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The Salt Lake City area has made strides in cleaning up the airborne particulate matter that cloaks the valley during winter inversions and has kept these pollution levels within federal limits in recent years. At the same time, ozone, an invisible gas that irritates the lungs and airways, has continued to plague the region. U.S. Rep. Ben McAdams is trying to figure out why and what to do about it.

Dr. Lauren Birgenhier and Dr. Cari Johnson have won a 2019 GRIT Award for She Persisted. The GRIT Awards℠ & Best Energy Workplaces℠, sponsored by Medallia, were created to recognize women leaders in energy and the male allies who advocate for their advancement. Nearly 300 nominations poured in from across the world from oil and gas, utilities, and alternative energy companies, academia, and non-government organizations (NGOs).

In a paper published as part of an upcoming focus section on regional seismic networks in Seismological Research Letters, University of Utah seismologist Keith Koper explains how the work of regional seismic networks in North America is contributing to nuclear test monitoring, particularly in the case of low-yield explosions. Koper is the director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations.

The new meteorites were found by the 2018-19 U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) field team, led by Jim Karner at the University of Utah and Ralph Harvey at Case Western Reserve University. The lunar meteorites were recovered from icefields near the Dominion Range (DOM) of the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the South Pole.

Smoke from a summer wildfire is more than just an eye-stinging plume of nuisance. It’s a poison to the lungs and hearts of the people who breathe it in and a dense blanket that hampers firefighting operations. There’s an atmospheric feedback loop, says University of Utah atmospheric scientist Adam Kochanski, that can lock smoke in valleys in much the same way that temperature inversions lock the smog and gunk in the Salt Lake Valley each winter. But understanding this loop, Kochanski says, can help scientists predict how smoke will impact air quality in valleys, hopefully helping both residents and firefighters alike.