Here in Tucson, we hear the sounds of Spanish and English mixing richly throughout the community. But spend time among bilingual speakers, and you often hear both spoken at the same time, even within the same sentence. This process called "code-switching." How does it work? Psychology doctoral student Kalim Gonzalez led a study to find out.
Our ancestors left the jungle, began to walk upright and ultimately ran like the wind. These early distance athletes chased prey and fled predators -- and grew bigger brains. Why? University of Arizona anthropologist David A. Raichlen studied humans, dogs and ferrets to demonstrate how aerobic exercise stimulates the production of brain-growth chemicals.
Fire in the mine! What should you do? UA scientists are working to help prepare miners to respond to and avoid the emergencies they may encounter working at a mine through development of educational computer games.
Fighting wars against enemies like illness, hunger and injustice requires more than brute strength. As in any war, winning demands training, experience and planning to harness the raw passion for real results. For warriors ready to do battle, the new UA Master's in Development Practice offers the essential training to win in the field.
Judith Bronstein, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has always loved getting outside and studying living things. An expert in the relatively new field of mutualism – the cooperative interaction among organisms and species – she loves asking those questions that have never been asked, and then bringing those new ideas to the next generation of scientists.
When Stephen Russell, PhD, started his career, there wasn't a lot of research on sexual minority youth in his field of family studies and human development. He changed that in a big way. Today, he’s not only illuminating the risks that minority youth face, but he's also giving students opportunities to ask their own questions and begin creating knowledge legacies of their own.
Students can use the UA-developed Heart Anatomy Explorer I application to view, rotate and zoom in on images of a real human heart.
What does it mean to be a participating member of the digital age? Through the new eSociety program, students take courses covering social media strategies, artificial intelligence, identity in the digital realm, privacy concerns, Internet communications law, information ethics, strategies for managing a social presence and the access -- and barring of access -- to information, and much more.
Ask Paul Blowers, PhD, why he was originally attracted to the field of chemical engineering, he’ll give you a simple answer: because it was hard. He had seen the discipline get the best of others, and he was determined to be great at it. Today, a UA Distinguished Professor, he now focuses on helping students get the best out of themselves.
After a nearly 5,000-year vigil upon a Nevada mountaintop, an ancient tree 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. Its age was not accurately known until a few years ago.
Ever heard of “laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis?” Maybe not, but you’ve probably heard of LASIK, a widely known procedure that has allowed millions to see clearly without glasses. Now, President Obama has recognized the surgery’s inventor, UA professor Dr. Gholam A. Peyman, with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Put your eyes on this one-man powerhouse of innovation.
Do you think of hip-hop as just catchy dance music with some rap thrown in for good measure? A new concentration in hip-hop studies in the UA’s Africana Studies program — the first hip-hop minor in the United States — challenges students to explore hip-hop as a worldwide phenomenon through which people explore identities, claim territories, protest injustice and change their worlds.
If you thought stitches that dissolved in the body were amazing – what about biodegradable electronics? Scientists are creating tiny electronic devices that could one day be implanted in the body, complete a specific task, then dissolve on cue. Dr. Marvin J. Slepian is part of a team developing soluble electronics that will revolutionize medicine.
Research scientist and Ph.D. candidate Taylor Edwards has been fascinated with the desert tortoise since he was a kid. And while his interest as a child was all about fun, his work today is truly about survival...and that's nothing to play around with. Edwards is working to decipher the tortoise's DNA with the goal of protecting these dry desert dwellers.
The NASA mission OSIRIS-REx, led by the University of Arizona, will send a craft to study 1999 RQ36, an asteroid that could tell us how life on Earth began. The ship will launch in 2016, but already, the UA has launched an $8 million mission to engage the public in this historic mission and inspire in young learners a passion for scientific exploration.
University of Arizona researcher Susan D. Penfield has spent her career studying endangered languages of the southwest. She serves on the advisory committee to the Endangered Languages Project, a global linguistic diversity initiative seeded by Google. The project is creating a centralized hub for people working to document more than 3,000 languages and protect them from extinction.
It’s not often that researchers get to conduct experiments on the International Space Station. But for 18 months, Professor Kelly Simmons-Potter and PhD student Brian Fox got to see their research launched skyward, and the data they’ve collected is helping to shape the future of space-based fiber optics.
Virtuoso Carrol McLaughlin took her harp from the concert stage into the cardiac care unit – where she tuned into individual patients and played 10 minutes of music improvised just for them. The UA Distinguished Professor of Music partnered with two UA scientists to monitor blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, self-reported perception of pain and other responses.
In today’s world of global markets and global workforces, diverse, distributed teams are common. But decades ago, when Anita Bhappu embarked on product development as a chemical engineer for Procter & Gamble, virtual collaboration was an uncharted territory — one her research has been illuminating ever since.
In June 2012, the world learned that the Higgs boson might have been found. As the world celebrated, emotions were especially high in the UA Physics Department. Here, a number of researchers who had a hand in the ATLAS experiment’s design at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN saw decades of hard work come to fruition.