CALS News and Announcements

  • Arizona SciTech Festival Events Throughout February 2012

    The Arizona SciTech Festival showcases Arizona as a national leader in science, technology and innovation through a series of events taking place January 25-March 14, 2012.  The Festival is a grass roots collaboration of over 200 organizations in industry, academia, arts, community and K-12, geared to excite and inform Arizonans ages three to 103 about how science, technology and innovation will drive our state for the next 100 years.
     

  • UA Revamps Minor to Focus on Fashion, Retail

    Trendy UA students might be able to turn their love for fashion into a degree with a proposed minor.

    The fashion and consumers minor, if approved by the UA, will start this summer with online courses that deal with fashion economics and research through the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences with the help of the Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing.

  • Published in Journal of Extension

    Several CALS faculty members had articles published in the December 2011 issue of the Journal of Extension:

    • Assessing the Culture of Fresh Produce Safety Within A Leafy Green Producing Community by Kurt Nolte, Yuma County Cooperative Extension; Charles Sanchez and Jorge Fonseca, Yuma Agricultural Center

  • School IPM in the 21st Century

    University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty serve on the National IPM School Working Group providing support to schools practicing Integrated Pest Management. With support from a U.S. EPA grant (2010 PRIA 2 grant), the team recently created two new documents:

    The Business Case for Integrated Pest Management in Schools: Cutting Costs and Increasing Benefits

    See http://www.ipminstitute.org/school_ipm_2015/ipm_business_case.pdf

     

  • Local Farmers Ensuring Food Safety Long Before Federal Bill

    Even before President Obama signed a new food safety law on Jan. 4, 2011, Yuma-area farmers had been voluntarily taking steps to ensure the healthy vegetables they produce don't end up being a health risk instead.

    It all starts at ground zero with the soil and water that nurture the plants from seed to maturity. It includes the workers and equipment used in the fields to plant, cultivate and harvest the crops. And it extends to the packing houses and salad plants where the vegetables are cooled, processed and readied for distribution to consumers across the country.

  • Sorghum a Sweet Treat for Zoo Animals

    This holiday season, animals in Tucson's Reid Park Zoo get to munch on a rare treat: scraps from the University of Arizona's research into renewable energy sources.

    Researchers from the UA's department of agricultural and biosystems engineering, who are growing sweet sorghum for the production of environmentally friendly biofuel, have found a new way of disposing of the leftovers without throwing them away.

  • Cotton Growers Reducing Whiteflies with Green Alternatives

    Some Arizona growers continue to combat whiteflies with broad-spectrum insecticides that wipe out a number of insects, despite the availability of sprays that specifically target whiteflies. Steve Naranjo, a scientist with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), and Peter Ellsworth of the University of Arizona conducted a study where they treated some plots with insecticides specific to whiteflies and other plots with broad-spectrum insecticides. They left a third set of plots as untreated controls. Naranjo is a research leader and acting center director at the ARS U.S.

  • UA Team Leads Nationwide Survey of Coupon Usage

    Established assumptions about regular coupon users are that they tend to be women of color with large families who fall into lower socioeconomic brackets, said University of Arizona researcher Anita Bhappu.

    But findings from a series of investigations on coupon usage Bhappu and her team have led could serve to undermine those assumptions.

    Bhappu, the UA PetSmart associate professor and division chair of retailing and consumer sciences, and her team have just completed a nationwide survey that has yielded interesting findings about who uses coupons and why.

  • Military Kids Get 'Deployed' for a Day

    A few dozen fresh-faced recruits - very fresh-faced - were deployed Sunday at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base as part of Operation Junior Heroes.
     
    The program, a "mock deployment" for children of military servicemen and -women, tries to re-create scenarios similar to those experienced by troops during deployment, said Teresa Noon, director of the Arizona branch of Operation Military Kids, a support program for children and youths impacted by the deployment of their parents.
     

  • Future Bright as Arizona's Sun for Making Algae Economic Driver

    In the future, Arizona may have to add an A to the five C's - copper, cotton, climate, citrus and cattle--that have been the state's economic drivers.


    Algae thrives on sunshine, CO‚, and brackish water. Three things that Arizona has in abundance, making the state the perfect place for growing algae for food, feed and ultimately fuel.


    This makes algae a potential boon for researchers at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University, both operating under the Sustainable Algae Biofuels Consortium.