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A team of researchers has highlighted human-wildlife conflict as one of the globe’s most pressing human development and conservation dilemmas. New research published in Communications Biology looked at 133 countries where 18 large carnivores ranged, and found that a person farming with cattle in developing countries such as Kenya, Uganda or India were up to eight times more economically vulnerable than those living in developed economies such as Sweden, Norway or the U.S.

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A review article published today in Nature addresses this conflict between models and evidence, known as the Holocene global temperature conundrum. Lead author Darrell Kaufman, a Regents’ professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability, and University of Arizona postdoctoral researcher Ellie Broadman, a co-author who worked on this study while earning her Ph.D. at NAU, analyzed a broad swath of available data from the last 12,000 years to break down the conundrum.

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In honor of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated on Feb. 11, Northern Arizona University asked a variety of woman scientists why they chose their field and what advice they had for women and girls hoping to follow the same path.

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The five-year multidisciplinary initiative is focused on tree species critical to Western Apache tribal communities and includes multiple researchers from throughout NAU.

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NAU professor Jeff Foster was recently awarded a grant by the DoD for a new study, “Demonstration of Metabarcoding for Monitoring Bird Species Habitat Quality on DoD Installations.” This three-year, $900,000 project will focus on five insectivorous species on four military sites.

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An innovative protocol called PepSeq is changing the way researchers test for contagious diseases—and this knowledge should change the way humanity responds to future pandemics. NAU researcher Jason Ladner and a team of collaborators from TGen published a comprehensive study about PepSeq that lays out the process, the tool and how to interpret the results.

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A recent study co-authored by associate professor Matthew Bowker found important connections between grazing pressure on drylands and the ecosystem services they provide. 

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In two connected studies, cave ecologist Jut Wynne, along with dozens of co-authors including engineers, astrophysicists, astrobiologists and astronauts, lay out the research that needs to be done to get us closer to answering the old-age question about life beyond Earth.

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The collective impact approach to enhance workforce development and increase graduation rates.

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Mechanical engineer Jennifer Wade is leading two federally funded projects that are addressing the critical question of how to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, thus slowing the devastating effects of global climate change. It's part of a national effort called the Carbon Negative Earthshot: Being able to remove carbon at $100 a ton at a scale of a million tons per year. That's a difficult task, Wade says, but it's not an insurmountable one.

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By the end of this century, permafrost in the rapidly warming Arctic will likely emit as much carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as a large industrial nation, and potentially more than the U.S. has emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. 

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A groundbreaking research collaborative at Northern Arizona University received another $21 million grant to continue its work to promote health equity and study health disparities among diverse populations of the American Southwest.

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Researchers from Northern Arizona University and the University of Washington School of Medicine in collaboration with the Washington National Primate Research Center received a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund a groundbreaking project that they hope will result in a safe and effective vaccine for Valley Fever.

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What organism on the CDC's bioterrorism watch list poses the most risk? You might be surprised. Biologist Jeff Foster says it's Brucella—dangerous because of just how prevalent it is worldwide.

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A team of NAU scientists, led by SICCS professor Kiona Ogle, won a $3.6 million grant from the NSF to study the legacy of extreme climate events on ecosystems in the American West; they hope to not only know how long an extreme event influences ecosystems but also figure out how to better forecast such effects.

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Astronomy postdoc Valerie Payré is on an international team that discovered the origin of the martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, one of the most-studied meteorites in the world. It may hold clues to the development of Earth and other terrestrial planets and help explain why Earth sustains life when its closest neighbor does not.

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Find out how an NAU team, led by professor Jim Gaherty, will conduct a seismological study of the Cocos tectonic plate deep beneath the Pacific Ocean.

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Could the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine reawaken previous antibody responses and point the way to a universal coronavirus vaccine? A new analysis of the antibody response to a COVID-19 vaccine suggests the immune system’s history with other coronaviruses, including those behind the common cold, shapes the patient’s response, according to a recently published study published in Cell Reports.