Faculty

The hunt for the origins of the universe’s most energetic particles

December 12, 2024

The hunt for the origins of the universe's most energetic particles

Dec 10, 2024

The University of Utah’s Cosmic Ray Research program, along with partner institutions in the Telescope Array collaboration is looking to crack the case of exactly what the mysterious particles are that carry far more energy than an Earth-bound accelerator can deliver.

The researchers’ recent observation of the second-highest energy cosmic ray on record is providing important clues.

At a seminar on campus September 26, Jihyun Kim, senior research associate in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, presented the Cosmic Ray Research team’s findings from the Telescope Array, an international experiment based in the high desert of western Utah, where 850 detectors are arranged across half a million acres of public land, with 250 more on the way.

“We are hosting the experiment here in Utah,” Kim said. “We design, maintain, and operate everything. We go down with our students, and they learn how to operate all the systems, collect the data and analyze it by themselves. This is a really unique research experience [for our students].”

She shared the latest research and insights pertaining to cosmic rays, utilizing the largest cosmic ray observatory in the Northern Hemisphere. The research group’s mission is to achieve breakthroughs in the field of particle astrophysics. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Cosmic Ray Research program is particularly interested in the properties of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, or UHECRs.

Read the full article by Ethan Hood in @TheU.

AI: The Promise and Peril for the Planet

December 4, 2024

AI: The Promise and Peril for the Planet

Dec 04, 2024
Above: The AI image was generated using DALL·E.

For the past few decades, we have lived in the “Digital Age.” Now, we are stepping into a new one — the Age of AI.

While artificial intelligence (AI) has existed in primitive forms since the 1950s, it has now advanced to a readily accessible and ubiquitous state. Browser-based programs like ChatGPT are well-known, but they represent only a small portion of the scope, demands, capabilities and consequences of AI.

At its inaugural symposium last September at the University of Utah, the One-U Responsible AI Initiative invited over two hundred attendees, including researchers, university faculty, government officials, and industry leaders, to discuss the role and responsible usage of AI. Three key issues were addressed at the first panel of the symposium; the environmental impacts of AI, the dangers of AI-generated misinformation, and the application of AI for wildfire forecasting, an issue that poses challenges for the West’s electrical grid.

Resilience and sustainability

William Anderegg, director of the U-based Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy, is the executive committee member who leads the One-U RAI’s environmental working group. The group’s members bring their diverse expertise to establish ethical policy, explore AI’s impact on society and the environment, and develop responsible methods for using AI to improve climate research.

The working group’s vision is to utilize AI to bolster our resilience to climate change with collaboration, training, technology, and ethical governance.

AI for wildfire forecasting

Researchers, including Derek Mallia, research assistant professor of atmospheric sciences, have also utilized AI to forecast wildfires and its hazardous smoke.

“When you think of extreme weather, you think of hurricanes, tornadoes and so on. But one of the biggest causes of mortality is actually poor air quality,” said Mallia. “Wildfires cause a degradation in air quality during the summer, and these effects are becoming more widespread. We’re not just seeing smoke across the western U.S., but also in areas that traditionally don’t see a lot of wildfire smoke—parts of NewYork, for example.”

Read the full article by Ethan Hood in @TheU.

The surprising role of CO₂ in cellular health

December 2, 2024

The surprising role of CO₂ in cellular health

Dec 02, 2024

The cells in our bodies are like bustling cities, running on an iron-powered system that uses hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) not just for cleaning up messes but also for sending critical signals.

Normally, this works fine, but under stress, such as inflammation or a burst of energy use, oxidative stress damages cells at the genetic level.

This is because iron and H₂O₂ react in what’s known as the Fenton reaction, producing hydroxyl radicals, destructive molecules that attack DNA and RNA indiscriminately. But there’s a catch. In the presence of carbon dioxide — that pesky gas disrupting global climate systems — our cells gain a secret weapon in the form of bicarbonate which helps keep pH levels balanced.

A team of University of Utah chemists has discovered that bicarbonate doesn’t just act as a pH buffer but also alters the Fenton reaction itself in cells. Instead of producing chaotic hydroxyl radicals, the reaction instead makes carbonate radicals, which affect DNA in a far less harmful way, according to Cynthia Burrows, a distinguished professor of chemistry and senior author of a study published this week in PNAS.

“So many diseases, so many conditions have oxidative stress as a component of disease. That would include many cancers, effectively all age-related diseases, a lot of neurological diseases,” Burrows said. “We’re trying to understand cells’ fundamental chemistry under oxidative stress. We have learned something about the protective effect of CO₂ that I think is really profound.”

Co-authors include Aaron Fleming, a research associate professor, and doctoral candidate Justin Dingman, both members of the Burrows Laboratory.

“Just like opening up a can of beer. You release the CO₂ when you take your cells out of the incubator. It’s like doing experiments with a day-old glass of beer. It’s pretty flat. It has lost the CO₂, its bicarbonate buffer,” Burrows said. “You no longer have the protection of CO₂ to modulate the iron-hydrogen peroxide reaction.”

She believes bicarbonate needs to be added to ensure reliable results from such experiments.

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @TheU.

Exploring the Vulnerabilities of Endangered Birds

December 2, 2024

Exploring the Vulnerabilities of Endangered Birds

Dec 02, 2024
Above: Kyle Kittelberger( a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences) at a bird banding station in northeastern Turkey holding a steppe buzzard. Courtesy Kyle Kittelberger.

Looking to inform the conservation of critically endangered bird species, University of Utah biologists completed an analysis identifying traits that correlate with all 216 bird extinctions since 1500.

Species most likely to go extinct sooner were endemic to islands, lacked the ability to fly, had larger bodies and sharply angled wings, and occupied ecologically specific niches, according to research published this month.

While some of these findings mirror previous research on extinct birds, they are the first to correlate bird traits with the timing of extinctions, said lead author Kyle Kittelberger, a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences.

“I’ve been very interested in extinctions and understanding the species that we’ve lost and trying to get a sense of how we can use the past to better inform the present and future,” said Kittelberger, who is completing his dissertation on how the bodies and wings of certain species of migratory songbirds have changed in response to climate change.

Connecting bird traits with species extinction

His team’s analysis tapped into BirdBase, a dataset of ecological traits for the world’s 11,600+ bird species compiled by U biology professor Çağan Şekercioğlu and the Biodiversity and Conservation Ecology Lab at the U. The team simultaneously analyzed a broad range of biogeographical, ecological and life history traits previously associated with extinction and extinction risk for bird species that have gone extinct as well as those that lack recent confirmed sightings and have therefore disappeared.

One in eight species is in peril

This timing coincides with the rise of scientific observation, resulting in a systematic documentation of plant and animal life. It is also the time when European exploration took off, leading to the disruption of ecosystems around the globe as a result of colonization and introduced species.

Today, 1,314 bird species are at risk of extinction, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, or about 12% of the total.

Many species, such as the ‘Akikiki (Oreomystis bairdi), endemic to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, are so rare that they are functionally extinct. Kittelberger photographed the pictured ‘Akikiki, also called Kauai’s creeper, in the Alaka‘i Wilderness Preserve in 2022, when it was believed around 70 or so remained in the wild; today, only one individual remains.

As with many other Hawaiian bird species, the main threat to the ’Akikiki comes in the form of introduced species, principally malaria-carrying mosquitoes and habitat-wrecking livestock, according to Hawaii’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @TheU.

Climate change fueling more severe wildfires in California

November 18, 2024

Climate change fueling more
severe wildfires in California

Nov 18, 2024

Wildfires continue to damage California’s forests as human-driven climate change amplifies their impacts.

A new Environmental Research Letters study reveals that the severity of the state’s wildfires has rapidly increased over the last several decades, contributing to greater forest loss than would have been expected from past increases in burned areas.

“Fire severity increased by 30% between the 1980s and 2010s,” said Jon Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Utah School of Biological Sciences and former postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Irvine Department of Earth System Science. This means that for every acre of forest scorched by fire, the damages to mature trees are considerably higher than what occurred in the average fire several decades ago.

Jon Wang conducting field research in Norway. Photo credit: Acacia England, U.S. Forest Service

“When fire moves through an area on the forest floor, often mature trees survive and, in some situations, they may thrive from fire effects on nutrient cycling,” said study co-author James Randerson, professor in the UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science. “The new research suggests more fire is jumping into the tree crowns, causing more damage and tree mortality.”

Randerson added that wildfires also have moved into new areas with denser and more vulnerable forests. Those areas include northern mountain and coastal regions that may have been protected in the past by cooler summers and higher levels of surface moisture.

“Forest exposure has increased 41% over the past four decades, suggesting denser forests are now more vulnerable to wildfire,” said Wang, who joined the U last year and is the principal investigator for the Dynamic Carbon and Ecosystems lab.

The question Wang and his team wanted to answer was how much-rising tree cover loss in California is due to increases in total area burned, how much of the loss is due to increasing wildfire severity, and how much is due to fire moving into new areas with denser forests.

“There’s a pretty shocking map of just how much these fires have expanded into northern California forests,” Wang said. “There’s just a lot more fire in these northern forests than there used to be. Climate change allows severe fires to affect forests that once tolerated milder fires.”

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @TheU.

Exploring the Cosmic Unknown

November 12, 2024

Exploring the cosmic unknown with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

Nov 12, 2024
Above: TA view of DESI’s fully installed focal plane, which features 5,000 automated robotic positioners, each carrying a fiber-optic cable to gather galaxies’ light.

Although the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument sounds like something used at Hogwarts to practice wizardry, it is very much something based in real science.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is working its own magic to probe the fundamental physics that describe the universe and measure the effect of dark energy.

Kyle Dawson, University of Utah professor of physics and astronomy, is part of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument team and tells us more about this earth-bound, very complex instrument.

Listen to the full podcast posted in KPCW by Katie Mullaly and Lynn Ware Peek.

A dino-mite addition to SLC International Airport

October 28, 2024

A dino-mite addition to SLC International Airport

Oct 28, 2024
Above: Ally at the airport.

What’s more exciting than a shortcut to the B-Gates? An Allosaurus at the airport!

On Tuesday, Oct. 22, the Salt Lake City International Airport and the Natural History Museum of Utah unveiled the airport’s first-ever dinosaur—Ally, a 30-foot-long, 15-foot-tall skeleton of Allosaurus fragilis.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to be here today to reveal a project that’s been 150 million years in the making,” Jason Cryan, executive director of NHMU, said to the crowd gathered to celebrate the completed Concourse B. “Turn around as we unveil Utah’s state fossil as it’s never been seen before!”

The Jurassic Park theme boomed from the speakers, and the airport assembly spun around and gasped as the curtain fell to reveal Ally in all her glory.

From the Late Jurassic to Concourse B

The museum has wanted a dinosaur at the airport for decades. The recent expansion and a gift from Kirk Ririe, Bob and Cyndi Douglass, and the Lawrence T. & Janet T. Dee Foundation made it happen.

“I’m originally from the Chicago area, and the O’Hare International Airport has an iconic Brachiosaurus skeleton that gets people excited. I’ve always wanted that for Salt Lake City’s airport,” said Randy Irmis, curator of paleontology at NHMU and professor of geology at the University of Utah. “Utah is known for its dinosaurs. We hope this inspires visitors and locals to explore the really cool dinosaur heritage of our state.”

Read the full article by Lisa Potter in @The U.

Bringing together minds and resources for a greener tomorrow

October 11, 2024

Bringing together minds and resources for
a greener tomorrow

Oct 11, 2024
Above: Group picture from the visit to the Watershed.

From the headwaters of the Wasatch to the threatened Great Salt Lake, Utah is rich in beauty, environmental opportunities, and stories of sustainability innovation.

With an ever-growing population in city, suburban, and rural areas, the Beehive State and region’s economic potential is growing.

But the climate challenges Utah and neighboring states face pose dire consequences for the environment and the region’s residents and businesses. The exposed lakebed of the Great Salt Lake; droughts causing water shortages and shrinking lakes; and vast air pollution from wildfire smoke are just some of the challenges being seen.

The climate challenges Utah and the region face are a threat, but these challenges can also drive innovation and create a robust workforce.

Recently, the University of Utah hosted the Southwest Sustainability Innovation Engine (SWSIE) Site Visit highlighting the achievements of the first year of this project. SWSIE is a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded program which includes academic, community, nonprofit and industry partners across Arizona, Nevada and Utah to establish the region as a leader in water security, renewable energy, and carbon management, and develop a workforce to support those high-wage industries.

The multi-day site visit showcased Utah’s efforts to make the state and the region a hub of green innovation. Some of the highlights of the event included field trips that spanned the watershed, examples of regional collaboration, partner engagement, building an ecosystem throughout the region, and workforce development, among other topics.

A key component of the NSF Engines program is to leverage existing partnerships and coordinate efforts among researchers, industry, and government to accelerate the pace of sustainability innovation and prepare a regional workforce.

“With SWSIE, we are able to accelerate the speed that things are happening,” said Dr. Brenda Bowen, Co-PI on the SWSIE project and serves as the University of Utah lead. “Even though we are acting so fast, it needs to be faster. There’s this urgency to it, and that so aligns with the urgency of the issues that we’re facing around climate. That’s an exciting thing that SWSIE can bring, that additional incentive to really accelerate things.”

Read the full article by Xoel Cardenas in @The VPR.

Utah’s Natural Wonders: 3 New Geoheritage Sites

October 10, 2024

Utah's Natural Wonders: 3 New Geoheritage Sites

Oct 10, 2024
Above: The view of Great Salt Lake Credit: The University of Utah

The International Commission on Geoheritage just named three locations in Utah as part of the Second 100 IUGS Geological Heritage Sites.

The Henry Mountains, Great Salt Lake and Coyote Buttes were added to the list of geoheritage sites.

You're probably asking yourself, “What is a geoheritage site?” University of Utah Geology and Geophysics Research Professor Marie Jackson talks about the three Utah sites and what exactly a geoheritage site is, and its importance.

Jackson was part of the team that nominated the Utah sites and compiled descriptions for the IUGS geoheritage catalog.

Listen to the full podcast posted in KPCW by Katie Mullaly and Lynn Ware Peek.

New models shed light on sea ice dynamics

October 2, 2024

New models shed light on sea ice dynamics

Oct 1, 2024
Above: An upside-down sea ice slab showcasing brine channels that facilitate the drainage of liquid brine and support convection along the interface. CREDIT: Ken Golden, University of Utah.

Polar sea ice is ever-changing. It shrinks, expands, moves, breaks apart, reforms in response to changing seasons, and rapid climate change.

It is far from a homogenous layer of frozen water on the ocean’s surface, but rather a dynamic mix of water and ice, as well as minute pockets of air and brine encased in the ice.

New research led by University of Utah mathematicians and climate scientists is generating fresh models for understanding two critical processes in the sea ice system that have profound influences on global climate: the flux of heat through sea ice, thermally linking the ocean and atmosphere, and the dynamics of the marginal ice zone, or MIZ, a serpentine region of the Arctic sea ice cover that separates dense pack ice from open ocean.

In the last four decades since satellite imagery became widely available, the width of the MIZ has grown by 40% and its northern edge has migrated 1,600 kilometers northward, according to Court Strong, a professor of atmospheric sciences.

A tale of two studies, one north and one south

Ice covering both polar regions has sharply receded in recent decades thanks to human-driven global warming. Its disappearance is also driving a feed-back loop where more of the sun energy’s is absorbed by the open ocean, rather than getting reflected back to space by ice cover.

Utah mathematics professors Elena Cherkaev and Ken Golden, a leading sea ice researcher, are authors on both studies. The Arctic study led by Strong examines the macrostructures of sea ice, while the Antarctic study, led by former Utah postdoctoral researcher Noa Kraitzman, gets into its micro-scale aspects.

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @TheU.