On Aug. 17, 1959, back when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the U.S. had yet to send a human to space and the nation’s flag sported 49 stars, Yellowstone National Park shook violently for about 30 seconds. The shock was strong enough to drop the ground a full 20 feet in some places. It toppled […]
Research
Aftershocks of 1959 earthquake rocked Yellowstone in 2017-18
Children who use asthma tracking app have better disease control and fewer hospital visits
An app that allows parents and doctors to monitor a child’s asthma has a big impact on managing the disease. When families monitored symptoms with eAsthma Tracker and adjusted care accordingly, children had better asthma control and made fewer visits to the emergency department. Using the app also meant that children missed fewer days of […]
Chemical records in teeth confirm elusive Alaska lake seals are one of a kind
[Adapted from a news release by the University of Washington] Hundreds of harbor seals live in Iliamna Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Alaska and one of the most productive systems for sockeye salmon in the Bristol Bay region. Sometime in the distant past, a handful of harbor seals likely migrated from the ocean […]
How Earth’s mantle is like a Jackson Pollock painting
In countless grade-school science textbooks, the Earth’s mantle is a yellow-to-orange gradient, a nebulously defined layer between the crust and the core. To geologists, the mantle is so much more than that. It’s a region that lives somewhere between the cold of the crust and the bright heat of the core. It’s where the ocean […]
Google Street View cars join the U’s air quality team
The first step toward fixing air quality challenges in the Salt Lake Valley is understanding how air pollution levels vary across the city. To that end, U researchers have previously placed air sensors in a van, on light rail trains and on a news helicopter. But to get an even finer view of Salt Lake’s […]
A new view of wintertime air pollution
[This release is adapted from material provided by CIRES and NOAA] The processes that create ozone pollution in the summer can also trigger the formation of wintertime air pollution, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA, in partnership with the University of Utah. The team’s unexpected finding […]
Chemistry chair Cynthia Burrows receives 2019 Rosenblatt Prize
Cynthia Burrows, chair of the department of chemistry at the University of Utah, is the 2019 recipient of the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the U’s highest faculty accolade. The $50,000 cash award is presented annually to a faculty member who transcends ordinary teaching, research and administrative efforts. A group of distinguished faculty members on the […]
U mathematician elected to Royal Society
Christopher Hacon, McMinn Presidential Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, can now add another honor of a lifetime to his already stellar resume: Election to the Royal Society of London. Hacon, born in England, is one of 50 eminent scientists elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, along with 10 Foreign Members, in […]
Are coffee farms for the birds? Yes and no.
April 29, 2019 — Over 11 field seasons, between 1999 and 2010, ornithologist Çağan Şekercioğlu trekked through the forests and coffee farms of Costa Rica to study how tropical birds were faring in a changing agricultural landscape. Through painstaking banding of individual birds, Şekercioğlu asked whether the expansion of coffee plantations is reducing tropical bird […]
We now know how insects and bacteria control ice
Contrary to what you may have been taught, water doesn’t always freeze to ice at 32 degrees F (zero degrees C). Knowing, or controlling, at what temperature water will freeze (starting with a process called nucleation) is critically important to answering questions such as whether or not there will be enough snow on the ski […]