SUPERCHARGING HURRICANES
Before it made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend in 2023, Hurricane Idalia intensified rapidly — really, really rapidly. It jumped from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm virtually overnight, taking forecasters by surprise.
How did Idalia get so powerful, so fast? Well, the Gulf of Mexico (or Gulf of America, if you prefer) was record-hot that summer, fueling tropical storms. But a new study by University of South Florida researchers has found another reason for the storm’s rapid intensification: fresh water from nearby rivers.
In looking at the rivers instead of just the Gulf, USF’s research has uncovered a blind spot in forecasting hard-to-predict hurricane intensification.
USF researchers found that, in the weeks before Idalia, heavy rains fed rivers along the Florida Panhandle and coastal Alabama, sending a huge plume of fresh water into the Gulf. River water mixed with the salty Gulf created a barrier that trapped ocean heat and helped strengthen Idalia, according to Chuanmin Hu, a USF professor of oceanography.
“In order for this to happen, you need to have the hurricane at the right time, at the right location, and that is pretty rare,” Hu told the Tampa Bay Times. “But this time, it’s like a perfect storm.”
The researchers’ conclusion: “Despite continued improvements in hurricane modeling, rapid intensification remains a challenge for forecasters.” Current hurricane models consider factors like water temperature, wind shear and air moisture, but they don’t take into account the water’s salinity, and that’s a factor that should no longer be overlooked.
FINDING HIDDEN RATS
They’re called RATs — remote access trojans. They’re a nasty form of malware that enables cybercriminals to steal your personal information and control your device without even being detected.
But now researchers at Florida Polytechnic University have figured out a way to use artificial intelligence to detect RATs on Android phones, which account for more than 70% of the world’s mobile phones.
As part of her master’s thesis in computer science, Florida Poly student Nesreen Dalhy worked with Karim Elish, associate professor of computer science, to find more effective ways to detect RATs.
“RATs are a significant cybersecurity threat — they are particularly hard to detect, remain persistent and attempt to steal as much of your data as possible,” says Dalhy, who hails from Davenport, located south of Orlando. “A lot of the existing research tries to identify general types of malware, but there isn’t much that specifically tries to detect RATs.”
She and Elish trained a machine learning model to identify specific RAT patterns. The next step: Developing a mobile app based on this research.
TOMORROW’S PLANT FOOD
Feeding the world will be a challenge in the future, with the Earth’s population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by the year 2050. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.
There’s a Ph.D. student at the University of Miami’s College of Engineering who wants to help. Shruti Choudhary is researching how nanotechnology could be used to increase crop yields and cut down on pollution.
“Where will we find enough food to feed the multitudes?” she told the university’s news service. “It would be much easier to feed so many if we were able to grow crops more efficiently and without damaging the environment and depleting our precious water supplies. That’s the challenge farmers face.”
That’s the purpose of her agriculture tech startup, Smart Aerosol Technologies or SmArT. She’s synthesizing zinc nanoparticles in a college laboratory, with the goal of applying them to crops to increase their growth.
She notes that plants can absorb only so much of the nutrients in conventional fertilizer, leaving nitrogen and phosphorus from the fertilizer to get washed away by rains, causing algal blooms in lakes and rivers and the Gulf of Mexico. In contrast, the particles in SmArT’s nanofertilizers are so small, they’d be absorbed more efficiently by the crops.
With a $125,000 investment for winning eMerge Americas’ recent Startup Showcase, as well as a $100,000 grant from the University Startup Accelerator, or USTAAR, she’s planning to test out nanofertilizers on crops in Florida.
CONCUSSION DETECTOR
Concussions are a concern for young athletes playing contact sports like football and soccer. When traumatic brain injuries like that go undetected, it increases the risk of long-term neurological damage. While pro and college athletes typically have access to advanced concussion-detection systems, this technology tends to be too pricey for high school and youth sports leagues.
“Current systems are great, but they are costly and out of reach for many sports programs,” says Christopher Oshman, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of North Florida. “Our goal is to provide a solution that’s affordable for every athlete at all levels, regardless of their resources.”
Under his mentorship, a team of UNF students is working on an innovative, low-cost way to detect brain injuries. They’re trying to develop a passive, fluidic inertial sensor that could change the way concussions are identified.
These sensors are designed to detect sudden accelerations caused by head impacts, which may lead to concussions. The idea is for the sensors to be integrated into existing gear like helmets or headbands. They’d alert coaches or trainers when an athlete has been through an impact that may require further evaluation.
Currently in the testing phase, the UNF researchers are fine-tuning their design and conducting trials.
GROWING CROPS ON THE MOON
Humanity is going back to the moon, and maybe to Mars too. But how do you feed humans on the moon and Mars?
Florida Tech senior Trent Causey is looking into it. The astrobiology student is working on extraterrestrial crop growth by using peanut shells to improve conditions for crop growth in lunar regolith, or moon soil.
One of the problems with growing food in lunar regolith is that the soil becomes compact when watered, and stifles root growth by slowing air and water flow. Causey is trying to fix this by adding peanut shells to loosen the soil. So far, plants are growing better in the peanut shell-enhanced simulated regolith than in the simulated regolith alone.
His senior design project is called Promoting Extraterrestrial Agriculture through Novel Utilization Techniques for Sustainability, or PEANUTS.