Arizona State University News

When rain falls in Hawai‘i and soaks into the subsurface, some of it drains to streams. But some of it leaks below streams and coastal communities to enter the ocean as submarine groundwater discharge. Until recently, researchers weren’t sure of how that hidden water moves from Hawai‘i’s mountains to its coastlines. A new study published in Hydrological Processes — led by Jasper Oshun and Gregory P.

Like many parents, Megan Rivas wants to give her 6-month-old daughter, Monroe, a healthy start, and one of the ways she’s going about it could make a big difference for more than just her daughter. Rivas is among dozens of parents across the Valley feeding their babies an unexpected research ingredient — avocados — as part of an Arizona State University College of Health Solutions study called Guac & Grow.

Imagine coming home after a frustrating day. You open an app to chat with your AI companion, then vent about your boss, your commute and your soggy lunch. The AI listens and validates your feelings without hesitation. It feels like the perfect partner. Yet there is a fundamental difference between an AI relationship and a human one: You experience the relationship. The AI does not. While that may sound like science fiction, it’s now real life.

Phoenix was changing rapidly when sociologist Albert Mayer arrived at ASU in 1968. New homes and neighborhoods were spreading across the desert as the metropolitan area's population soared. Mayer made the region his living laboratory, studying urban demography and Phoenix’s expansion while hundreds of ASU students packed into his popular course The Modern City. Elsewhere on campus, a set of faculty was looking at “home” through a different lens.

When ChatGPT brought generative AI to the public in late 2022, newsrooms across the country tried to figure out what to do with it. Interested in AI in Journalism? Three years later, a new report from the Knight Center for the Future of News offers one of the first systematic answers to the question of what they actually built and what it means.

When a Spanish-Quechua speaker in Ecuador switches between the two languages while searching for health information online, rather than recognizing their natural bilingual communication, AI flags it as broken language. That's because the AI behind most language tools was not built with them in mind. It was trained on standard, monolingual data.

America’s power grid is being pushed to its limits. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the country is experiencing its strongest sustained surge in demand for electricity in more than 25 years. Rapid growth in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and electric transportation is forcing utilities to rethink how to meet expanding need, and it’s putting nuclear power back in the national conversation.

Nuclear power plants, like people, need plans for their retirement. But during the building boom in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when power plants sprang up across the country to meet soaring electricity demands, a post-power plant world was not in the picture. Over time, 39 of the nation’s 72 commercial nuclear power stations reached the end of their operating lives, leaving behind massive industrial sites.

After 20 years of flat growth, America’s demand for electricity is exploding, creating demand for safe, scalable nuclear reactor technology. Small modular reactors and microreactors are emerging to meet that need and driving a national nuclear resurgence, but there is a severe shortage of nuclear-literate engineers, managers and policymakers.

Please join us for a one-hour virtual information session to learn more about the Cronkite School’s doctoral program in mass communication. This program is designed for communication professionals or others interested in tackling the critical questions emerging in the fields of journalism, digital media and technology, strategic communication and audience studies, and global mass communication.