Experts in the News

While 2023 has already been called the world's hottest year, the full set of climate data up to December 31 shows global temperatures reached "exceptionally" high levels last year, according to the European Union's key climate service. It found Earth was 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, with temperatures during the year overtaking the previous record set in 2016 by a large margin. This story offers a glimpse of some of the defining events from the world's hottest year in pictures and charts. Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said it was "very plausible" that intensely warm ocean temperatures aided several of these events, including extreme rainfall and severe coral bleaching, although formal studies would be required to confirm it.

No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in the outputs of large language models like ChatGPT. It's a big problem when chatbots spew untruths. But Wired writer Steven Levy says we should also celebrate these hallucinations as prompts for human creativity and a barrier to machines taking over. Santosh Vempala, professor in the School of Computer Science, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and adjunct professor in the School of Mathematics, has studied AI hallucinations and is quoted in the article. 

Alien hunters should search for technological life on planets that possess a high oxygen abundance in their atmospheres, according to new research that aims to hone the search for technosignatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. The study from scientists at the University of Roma Tor Vergata in Italy and the University of Rochester in the U.S. argues that a planet's atmosphere needs to contain at least 18 percent oxygen to facilitate a technological civilization. The reason for this, they say, is a simple one: oxygen is needed for fire. This story cites another study detailing a future oxygen-related challenge for the Earth — as the sun ages and brightens in a billion years to produce more heat that warms our planet in turn, Earth's atmosphere will become deoxygenated, with oxygen levels dropping below 10 percent. That study's co-author is Christopher Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

Africa is on fire. It has been for thousands of years. The continent contains more than 50 percent of the total area on Earth that is burning, on average, and there is no sign of it stopping; indeed, the migrating hemisphere-hopping African wildfire season is steadily increasing. The fire is essentially feeding itself in a vicious cycle involving aerosols, tiny particles that have a large impact on Earth's climate. Their interaction with the climate is intricate; they reinforce regulations of African ecosystems and pave the way for evolving wildfire patterns each year. The findings appear in a new study co-authored by Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little in all that time. Logic told Stroud that if evolution had favored the same traits over millions of years, then he should expect to see little to no change over a single generation. Except that’s not what he found. Instead of stability, Stroud saw variability. One season, shorter-legged anoles survived better than the others. The next season, those with larger heads might have an advantage. This story builds on Stroud's recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, joined Fox Weather to talk about the "falling iguana alerts" now issued by the National Weather Service in Miami when temperatures dip unseasonably lower during the winter, causing the large lizards to fall out of Florida trees. Stroud, an evolutionary ecologist, spoke of his lab's studies to find out whether iguanas are adapting to colder temperatures brought on by climate change, or whether genetic factors are involved. Iguanas, normally found in hotter Central and South American climates, are considered an invasive species for Florida. 

Thomasville native Jacques Gay, a Ph.D. scholar in physical chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been selected for the National Science Foundation's International SuperComputing collaborative NSF IRES ASSURE Program. As a US graduate student, Gay will get to collaborate with supercomputing centers in China, Japan and Germany through the program. He has been selected to work with Dr. Paolo Carloni of Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany. There, Gay said he will help develop molecular mechanic-based drug design computations with quantum accuracy. According to the NSF, only 20-25 students throughout the United States are chosen for this prestigious program.

Global forest fires emitted 33.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2001 and 2022, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This makes the CO2 emissions generated by forest fires each year higher than those from burning fossil fuels in Japan — the world’s sixth-largest CO2 emitter. Driving the emissions spike was the growing frequency of “extreme forest-fire events”. Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, tells Nature the report complements his work, which “indicates a roughly 20 percent rise in global burnt area by the 2050s compared to the 2000s”.

Terry Maple, emeritus professor in the School of Psychology who is credited with transforming Zoo Atlanta from one of the worst in America to one of the best in the world, has died at 77. Atlantans of a certain age will recall that Zoo Atlanta was in a dismal state in the 1970s and 1980s before Maple took over as director in 1984. But Maple believed Zoo Atlanta had promise, and his first mission was to free Willie B, a western lowland gorilla, from the concrete bunker he lived in with a tire swing and television to keep him company. Maple, who had grown up in San Diego and frequented its world-famous zoo, envisioned a large outdoor habitat where Willie B. and other gorillas could live naturally rather than in confinement. (This story was also covered in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) 

India was the world’s third-most-prolific publisher of research papers in 2022, but it was ranked only 153rd for the number of citations it received per paper. Indeed, in 2020, about 30 percent of papers from India were not cited at all, compared with 20 percent in both the United States and China. These trends are mirrored in many other low- and middle-income countries whose researchers struggle to get published in high-impact journals. But despite this challenging publishing environment, some Indian scientists have produced influential, highly cited studies in a number of fields in the past few years. One of those researchers, Sachin Gunthe, who studies aerosols at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, teamed with Pengfei Liu, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, to study the origins of air pollution in Delhi. 

Systems consisting of spheres rolling on elastic membranes have been used to introduce a core conceptual idea of general relativity: how curvature guides the movement of matter. However, such schemes cannot accurately represent relativistic dynamics in the laboratory because of the dominance of dissipation and external gravitational fields. A new study from School of Physics researchers demonstrates that an “active” object (a wheeled robot), which moves in a straight line on level ground and can alter its speed depending on the curvature of the deformable terrain it moves on, can exactly capture dynamics in curved relativistic spacetimes. The researchers' mapping and framework facilitate creation of a robophysical analog to a general relativistic system in the laboratory at low cost that can provide insights into active matter in deformable environments and robot exploration in complex landscapes. Researchers includes Hussain Gynai and Steven Tarr, graduate students; Emily Alicea-Muñoz, academic professional; Gongjie Li, assistant professor; and Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor. 

Diverse and full of sea life, the Earth’s Devonian era — taking place more than 370 million years ago — saw the emergence of the first seed-bearing plants, which spread as large forests across the continents of Gondwana and Laurussia. However, a mass extinction event near the end of this era has long been the subject of debate. Some scientists argue the Late Devonian mass extinction was caused by large-scale volcanic eruptions, causing global cooling. Others argue a mass deoxygenation event caused by the expansion of land plants was to blame. 
A recently published study in the journal Communications Earth and Environment now posits that both factors played a role — and draws attention to the environmental tipping points the planet faces today. Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, contributed to the study. (This story also appears in SciTechDaily and ScienceDaily.)