A new study of climate changes and their effects on past societies offers a sobering glimpse of social upheavals that might happen in the future. The prehistoric groups studied lived in the Amazon Basin of South America hundreds of years ago, before European contact, but the disruptions that occurred may carry lessons for our time, […]

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 […]

Plants have important things to say, and University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professor Hanseup Kim wants to listen to them. He leads a team of U engineers who have received a $2.2-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to design and build small chemical sensors that can “sniff” out when a […]

On July 22, 1847, a scouting party from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stood above the Great Salt Lake Valley in modern-day Utah; by 1870, more than 18,000 followers had colonized the valley and surrounding region, displacing Native American populations to establish dispersed farming communities. While historians continue to debate the drivers […]

The town of Escalante in southern Utah is no small potatoes when it comes to scientific discovery; a new archaeological finding within its borders may rewrite the story of tuber domestication. Researchers from the Natural History Museum of Utah and Red Butte Garden at the University of Utah have discovered potato starch residues in the […]

Gardeners know the frustration of a false spring. Coaxed outside by warm weather, some people plant their gardens in the spring only to see a sudden late frost strike at the plants with a killer freezer burn. Grumbling green thumbs, along with farmers and water supply managers, would benefit from more accurate predictions of the […]

From melting glaciers to increasing wildfires, the consequences of climate change and strategies to mitigate such consequences are often a hotly debated topic. A new study led by the University of Utah adds to the ever-growing list of negative impacts climate change can have on humans—low birth weight. The first of its kind, the two-year […]