More than 30 million people watch every episode of TV’s American Idol, an entertainment phenomenon that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Vaudeville. In the late 1800s, vaudeville’s singing, dancing, magic and comedy revues dominated American entertainment. The American Vaudeville Museum – the world’s largest collection of vaudeville memorabilia and artifacts – has moved to The University of Arizona Special Collections. The amazing collection of recordings, photographs, correspondence, costumes, posters and more offers an unmatched opportunity for students and scholars from around the globe—the chance to discover, hands-on, this uniquely American expression that even today shapes how we reflect our world.

An Oxford-educated astronomer full of ideas came to the UA in 1973 and promptly made his mark on the heavens. Today College of Science Regents Professor Roger Angel is revered as a pioneer of modern optics. He designed the world’s largest telescope. Its mirrors are being cast at the UA using technology Angel developed. This spring Angel was in the world news again for his paper proposing to launch a million tiny mirrors into space to reduce global warming. A colleague said of the world-renowned scientist, "if he doesn’t have a dozen good ideas by breakfast, he’s having a bad day."

While scientists today use gold to treat cancer, detect toxins and more, for most of us, it’s simply that shiny symbol of wealth and achievement. And symbols matter, even when you're just getting by. That’s the story suggested by the 4000-year-old gold necklace -- six hundred years older than other gold artifacts discovered in the Americas - unearthed in the Peruvian Andes by UA anthropologist Mark Aldenderfer. The necklace hails surprisingly from a simple village of people living at the subsistence level. Hardly a place to find jewelry, the site and its treasures suggest that even in the poorest early societies, people used symbols to convey power and prestige, pointing the way for generations of hereditary rule.

A patient is rushed into the emergency room suffering from multiple injuries. Doctors must work quickly, making split-second decisions. Before facing this scenario in real life, doctors-in-training at The University of Arizona College of Medicine practice life-saving skills in the new high-tech Arizona Simulation Technology and Education Center (ASTEC). To reduce errors, medical simulation technology offers opportunities for health care providers to perform all types of medical and surgical procedures without risk to patients. ASTEC has partnered with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to develop a new system so future surgeons can hone their skills in laparoscopic surgery before stepping foot in the operating room.

UA Regents' Professor Malcolm Hughes studies bristlecone pines that can live for nearly 5,000 years, recording climate changes as they grow. Hughes analyses data hidden within tree rings that reveal climate patterns across the centuries, then interprets today’s climate changes within that context. Hughes was one of a trio of U.S. scientists who showed that nothing like the global warming of the last century had happened in a thousand years. Working from a lab under the football stadium – where the founder of dendrochronology worked before him – Hughes helped establish the UA as a world-renowned scientific center for the understanding of global warming.

Not many people get the chance to truly change how we see the world. But undergraduate and graduate students - working with UA physics professors Dr. John Rutherfoord and Dr. Michael Shupe - are doing just that. With engineers and other faculty, they’ve created a new kind of calorimeter-a device that captures what happens when protons smash together-capable of withstanding unprecedented collision rates. That’s important when tracking the 600 million impacts per second in the world’s largest particle accelerator, where this new technology plays a starring role. Thanks to Rutherfoord and his team, scientists can now better track those collision dynamics and may finally find proof for theories illuminating earliest moments of our universe.

Using a two-drug punch, researchers have stopped the recurrence of colon polyps by up to 95 percent – a finding that ultimately could prevent colon cancer. Arizona Cancer Center researcher Eugene W. Gerner and his colleagues found that the two-drug combo substantially reduced the recurrence of colon polyps, especially those associated with the highest risk of colorectal cancer. The minimally toxic treatment had few side effects, about the same as those who received a placebo. The experiment combined difluoromethylornithine (DFMO) with sulindac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. This discovery is a landmark advance in efforts to stop the worldwide epidemic of cancer deaths.