International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration

UA researcher leads team of students through international research study: The Crimson White – April 17

A University of Alabama associate professor of geological sciences is part of a seven-year project dedicated to researching a glacier in Antarctica that has been receding for nearly a hundred years.  

Cicada Broods

Swarms of cicadas coming to Alabama: What makes this summer historic: Al.com – April 17

For the first time in 221 years, two distinct cicada broods will emerge at the same time, bringing a few billion red-eyed insects into our springtime air…“It’s the first time they have overlapped in 221 years, which makes it a pretty rare event,” said John C. Abbott, chief curator and director of museum research and collections at The University of Alabama.

Columbine Shooting

25 years ago, the trauma of Columbine was ‘seared into us.’ It’s still ‘an open wound’: USA Today – April 19

The massacre at Columbine on April 20, 1999, during which 12 students and one teacher were killed, wasn’t the United States’ first mass shooting at a school, nor would it be the last. But media experts told USA TODAY it quickly became one of the most infamous thanks in part to the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet…Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminology professor who has researched mass shooters, said the media attention on the perpetrators at Columbine may have contributed to this “contagion effect.”

Medicaid Expansion

Why haven’t Kansas and Alabama — among other holdouts — expanded access to Medicaid?’: NPR – April 22

From Nebraska to North Carolina, states with Republican-led legislatures have slowly moved toward expanding access to Medicaid for thousands of their residents. But some are still holding out…”Just the partisan nature of this is definitely a problem,” said Regina Wagner, professor of political science at The University of Alabama. Wagner said that for years Republican legislators in the south promised to repeal Obamacare.