UCF in the News

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.

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.