Two UA journalism professors have interviewed Mexican journalists along to U.S.-Mexico border to determine how drug cartels affect news reporting in the area.
Two researchers in the University of Arizona School of Journalism have traveled the length of the U.S.-Mexico border interviewing 39 Mexican journalists to find out how the drug cartels are affecting what news people receive. (more…)
Written by an expert cast of UA affiliates, “Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas” is perfect for desert aficionados and armchair explorers wishing to learn more about southwestern Arizona.
The University of Arizona Press, in collaboration with the University of Arizona Southwest Center, has announced the release of “Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas.“
Written by an expert cast of UA affiliates and well-known Tucsonans, this book is perfect for desert aficionados and armchair explorers wishing to learn more about the High Tanks, the iconic natural watering holes of southwestern Arizona.
The Devil’s Highway – El Camino del Diablo – crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows and searing summer heat. (more…)
Glacier lilies and broad-tailed hummingbirds out of sync
The glacier lily as it’s called, is a tall, willowy plant that graces mountain meadows throughout western North America. It flowers early in spring, when the first bumblebees and hummingbirds appear.
Or did.
The lily, a plant that grows best on subalpine slopes, is fast becoming a hothouse flower. In Earth’s warming temperatures, its first blooms appear some 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, scientists David Inouye and Amy McKinney of the University of Maryland and colleagues have found. (more…)
*Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long*
Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research results.
The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, show that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but then begin to deteriorate quickly.
“We were really surprised by the pattern, where the initial boost in growth just went away,” said scientist Zhuoting Wu of Northern Arizona University (NAU), a lead author of the study. “As ecosystems adjusted, the responses changed.” (more…)
One particular mountain on Mars, bigger than Colorado’s grandest, has been beckoning would-be explorers since it was first sighted from orbit in the 1970s. Scientists have ideas about how it took shape in the middle of ancient Gale Crater and hopes for what evidence it could yield about whether conditions on Mars have favored life.
No mission to Mars dared approach it, though, until NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, which this August will attempt to place its one-ton rover, Curiosity, at the foot of the mountain. The moat of flatter ground between the mountain and the crater rim encircling it makes too small a touchdown target to have been considered safe without precision-landing innovations used by this mission. (more…)
Asteroid 2011 AG5 has been receiving a lot of attention lately because of a very unlikely scenario which would place it on an Earth-interception course 28 years from now. Here is a scientific reality check of this relatively nondescript space rock which is currently ranked a “1” on the 1 to 10 Torino Impact Hazard Scale
As of Feb. 26, 2012, asteroid 2011 AG5 is one of 8,744 near-Earth objects that have been discovered. It is approximately 460 feet (140 meters) in size and its orbit carries it as far out as beyond Mars’ orbit and as close to the sun as halfway between Earth and Venus. It was discovered on Jan. 8, 2011, by astronomers using a 60-inch Cassegrain reflector telescope located at the summit of Mount Lemmon in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, Arizona. (more…)
*N.Y., L.A., Miami, San Francisco, D.C. Top List; Maricopa, Ariz. Rising*
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Nearly a third of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, but events continue to occur in rural areas, spurred on by domestic actors, according to a report published today by researchers in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland.
The research was conducted at Maryland and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. (more…)
*The Event Horizon Telescope is an Earth-sized virtual telescope powerful enough to see all the way to the center of our Milky Way, where a supermassive black hole will allow astrophysicists to put Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the test.*
Astronomers, physicists and scientists from related fields across the world will convene in Tucson, Ariz. on Jan. 18 to discuss an endeavor that only a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing less than outrageous.
The conference is organized by Dimitrios Psaltis, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, and Dan Marrone, an assistant professor of astronomy at Steward Observatory. (more…)
