UNLV anthropologists made headlines in August for a paper that takes aim at a popular scientific claim that modern humans experienced an evolutionary decrease in brain size around 3,000 years ago. The evidence doesn’t support it, according to the UNLV team, which doubled down to say it may not have happened in the last 30,000 or even 300,000 years.
Less than two years after shocking the science world with the discovery of a material capable of room-temperature superconductivity, a team of UNLV physicists has upped the ante by reproducing the feat at the lowest pressure ever recorded. In other words, science is closer than it’s ever been to a material that could revolutionize how energy is transported. The findings were published in the journal Chemical Communications.
UNLV preschool teacher Carl Esteban was named Nevada’s Early Childhood Educator of the Year for pre-kindergarten by the state’s Department of Education. Esteban earned his bachelor's degree from UNLV and is pursuing a master's in special education. He has worked at the UNLV/CSUN Preschool since 2017.
UNLV’s School of Life Sciences earned an NSF grant to continue a successful STEM initiative that funds scholarships for talented low- income college students to pursue careers in STEM. The program, which has granted 36 scholarships since 2018, also encourages research and supports activities related to participant recruitment, retention, and graduation.
UNLV student-athletes earned an NCAA Academic Progress Rate of 985/1000 – the university’s highest-ever score. APR calculates academic success of athletics programs by tracking eligibility, retention, and graduation rates over multiple years. Seven UNLV teams earned a perfect score of 1,000.
UNLV radiochemists earned nearly $3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to identify future nuclear energy workforce needs and determine how higher education can help fill those needs. UNLV is one of few universities nationwide with a radiochemistry program.
Starting this fall, UNLV will join approximately 2,000 universities across the country that have become tobacco-free campuses. The new policy was approved by university leadership in 2021 and will prohibit all forms of smoking, tobacco use, and unregulated nicotine products as of Aug. 15.
UNLV and 19 of the nation’s top research universities recently formed the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities. The Alliance is committed to increasing opportunity for those historically underserved by higher education, with goals to significantly boost Hispanic doctoral student enrollment and faculty numbers at member institutions by 2030.
Building on the success of UNLV’s wastewater surveillance program, the university is partnering with the Southern Nevada Health District, Southern Nevada Water Authority, and Desert Research Institute on a new online dashboard to detect early increases of SARS-CoV-2 and emerging variants in Southern Nevada.
The Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV will continue its long-standing study of traffic-related injuries and fatalities in Nevada, thanks to a grant from the NV Dept. of Public Safety. The school maintains a longitudinal database spanning more than a decade of vehicle crash and statewide trauma center injury data, highlighting trends to encourage development of safety policies that will save lives and prevent injuries.
Sport management professor Nancy Lough and colleagues with the national Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport co-authored “DisruptHERS,” a new model to change how women’s sports are marketed, sponsored, endorsed, invested in, and broadcast. The timely report drives home how people of different generations, genders, and genres can tap into their own personal platforms to power change.
Paul Werth, professor of history, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the area of European and Latin American history. He is among a diverse group of 180 scholars representing various disciplines chosen from thousands of applicants across North America.