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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the Curiosity rover touched down on the Red Planet on August 5th, teams at the University of Arizona gathered in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory to cheer along with those at Mission Control in Pasadena. Once again, the UA is playing multiple roles in key aspects of the $2.5 billion mission.
Paul Blowers, Ph.D., is an analytical guy. He’s read 1,442 books since 1983, an average of 52.9 per year. He gauges that over five years with two children he pushed their stroller roughly 7,000 miles. Yet he knows other people think – and learn – differently. That’s why his engaging chemical engineering classes at the University of Arizona are a calculated mash-up of teaching styles.
This past April, the University of Arizona sent Crew 117 to experience the Red Planet – without leaving our own. During the mission, which took place at the Mars Desert Research Station in southern Utah, five crew members spent two weeks testing a camera they designed for NASA as their College of Engineering senior capstone project.
The baby girl’s pulse is weak. The monitor then shows she has flat-lined. A nurse starts chest compressions. The pharmacist preps an injection. Where’s the defibrillator? At last – the baby breathes. The team has saved another life. This is not TV– this is medical school – with adrenalin-pumping life-and-death simulations in a real hospital operating room.
Matt Adamson lives within Biosphere 1 – our Earth – just like all of us. But he also has the privilege and the responsibility of serving as the associate director of K-12 education at Biosphere 2, one of Time-Life Books' Top 50 Wonders of the World. Join Matt on a brief tour of a place where University of Arizona researchers do some very, very big science.
Binoculars are so last century. But that’s how you watch a horse race, scanning the rail as thoroughbreds thunder around the track. Imagine instead a jockey’s eye view of the race – brought to you by UA students who developed the “jockey cam,” a smart helmet that streams real-time video. Their invention is changing the horseracing experience, and has potential for other sports, even the military.
As crowds cheer on the Arizona Wildcats football team, something amazing is happening within the stadium below. Here in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, teams of scientists use a great oven to spin-cast molten glass into the largest, most perfect telescope mirrors in the world.
In his free time, Dr. Joseph Sheppard is a sculptor of hands, making sure that every detail of his art is perfect. As an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in the hand and upper extremity, he does much the same thing. A talented surgeon and exacting educator, Sheppard attends to the smallest of details to deliver the greatest good for his patients as well as the residents training under him.
How does the brain produce conscious experience – feelings, awareness, thought? Physician, author and Eastern spirituality explorer Deepak Chopra joins 29 other experts – scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and skeptics – for a provocative exploration of consciousness at the UA’s 10th Biennial “Toward a Science of Consciousness."