth while a detector records "jumping" electrons.

Automated trail cameras set up by a UA research team have snapped pictures of a male jaguar and a male ocelot roaming the rugged Southern Arizona landscape. The purpose of the research project is to establish a non-invasive, hands-off system for detecting and monitoring jaguars and ocelots, which will help researchers and managers understand distribution and activities of other wildlife as well.

Feryal Ozel, a UA associate professor of astronomy, has won the 2013 American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert Mayer Award for her cutting-edge research on neutron stars. In addition, Ozel is a 2012-13 fellow at the prestigious Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she is studying neutron stars and black holes.

UA astrophotographer Adam Block caught asteroid Toutatis with the Schulman Telescope at the UA Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter as it zipped by the Earth on Dec. 11. At three miles long, the peanut-shaped space rock is about half as big as the one believed to have slammed into the Caribbean 65 million years ago, sealing the fate of the dinosaurs.

An international team of astronomers has found the most distant galaxies to date, observed as they were more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 3 percent of its present age. The observations show a smooth decline in the number of galaxies with increasing look-back time to about 380 million years after the big bang and support the idea that galaxies assembled continuously over time.

Moths are able to enjoy a pollinator's buffet of flowers - in spite of being among the insect world's picky eaters - because of two distinct "channels" in their brains, scientists at the UA and the University of Washington report. Giant hawk moths known to scientists as Manduca sexta are innately attracted to flowers with a particular scent profile, said study co-author John G. Hildebrand of the UA.

David Lowenthal, the UA's associate department head for computer science, is leading a research team working to develop a software system that will help improve performance of supercomputers. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Lowenthal's work is in direct response to government and industry needs to enable supercomputing applications to reach high performance within a fixed power budget.