UCF in the News

A Nov. 8 Facebook post (direct link, archived link) shows two photos: one of the moon illuminating a body of water and another of an astronaut standing on the moon next to the American flag. Yan Fernandez, a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida, told USA TODAY that the light reflected off the moon’s surface works much like other objects.

As more businesses in the hospitality industry consider robots as a solution to a thinned frontline service workforce, owners and operators must recognize that their investment in a service robot extends beyond the hardware and software. It may require targeted training, small architectural and design improvements to the physical space, an assessment of organizational and managerial readiness, or all of the above. Service robots can help elevate customer service if their purpose is clear, if their physical environment is conducive, and if leadership actively supports staff during the adoption process.

Even the most successful space missions initially encounter snafus which can keep their project managers up all night. And the European Space Agency's Euclid mission is no exception. Roughly one month after its launch this past July, the team realized that the spacecraft had issues. Ones that could jeopardize Euclid’s forthcoming wide-field survey to finally understand the cosmos’ unseen dark energy and dark matter. Although Euclid was not designed to study asteroids, it is expected observe more than 150,000 of them as foreground objects in its images. This will produce a gold mine of data on asteroids; we will characterize smaller and more distant asteroids than possible from ground-based telescopes, Humberto Campins, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, told me via email.

The University of Central Florida has grown its prominence in research as it prepares for its football team to play the latest iteration of the Space Game. UCF's football team will play Oklahoma State on Nov. 11, the seventh installment of the game which includes special Citronaut uniforms and promotes the school's research and more. The school's ties extend from when it was founded in 1963 to provide the workforce for activity on Florida's Space Coast, to now, where rockets from Launch Pad 39A line up with FBC Mortgage Stadium's 50-yard line.

Less ink has been spilled in the quest for the Holy Grail than a more elusive prize: the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Every year, magazines and newspapers and websites — including, of course, The Washington Post — offer up the latest and greatest takes on the recipes and techniques that will produce for the reader willing to follow along the bronzed, juicy, flavorful centerpiece of their holiday table that they’ve been dreaming of. “There’s a saying in food media that every Thanksgiving is a cook’s first turkey,” says Kim Voss, a University of Central Florida professor who studies the history of food journalism. “But it’s another cook’s 20th — so the question is how do you balance out the need for the basics and the fact that someone has been cooking for so long, it’s like ‘give me something new.’”

Dr. Phillips Charities wants to be the naming rights sponsor for the University of Central Florida's Lake Nona College of Nursing building in east Orlando. The college's board of trustees will consider on Nov. 16 the Dr. Phillips Nursing Pavilion name for the 90,000-square-foot, $68 million-plus facility at its current Lake Nona Academic Health Sciences campus. The Orlando nonprofit donated more than $10 million for the project to enable UCF to help meet the region's nursing shortage. "Being able to educate more nurses will help our local partner hospitals in Orlando Health and AdventHealth fill critical positions and provide the best care possible for their patients and our community," Ken D. Robinson, president and CEO of Dr. Phillips Charities, told Orlando Business Journal. He added that the organization's history with UCF goes back to the university's inception when Howard Phillips was one of the guarantors for UCF to be created.

The UCF Themed Experience Graduate programs are fortunate to be in the international hub of the themed entertainment industry (Orlando). We have drawn on this local industry leadership resource to create an exceptional UCF Themed Experience Advisory Council. Here, several members of that Council share their thoughts on the future of themed experience and entertainment education.

Each time you take a sip of water, you’re imbibing liquid that, in all likelihood, is up to 4.5 billion years old. Earth is awash in a life-sustaining substance about as ancient as the planet itself. Astrophysicists don’t completely know where the stuff came from, but circumstantial evidence suggests that water-containing meteorites might have pummeled an infant Earth. Those rocky showers would have helped transform a bone-dry place into a unique wet world. When the solar system first came together, some of the young planets were too hot for water. “Earth and Mars should have formed extremely dry,” says Humberto Campins, an asteroid expert at the University of Central Florida—due to their locations in the solar system’s frost line. "The pieces of the puzzle are not clear," says Campins, who is a member of the team that probed Bennu's contents. But he points to one major clue that "gives us an idea of where the water may be coming from": the type of hydrogen that flows through our aquatic systems.

A man out to dinner with his daughters, meeting his grandchild for the first time, suddenly collapsed. Luckily, a group of a physician from HCA Florida Osceola Hospital and three UCF-HCA Healthcare residents were dining nearby and rushed over to help. Together, they administered CPR and care until paramedics arrived. And when he arrived at the hospital, he ended up being assigned to Dr. Suhail Saad-Omer, who helped him at the scene.