For years, researchers have been trying to harness the crop-growing benefits of the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), for example, can deliver water and nutrients to the roots of plants like sorghum, a grain used to produce biofuels. The US Department of Energy (DOE) is particularly interested in producing sorghum more efficiently to reduce the need for irrigation and fertilizer, and… Read more
research
NAU researcher receives NSF CAREER award to develop drones that operate autonomously in remote environments
Fatemeh Afghah, an associate professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) at Northern Arizona University, has received a $550,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, one of the foundation’s most prestigious awards. The funding will support a project developing algorithms that will enable a fleet of smart and autonomous drones to assess situations, change… Read more
NAU paleoclimatologists author major new study showing global warming has upended 6,500 years of cooling
Over the past 150 years, global warming has more than undone the global cooling that occurred over the past six millennia, according to a major study published June 30 in Nature Research’s Scientific Data, “Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach.” The findings show that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago when the long-term average global… Read more
NAU researchers study effects of COVID-19, health disparities on caregivers of people with ADRD
Sixteen million family members in the US are caregivers for the more than 6 million people living with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). For many caregivers in rural areas such as northern Arizona, health disparities prevent them from accessing the healthcare and support services they need. COVID-19-related isolation is adding… Read more
Top Northern Arizona University microbiologist joins COVID-19 Genomics Union to track virus, lead state’s response to pandemic
Team will use genomic sequencing to track new coronavirus, provide critical data for global biomedical researchers and give Arizona an edge in responding to the pandemic
The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, The Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona University and the Ecology and… Read more
As ice recedes in Antarctica, new microbial research frontier opens for NAU, Texas Tech team
Warming global temperatures are changing life on every continent on Earth, including Antarctica, where more microbes are moving in to territory previously covered by ice. How these microbes respond to warming offers us clues about what future Antarctica will look like and who will thrive there. Microbial ecologist and PhD candidate Alicia Purcell from the Center for Ecosystem… Read more