A new University of Utah study on the impact of wood burning stoves and fireplaces along Utah’s Wasatch Front proves that 20-year-old restrictions have had a tremendous impact on the state’s air quality. “This study is showing a reduction in the contributions of wood burning by a factor of four or five,” says University of […]

A remarkable new species of meat-eating dinosaur has been unveiled at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Paleontologists unearthed the first specimen in early 1990s in Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited the flood plains of western North America during the Late Jurassic Period, between 157-152 million years ago, making it […]

Zinc and folic acid, a pair of dietary supplements long touted as an effective treatment for male infertility, failed to improve pregnancy rates, sperm counts and sperm potency in a new study conducted at University of Utah Health and other medical centers in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health. According to the researchers, the finding presents […]

In the wintertime Arctic, cracks in the ice called “leads” expose the warm ocean directly to the cold air, with some leads only a few meters wide and some kilometers wide. They play a critical role in the Arctic surface energy balance. If we want to know how much the ice is going to grow […]

A multidisciplinary team of University of Utah Health scientists has received a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to investigate how variations in pollutant-sensing genes in the lungs could influence air pollution’s effects on children who have asthma. The researchers say the newly funded effort could potentially lead to the development […]

The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, wages war in our bodies using a strategy evolved over millions of years that turns our own cellular machines against themselves. Despite massive strides in understanding the disease, there are still important gaps. For years, scientists at the University of Utah wished there was a way to visualize how […]

Take a deep breath in. Slowly let it out. You have just participated in one of the most profound evolutionary revolutions on Earth—breathing air on land. It’s unclear how the first vertebrates thrived after crawling out of the sea nearly 400 million years ago, but the lungs hold an important clue. Birds, reptiles, mammals and […]

The flat dry lakebed (also called a playa) surrounding Utah’s Great Salt Lake is more than 750 square miles—an area bigger than Houston. The wide-open landscape is surprisingly varied and is the realm of coyotes, bison, and a few hardy plants. It’s probably safe to say that no one knows the Great Salt Lake playa […]

Scientists from around the world have assessed the planet’s 78 mountain glacier–based water systems and, for the first time, ranked them in order of their importance to adjacent lowland communities, as well as their vulnerability to future environmental and socioeconomic changes. These systems, known as mountain water towers, store and transport water via glaciers, snow […]

The next generation of information technology could take advantage of spintronics—electronics that use the minuscule magnetic fields emanating from spinning electrons as well as the electric charges of the electrons themselves—for faster, smaller electronic devices that use less energy. Newly published work by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Utah […]