UCF in the News

If anyone was wondering whether or not UCF knows how to bring the energy, their question should be answered now. This is the first time this pre-game show has been to the state of Florida ever, and they picked a great place to make their Florida debut. Even though attendance can't be fully counted, it has been announced that the estimated attendance for Big Noon Kickoff in Orlando is the largest they have ever had in the show's history. UCF athletic director Terry Mohajir made the announcement on X (formally known as Twitter). The UCF crowd was ready nice and early this morning, even after a Category 4 hurricane, Hurricane Helene ravaged the start of Florida the two days before. If there is one thing that UCF has, it is spirit for their athletics program. Famous DJ Khaled made an appearance with Fat Joe for live performances in the middle of Memory Mall in the heart of UCF's campus. Khaled could be the hype of the crowd as he chose to even jump into the crowd and crowd surf, but that didn't last long, as security was there to break it up.

The University of Central Florida on Sept. 24 hit a key construction milestone for its Dr. Phillips Nursing Pavilion. The college brought in representatives from AdventHealth, Orlando Health, Nemours Children's Health, Dr. Phillips Inc. and more to sign a beam that will be put in the $68 million, 90,000-square-foot building. Construction is more than 40% complete on the facility, which the college expects to occupy late next summer ahead of the 2025-26 academic year. UCF College of Nursing Dean Mary Lou Sole told Orlando Business Journal the program already has added 100 students and is planning how it can accommodate those students and more at the new building. The expanded building will allow the school to graduate 150 more nurses per year than the roughly 260 it averages now. "The Central Florida area continues to grow, so it will be a continuous job to address as all the new health care facilities are opening," Sole said.

On Sept. 9 and 10, scientists and engineers tested NASA's LEMS (Lunar Environment Monitoring Station) instrument suite in a "sandbox" of simulated moon regolith at the Florida Space Institute's Exolith Lab at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Lunar regolith is a dusty, soil-like material that coats the moon's surface, and researchers wanted to observe how the material would interact with LEMS's hardware, which is being developed to fly to the moon with Artemis III astronauts in late 2026. Designed and built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, LEMS is one of three science payloads chosen for development for Artemis III, which will be the first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972.

More than three million small businesses make up the vast majority of all of Florida's companies, and Hispanics and Latinos own a third of them, often overcoming language, cultural, and economic barriers to do so. It's a factor Arnaldo Oliveras took into account when he was part of the team that developed the University of Central Florida's Hispanic Business Education and Training program. "It's no surprise that Central Florida is a mecca for Hispanic business owners," Oliveras said. A business owner in Central Florida and Puerto Rico himself, he's worked with others to get them on the path to scale their businesses or start their own. He uses similar tactics that people can learn in the H-BEAT program. "I think it's essential, especially with the influx of new businesses starting, as we speak, on a daily basis," he said. In its third year now, H-BEAT will teach budding business owners "Business 101," from finance, how to choose a business location, marketing, human resources, and other topics. It's all free in the class, and it spans an eight-week period. Despite being the basics, Oliveras says, oftentimes, they're the topics Latino and Hispanic business owners don't know.

Orlando's electricity provider and its customers could use relationship therapy as they venture together into an era of sunshine powering homes, cars and most everything else. What the municipally owned Orlando Utilities Commission aims to do is swift, consequential and risk-taking in a region of the nation only now going full throttle to green energy. The Southern Alliance For Clean Energy measures utility solar performance by the number of solar watts per customer. By that metric, Orlando Utilities Commission now ranks first in the Southeast for projected solar growth from 2023 to 2027, besting the giant, stockholder-owned Florida Power and Light Co. and Duke Energy. “It’s great that we are building more solar, but the real truth is we are not building anywhere near enough,” said Jim Fenton, director of the Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida. “That includes rooftop solar.”

UCF‘s much-anticipated showdown with Colorado and coach Deion Sanders has generated plenty of buzz, so much so that FOX‘s Big Noon Kickoff Pregame Show will broadcast live from campus. The game, which kicks off Saturday at 3:30 p.m. on FOX, is the first meeting between the programs. Rob Stone hosts the two-hour pregame show, which features analysts Mark Ingram II, Matt Leinart, Urban Meyer and Brady Quinn, reporters Bruce Feldman and Tom Rinaldi and wagering expert Chris ‘The Bear’ Fallica. “We’re thrilled to welcome FOX Big Noon Kickoff to UCF,” UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir said in a statement. “What a fantastic opportunity to showcase our program, our incredible fans, and the electric atmosphere on campus and in FBC Mortgage Stadium as I know Knight Nation will deliver the best fan participation they’ve had. I’d like to thank FOX, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and the staff at the conference office for this tremendous opportunity. We’re looking forward to an exciting day and a great game.”

Migratory animals may navigate using Earth’s magnetic fields, potentially aided by magnetic bacteria living inside them. Robert Fitak and his team have compiled a vast DNA database to investigate the presence of these bacteria in animals, focusing on their possible role in aiding navigation, especially in sea turtles. The remarkable navigation and route-recalling abilities of migratory animals may stem not only from their sensitivity to Earth’s magnetic fields but also from a potential interaction with magnetic bacteria living within them. The relationship between these magnetic bacteria and the animals they reside in is not yet fully understood, but UCF Department of Biology Assistant Professor Robert Fitak recently compiled a database of animal DNA that houses hundreds of millions of sequences showing the presence of various types of magnetic bacteria to use as a tool in his pursuit to learn more.

Could things get any worse for Boeing? Last week, the company’s Starliner spacecraft landed in New Mexico, having made its way home from the International Space Station without its crew. Left behind are two astronauts unexpectedly stuck aboard the ISS for months thanks to Boeing’s failure. They will have to wait to be rescued by Boeing’s archnemesis, SpaceX. “The companies have some bad feelings toward each other, and their own sets of fans have bad feelings toward each other, and so then NASA, in a sense, is kind of caught in the middle,” said Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida, who worked at NASA on human space flight programs for over a decade. he Starliner would probably have been safe to fly, most observers seemed to agree at the time, but why take the risk? With the SpaceX Dragon, there was a known safe alternative. “In the past, they may have gone ahead and flown it,” Metzger said. And if SpaceX were running its own test flight that experienced similar problems and was in charge of decision-making, he said, it might have chosen to go ahead with the flight, “because SpaceX doesn’t seem to be as cautious as Boeing or NASA.”

Andy Thomas had just landed on Earth after 20 weeks in space. He unfastened his restraints, got to his feet and felt a staggering weight in his legs. It was 1998 and Thomas, one of only two Australians who have travelled in space, had just hours earlier been aboard Russia’s Mir Space Station, floating about with other international crew members. After touchdown at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, he was whisked into crew rooms and given anti-nausea tablets as he waited out the worst of his body’s reaction to entering back into Earth’s gravity. Since the early days of the space race, back in the 1950s and ’60s, astronauts have undergone all sorts of regimens to prepare for the adverse effects of space travel and have been scrutinised for years after their return. The first moments in space are the most impactful for human systems, says Emmanuel Urquieta, vice chair of aerospace medicine at the University of Central Florida. Up to 85 per cent of astronauts experience motion sickness immediately. This includes nausea, headaches and cold sweating and can be similar to vertigo, although there is nothing physically wrong with the inner ear. Instead, astronauts feel sick because of a change in the inputs that tell the brain which way is up or down: what the eyes are seeing does not match up with the input that the inner ear sends to the brain. Similarly, the muscles in an astronaut’s back aren’t tensing the way they should if they were in an upright position on Earth.