A team of geologists led by the University of Utah analyzed 3,500 samples taken in and around coal mines in Utah and Colorado. Their findings open the possibility that these mines could see a secondary resource stream in the form of rare earth metals used in renewable energy and numerous other high-tech applications.
Ivory Prize honors organizations that embody the spirit of innovation and power of transformative ideas in developing solutions to the crisis in housing affordability.
University of Utah researchers document a close association between the pest’s spread and warming temperatures. Their study includes an online tool that forecasts the adelgid spread across the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest based on various climate scenarios.
The Wilkes Climate Launch Prize is one of the largest university-affiliate climate awards in the world and is geared to spur innovation and breakthroughs. The prize is specifically calibrated to support unconventional or first-of-a-kind projects that often have difficulty getting funding.
A heart attack will leave a permanent scar on a human heart, yet other animals, including zebrafish, can clear cardiac scar tissue and regrow damaged muscle as adults. New research by University of Utah biologists sheds new light on how zebrafish heal heart tissue by comparing how this species responds to heart injury with medaka, a fish species that cannot regenerate cardiac tissue.
The detectors, which measure echoes of cosmic particles bombarding Earth’s atmosphere, were built by participants in a program called “Investigating the Development of STEM-Positive Identities of Refugee Teens in a Physics Out of School Time Experience.”
Wirelessly connected devices perform an expanding array of applications, such as monitoring the condition of machinery and remote sensing in agricultural settings. These applications hold much potential for improving the efficiency, but how do you power these devices where reliable electrical sources are not available?
University of Utah Provost Mitzi M. Montoya announced that Kurt Dirks has accepted an offer to serve as dean of the David Eccles School of Business. Dirks is the Bank of America Professor of Managerial Leadership and director of the Bauer Leadership Center at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.
University of Utah biologists announce the discovery of numerous species of roundworm in the highly saline waters of Great Salt Lake, the vast terminal lake in northwestern Utah that supports millions of migratory birds.
Most sighting reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena occur in the American West where proximity to public lands, dark skies and military installations afford more opportunities to see strange objects in the air. Understanding environmental context may help identify truly anomalous objects that are a legitimate threat.
Oracle Bones is a fine press artists’ book published by the Red Butte Press, part of the Book Arts Program at the Marriott Library. The book contains text by Terry Tempest Williams and prints from woodblocks by Gaylord Schanilec, both produced for this edition and not previously published elsewhere.
It has been long assumed that Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats was formed as its ancient namesake lake dried up 13,000 years ago. But new research from the University of Utah has gutted that narrative, determining these crusts did not form until several thousand years after Lake Bonneville disappeared, which could have important implications for managing this feature that has been shrinking for decades to the dismay of the racing community and others who revere the saline pan 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. Relying on radiocarbon analysis of pollen found in salt cores, the study concludes the salt began accumulating between 5,400 and 3,500 years ago, demonstrating how this geological feature is not a permanent fixture on the landscape.
Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, will give the keynote address for the University of Utah’s 2024 general campus-wide commencement.
Utahns who secure higher education degrees earn more income, secure greater employment opportunities, achieve greater upward mobility, participate less in public assistance programs, and garner a variety of other positive benefits.
University of Utah atmospheric scientists set out to better understand extreme snowfall, defined as events in the top 5% in terms of snow accumulations, by analyzing hundreds of events over a 23-year period at Alta, the famed ski destination in the central Wasatch outside Salt Lake City.
University of Utah engineering researchers experiment with various wood laminates and "mass timber" construction techniques to come up with ways to build wood buildings that can stand up to earthquakes, hurricanes, bugs and the elements.
New research indicates that it is possible to forestall the onset of menopause, perhaps indefinitely, by implanting a woman’s own previously harvested ovarian tissue back into her body.
Conserving water won’t be enough to restore the depleted Great Salt Lake, the signature Utah landscape whose existence as a functioning ecosystem remains seriously imperiled from low water levels and rising salinity.
Conserving water won’t be enough to restore the depleted Great Salt Lake, the signature Utah landscape whose existence as a functioning ecosystem remains seriously imperiled from low water levels and rising salinity. Much of the water saved by Utah cities and farms through various conservation measures will have to be allowed to flow into the terminal lake if its levels are to rebound and remain at a safe level, according to Utah’s Great Salt Lake Strike Team. The panel of university and agency experts has released its latest data analysis just ahead of Utah’s upcoming legislative session.
Innovation may be what drives progress in the arts, business, sciences and technology, but the novel ideas that drive innovation often face headwinds that hinder or even prevent their adoption.
The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute today presented the 36th Economic Report to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox at the 2024 Economic Outlook & Public Policy Summit, hosted by the Salt Lake Chamber.
While fog presents a major hazard to transportation safety, meteorologists have yet to figure out how to forecast it with the precision they have achieved for precipitation, wind and other stormy events. This is because the physical processes resulting in fog formation are extremely complex, Now, in a recent paper published by the American Meteorological Society, University of Utah researchers report their findings from an intensive study centered on a northern Utah basin and conceived to investigate the life cycle of cold fog in mountain valleys.
Tim Garrett, an atmospheric scientist, is unlocking the mystery of how snowflakes move in response to air turbulence that accompanies snowfall using novel instrumentation developed on campus.
A greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2, methane emissions are blamed for at least a quarter of the climate change underway on Earth. Researchers are exploring way to put microbes to work removing enough of that methane from the atmosphere to dampen global warming.
The new public history digital database called "This Abominable Slavery," explores Indigenous and African American enslavement in Utah Territory through primary source documents – many of which are available to the public for the first time.
The researchers describe the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray, dubbed the Amaterasu particle after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology. They evaluated its characteristics and conclude that the rare phenomena might follow particle physics unknown to science.
To demonstrate this point, Professor Chong Shu and his colleagues Matthew Kahn and John Matsusaka from the University of Southern California examined the 30 largest state pension funds benefiting public employees, with a total of $5 trillion in assets under management. Funds were defined as “green” and “not green” according to the political party of the state’s governor or the fund’s board of trustees.
The way ice forms is a lot more interesting than you think. This basic physical process, among the most common in nature, also remains somewhat mysterious despite decades of scientific scrutiny.
Two major investments in technology research and development were announced Thursday, Oct. 12, by University of Utah President Taylor Randall, marking the U’s expanding partnerships with industry and government players in the areas of artificial intelligence and semiconductors.
The organization, which consists of state-wide partnerships between institutions of higher education, governmental bodies, and members of private industry, will help develop Utah’s semiconductor workforce and increase its access to key technological infrastructure.
The University of Utah is launching a new research initiative focused on AI that aims to responsibly use advanced AI technology to tackle societal issues. President Taylor Randall announced a $100 million investment in the newly created Responsible AI Initiative that will advance AI, led by the U’s Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute.
Google Street View cars equipped with instrumentation sampled air quality at a scale fine enough to capture variations within neighborhoods in the Salt Lake Valley. A new atmospheric modeling method, combined with these mobile observations, can be used to identify pollution emission sources in many cities.
Methanogens in the cow rumen make methane gas as a by-product. Lumen scientists engineered spirulina to biomanufacture a natural enzyme that destroys only methanogens, with no impact on the cow or other bacteria.
Ivory Innovations announces three winners of Hack-A-House, a 24-hour “hackathon” created to engage students in proposing innovative solutions to address the housing affordability crisis.
The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute’s State of the State’s Housing Market report provides a detailed analysis of current market conditions in Utah, which shows residential construction activity, existing home sales, housing shortages, and affordability were all impacted in a way not seen since the Great Recession.
University of Utah biologist Richard Clark has published research this month that sheds new light on how the two-spotted spider mite mite, known to science as Tetranychus urticae, quickly evolves resistance to foreign compounds, known as xenobiotics.
Voluntary collective isolation alone was ineffective to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 into small-scale, remote Indigenous communities of the Tsimané in the Bolivian Amazon.
Every time you engage with Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix and other online sites, algorithms are busy behind the scenes chronicling your activities and queuing up recommendations tailored to what they know about you.
Earth’s rapidly changing climate is taking an increasingly heavy toll on landscapes around the world in the form of floods, rising sea levels, extreme weather, drought and wildfire. Also at growing risk are the values of the property where these hazards are projected to worsen, according to a new study by University of Utah scholars. The research team, led by biology professor William Anderegg, attempted, for the first time, to quantify the value of U.S. property at risk in forested areas exposed to increased wildfire and tree mortality associated with climate stresses and beetle infestation.
U seismologists are analyzing decades of seismic data in the hope of discerning the significance of earthquake swarms in a geologically complex region known as a geothermal hotspot and for recent—geologically speaking—volcanism.
In a first-of-its-kind study that controlled for individuals’ biological factors, researchers found that people who lived in multi-family housing, or in areas with higher levels of air pollution and access to public transit, were at a higher risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 in the Denver Metro Area in 2020.
Women buried at the ancestral Ohlone site of Kalawwasa Rummeytak in the San Francisco Bay Area in California were breastfed longer and accumulated greater wealth than the men. Isotopic analysis indicates that after marriage, men lived with their wives’ families and women tended to remain in their birth community. This study is the first of its kind to uncover wealth-driven patterns in maternal investment among ancient populations.
How Earth’s inner core formed, grew and evolved over time remains a mystery, one that a team of University of Utah-led researchers is seeking to plumb with the help of seismic waves from naturally occurring earthquakes.