Human Interest

A new service has been opened for free to the public thanks to University of Arizona libraries: the Wildcats Memory Lab. Here, people can bring their old media forms such as home videos on VHS, cassette tapes, vinyl, even floppy disks and other media forms, to be digitized. The project is led by Stacey Erdman, an associate faculty librarian who oversees both digital preservation and archival digitization for the library. It is funded thanks to a $43,240 grant from Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Consciousness: it’s a mystery that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and scientists throughout human history. Where does our first person sense of experience come from? One of the leading theories today comes from Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona. Back in the 1990’s, he had a clandestine meeting with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and together they came up with a profound – and controversial – new hypothesis that our brains construct conscious experience from quantum mechanical processes laced into the very fabric of the universe. Now 30 years later, evidence in favor of their theory is mounting thanks to incredible new findings by Director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center, Dante Lauretta, who also recently captained NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. That mission collected pristine samples from an asteroid that dates to the dawn of the solar system, and inside they’ve found clues that the quantum nature of consciousness might have preceded the formation of life on Earth. Lauretta thinks that further study could solve another great scientific mystery: the origin of life.

There’s probably no person alive who knows the songs, history, and myths of Arizona better than Dolan Ellis – because it’s likely, he’s the one that wrote them. Ellis has been serving as Arizona’s first and only Official State Balladeer, a unique governor-appointed position, since 1966. He has dedicated his life to traveling around the state, writing and collecting stories and songs about Arizona’s most colorful characters, landmarks, and legends. In 1996, Dolan founded the Arizona Folklore Preserve in Ramsey Canyon, a charming venue that continues Dolan’s dream of celebrating the folk songs and cowboy legacies of our state. The theater there still hosts weekly performances by visiting artists.

Splinter Collective is a housing and community gathering space located in the Barrio Anita and Dunbar Spring neighborhoods in Tucson. It's also adjacent to Estevan Park, which in recent years has become a nexus for a local encampment for people experiencing homelessness and a symbol for Tucson's growing housing crisis. While the city has regularly responded to the challenges of managing the park with a top-down approach that manifests as regular sweeps of the encampment, Splinter Collective is trying out a different, bottom-up strategy: by envisioning what a community-based response might look like; by building relationships, offering humane services, conducting beautification projects in the park, and treating community members experiencing homelessness as fellow neighbors rather than trespassers.

The origin of the COVID-19 pandemic has become a heated and politicized public debate. Did the virus come from a Chinese lab leak, or did it jump from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market? Enter Michael Worobey, Department Head of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona and one of the world’s leading scientists studying the genomic origins of pandemics. His research has produced strong evidence supporting a market origin for the virus, though public opinion on the topic has been slow to catch up.

Fictional storytelling is an important and pervasive part of how human cultures transmit knowledge and values across generations. But there are many philosophical questions that arise from this human act of fiction-making. For instance, what does it mean for a work of fiction — that is, a made-up story — to say something about what’s true? Hannah H. Kim, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, argues that by examining questions like this, philosophy of fiction can help us better navigate a media landscape rife with misinformation, bots, and propaganda — and in doing so, teach us something about what it means to live a good life.

Social media has played an increasingly pivotal role in shaping political life, and social scientists are working to better understand its impacts. Yotam Shmargad, a computational social scientist at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy, is at the forefront of this burgeoning new research field. He examines ways in which social media technology is skewing our political realities, but notes that this might be a temporary blip in the history of democracy.

Twice a year, the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association opens up their exclusive Chiricahua Astronomy Complex to the public for an “evening under the stars” – a remarkable opportunity for the local community to get a look at the night sky in detail they may never have seen before. The complex sits within a designated Dark Sky area, where the band of the Milky Way shimmers as it parades across the sky, inspiring wows and wonders from star gazers.

On September 24, 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached a thrilling conclusion with the return of a sample from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth. It represents NASA’s first ever asteroid sample return, and it promises to reveal clues about the origin of our solar system, the origin of our planet, and potentially the origin of life itself. The mission has been characterized by remarkable successes at every stage over its 7 year journey in space, which is a testament to the team behind it – led by Principal Investigator and University of Arizona Regents Professor at the Lunar and Planetary Lab, Dante Lauretta. But there’s one last stage of the mission upon which all others depend: the safe delivery of the sample capsule through Earth’s atmosphere, and the gentle deployment of a parachute to ease its landing in the Utah desert.

SPACEWATCH is a NASA-funded program at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab that was founded in 1980 to keep track of hazardous asteroids and comets in our solar system that might pose an impact threat to Earth. The program, led by Principal Investigator Melissa Brucker, makes observations 24+ nights a month from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Their most recent headline-grabbing collaboration was with the NASA DART mission, which smacked a small spacecraft into an asteroid to see how well it could deflect the rock from its orbital trajectory, as a test for planetary defense.

Founded in 1893, Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona is the oldest and largest anthropological research facility in the U.S. Southwest. It is also Arizona’s official archaeological repository, housing more than 3 million cataloged objects, and growing by as much as 1,000 cubic feet of bulk material every year. Three separate collections are especially prized (pottery, basketry, photography), designated as American Treasures by the U.S. government, which underscores the museum’s vital importance to the nation's shared cultural history.

Archaeologists have recently uncovered ancient human footprints beneath the windswept landscape of White Sands National Park in New Mexico that date to as far back as 23,000 years. That makes these footprints the earliest unequivocal evidence for human habitation in the Americas, pushing back our understanding of the date of arrival by as much as 10,000 years. The history-shaking find also helps to validate Native American claims of a deep time connection to this continent, and could forever alter our theories about the peopling of the Americas.

Dr. Ski Chilton has dedicated his life to helping people around the world overcome health challenges to live more fulfilled and joyful lives, but he heralds his latest discovery as the most important thing he’s ever done. Chilton and his team at the University of Arizona believe they have discovered an enzyme that is at the very heart of COVID-19 mortality. His lab is now leading an international effort to develop an inhibitor to this enzyme that might drastically reduce the risk of severe disease. He hopes it could serve as a miracle medicine in places with low vaccination rates, like Africa.

Climate change is personal to Arizona residents, and few know this better than University of Arizona climate scientist, Jessica Tierney. She is a lead author on the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a United Nations body that is the world authority on our changing climate. This latest report is perhaps the starkest yet - laying out unequivocal evidence of the role that human activity plays in warming the planet. Tierney and her team examine what this might mean for Arizona, our life-giving monsoon season, and the ongoing drought.

AzREADI, or the Arizona Rural EMS Advanced Telemedicine Demonstration Initiative, is an innovative new program to bring immediate lifesaving telemedicine access to remote areas of rural southern Arizona, such as the Sonoita-Elgin Fire District. Spearheaded by University of Arizona’s Department of Emergency Medicine, the program makes use of a specialized wireless network dedicated to first responders that can connect doctors with paramedics even if they are hours apart and located in regions otherwise devoid of cell service.

On October 20th, 2020, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft unfurled its robotic arm and briefly touched one of the oldest objects in our solar system - the asteroid Bennu - and captured a sample of material to bring back to Earth. The moment was the pinnacle of this record-making mission, an example of the scientific ingenuity and engineering acumen of the team behind it at the University of Arizona... and we were there to capture every anxious and exhilarating moment as the event unfolded.

As the 2020 election looms, it might seem like our communities are more polarized than ever before. But according to University of Arizona political scientist Samara Klar, recent research shows that the coronavirus pandemic has an unexpected silver lining when it comes to our politics: by actually bringing us all closer together.

A women-only oyster farming cooperative along Mexico's Gulf of California demonstrates the importance of community if we want to protect our natural resources. Produced in collaboration with Hakai Magazine.

Niqi Cavanaugh is a transgender ballet dancer who has faced many personal challenges, both in her internal struggle to self-identify and as a professional in an artistic medium that has traditionally placed a premium on defined gender roles and body form. Her journey to transcend gender norms and artistic convention is a testimony of self-affirmation, one which she has emerged from with an inspirational embrace for life. This was completed as collaboration with NW Documentary.