This release is adapted from material prepared by University College London Whether ‘alien’ bird species thrive in a new habitat depends more on the environmental conditions than the population size or characteristics of the invading bird species, say researchers, including University of Utah ornithologist Çağan Şekercioğlu. A new study published today in Nature shows that […]

Nature, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, is no spendthrift. Unfortunately, he was wrong. New research led by University of Utah biologists William Anderegg, Anna Trugman and David Bowling find that some plants and trees are prolific spendthrifts in drought conditions—“spending” precious soil water to cool themselves and, in the process, making droughts more intense. The findings […]

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 […]

[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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The University of Utah’s esports team is locked and loaded for a national championship. The U’s varsity esports team is only two years old and its “Overwatch” squad is already heading to its first national collegiate championship as one of the final “Elite Eight” teams in the popular first-person-shooter video game. The squad of six […]

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 […]

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 […]

The University of Utah’s commitment to undergraduate involvement in research will be on full display on Tuesday, April 9, as more than 500 undergraduate students, representing every college and more than 70 academic departments and schools, present their research projects in the 2019 Undergraduate Research Symposium. “The U strongly supports undergraduate research, with programs supported […]