UCF in the News

If you’re feeling unmotivated—or even unwell—at work right now, you’re hardly alone. What you’re feeling is valid, as your newsfeeds and social feeds are likely filled with atrocious and graphic updates around war, terrorism, and gun violence. Toggling from a breaking news story to a non-urgent work email can be emotionally distressing, to say the least. “Excessive news consumption, especially when it involves so much negativity and repeated crises, is related to feelings of anxiety, fear, despair, anger, and disgust,” says Chrysalis Wright, psychologist and associate lecturer at the University of Central Florida. “These feelings can take a toll on us and our well-being, but there are things we can do about it.” We asked mental health experts what self-care can look like, both for people on the job and during a mental health day.

Recently I wrote about how instructors are using AI in class. Some are giving assignments they hope will help students cast a more critical eye on generative AI; others are showing students how AI can be used productively. But how can you appropriately guide students in an online course? That’s what Beth Rapp Young, an associate professor in the department of English at the University of Central Florida, is wrestling with. She writes: I find that the AI can solve many homework and test questions in the classes I teach. For example, the AI can “Write a sentence that contains both a nominal clause and an adverbial prepositional phrase” or “Explain whether this sentence [written in Old English] is in SVO, SOV, or VSO order” or “Which of the following passages does NOT follow the known/new contract?” Often the classes I teach are fully online/asynchronous so there is no possibility of moving some of this work to a face-to-face classroom.

Maryann Kilgallon, a UCF Incubation Program client and business founder, heard a harrowing story about a Duke Energy employee — the kind of story her company’s product was designed to avert. "This man, John, was on assignment in Puerto Rico, cutting down trees for a power-related project. He was working alone when a tree fell backwards, hit him, and pushed him over the side of a mountain. His radio was in his truck, so even though he was alive, he had no way to call for help,” said Kilgallon. The center is available not only for the development of projects owned by Siemens or its clients, but also UCF incubator clients and any other businesses with applicable projects.

Picture it: After years of fantasizing and months of planning, you finally arrive at the destination you've always dreamed about. Except, it's just not how you pictured it. You spend three hours in traffic just to pull into Yosemite National Park. The Venice Canal bridges are overrun with strangers scrambling for the same selfies. You can barely see Yellowstone's Old Faithful through the rows of people trying to get a good view. And beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you are dodging tour groups and cheap souvenir stalls. "At the end of the day, there's roughly 8 billion people on the planet. In the next 20 to 30 years, there's going to be another billion people on the planet. A lot of those people will travel. Where are they going to go? Well, the same places as everybody else," Alan Fyall, the Visit Orlando endowed chair of tourism marketing at the University of Central Florida's Rosen College of Hospitality Management who studies sustainable tourism, told Insider. "There's a lot of people with sufficient money and time to travel, so it's not going to get any easier." "Instagram is really compounding the problem," Fyall said, explaining that social media is part of the reason so many people want to go to the exact same spot when they visit a destination. "Everybody wants to get that shot."

A statewide approach to supporting undergraduate research in Florida offers valuable opportunities for students to showcase their work beyond campus — and a model for other regions to replicate.

When Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, planetary geologists expected a few dull images of a cold, dark icy body on the edge of the Solar System. But Pluto surprised everyone. What astronomers discovered was a complex dwarf planet with a surprisingly varied landscape potted with huge cliffs, deep ravines, enormous mountains all battered by a curious kind of weather with evidence of water plus much more. But the scale of this volcanic activity has been hard to pin down. Now Dale Cruikshank at the University of Central Florida, and colleagues, who have been analyzing the data from New Horizons, say they have found evidence of a supervolcano on Pluto called Kiladze.

University of Central Florida student Ben Briggs sometimes waits six minutes or longer to cross Alafaya Trail. Briggs, 21, majoring in emerging media, a degree blending art and technology, said he occasionally gets impatient on the opposite side of the high-volume, state road in an area where nine pedestrians have died in the past decade. “But I always make sure to just wait it out because of the stories I’ve heard,” he said. Those stories — of young people maimed or killed by speeding cars — have made him wary at the crossing and spurred Orange County with UCF and the Florida Department of Transportation to begin a $13.2 million safety project.

When it comes to missions to Mars, NASA has been on a winning streak in recent decades. Its Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, InSight, and Perseverance missions have all landed successfully on the Martian surface, and we’re learning more than ever before about how to land on and explore the planet safely. The agency’s next plans for Mars, however, are a whole new level of ambitious. With a rocket firing its engines hard enough to take off from the ground, “the amount of energy that you have to blow out the back is gigantic,” explained Phil Metzger of the University of Central Florida, a launch pad expert who worked for NASA for many years. When that energy hits the surface of Mars, which is covered in a dusty material called regolith, the material being thrown up can cause serious problems and even damage the rocket itself.

About 5,000 Hispanic students graduate from the University of Central Florida (UCF) annually — many with bachelor’s degrees — and per the monthly magazine Hispanic Outlook on Higher Education, that makes UCF No. 4 in the nation in awarding four-year diplomas to Hispanic students. Hispanic Outlook released rankings Monday that put UCF among the top in the nation for Hispanic students. The UCF numbers are representative of the geographic area it serves and the nation at large, according to UCF President Alexander N. Cartwright. “UCF looks like the future of America,” Cartwright said. “We are proud to have the tremendous opportunity to help our Hispanic and Latino students succeed and fuel the talent pipeline for industry.”