Research & Academics

April 4, 2019

On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, it is possible to stand in a lush tropical forest that doesn’t contain a single native plant. The birds that once dispersed native seeds are entirely gone, leaving a brand-new ecological community composed largely of introduced plants and birds. In a first-of-its-kind study published in Science, researchers demonstrate that these novel communities are organized in much the same way as native communities worldwide.

The discovery comes after an exhaustive examination of bird… Read more

April 4, 2019

The misuse of and addiction to opioids, including prescription analgesics and street drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, is a serious national crisis affecting public health as well as the country’s social and economic welfare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose. The CDC estimates the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse in the United States is $78.5 billion a… Read more

Taking a human’s temperature is a good way to determine if their body is under stress or getting sick.

The same is true of places on Earth that are prone to drought stress in a warming climate. That’s the idea behind Drought Eye, a new tool developed by Bijan Seyednasrollah of Northern Arizona University’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) and School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS). By taking the temperature of a given… Read more

March 29, 2019

Golden toads, the effect of uranium on human skin cells, research from hundreds of feet in the air and what asteroids tell us about the location of Planet X all got a brief—180 seconds, to be exact—moment in the spotlight this week at Northern Arizona University’s annual 3-Minute Research Presentation (3MRP) finals, held Tuesday at the High Country Conference Center.

Ten graduate student finalists got three minutes and one slide to present complex research in an engaging, informative… Read more

March 27, 2019

A study published Wednesday in Nature used climate records dating back thousands of years to demonstrate that warming in the Arctic is associated with fewer storms and increased aridity in a huge swath of the Northern Hemisphere, including most of the continental United States. This pattern could lead to dramatic effects on agriculture and population centers throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Assistant research professor Cody Routson, assistant professor Nick McKay, Regents professor Darrell Kaufman and postdoctoral… Read more

March 18, 2019

According to the National Institutes for Health, asthma is a chronic lung disease affecting more than 300 million people worldwide—25 million in the U.S. alone, including 7 million children. Because it inflames and narrows the airways, the disease significantly affects quality of life, causing recurring periods of wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath and coughing.

The incidence of asthma is rising as more Americans subsist on high-fat, low-fiber diets, especially in low-income urban populations where air quality is also… Read more