September 26, 2024: We're covering the strength of Hurricane Helene, why birds run so strangely, and the best and worst questions to pose to ChatGPT. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | Hurricane Helene picked up strength over the warm water in the Gulf of Mexico today and is expected to make landfall this evening in Florida's Big Bend area, between the state's panhandle and main peninsula. The strengthening tropical cyclone is looking to be a significant and dangerous weather event with devastating impacts as far north as Tennessee, reports Scientific American editor Andrea Thompson. The forecast threats so far include storm surges along Florida's Gulf coastline, some of which are expected to reach 15 to 20 feet above ground level. Rain-driven inland floods are expected well into northern Georgia and elsewhere in the southern Appalachians.
Why this matters: Helene is larger in diameter than most hurricanes at similar latitudes, likely ranking in the top 10 percent of such storms. That means it's a threat to a greater number of people, homes and infrastructure systems for services such as drinking water and electricity. Authorities in several Florida counties have issued evacuation warnings, road closures and other alerts.
What the experts say: The threats posed by Helene are bigger than those posed by past tropical storms in recent memory because "it's starting out big," says atmospheric scientist Kim Wood. | | | A business owner places plywood against a storefront window in Tarpon Springs, Florida on September 25, 2024 ahead of the possible arrival of Hurricane Helene, expected to make landfall on Thursday on Florida's West Coast. Joe Raedle/Getty Images | | | To many people, birds can look a little odd, bordering on ridiculous, when they speed along and sometimes even run on their spindly legs. For starters, they rely in part on "grounded running," which is characterized by having at least one foot on the ground at all points in the run cycle, whereas athletic humans running fast rely on "aerial running," in which both feet are off the ground at some point in the cycle. A new computer model of a running Common Emu reveals that at certain speeds grounded running is more energetically efficient for birds than aerial running, because their knee and hip joints are tucked up high under their bodies, reports Scientific American senior news writer Meghan Bartels. You'd run that way too with that crouched anatomy. Give it a try, Bartels suggests.
Why this is cool: One study co-author thinks that petite velociraptors and other dinosaurs most closely related to birds "may have chased down their prey like a nightmare agent of the Ministry of Silly Walks," writes Bartels.
What the experts say: "If we think about bird locomotion through a human lens, then [grounded running] seems like a really weird and kind of dumb thing to do because it seems really energetically costly. It's actually a pretty smart thing to do when you have the anatomy of a bird," says biomechanist Armita Manafzadeh. | | | Ken Griffiths/Alamy Stock Photo | | | • The hysterical word-salad replies that generative AI models can provide to seemingly simple questions have fascinated optics researcher Janelle Shane for several years. Hence Shane's blog and 2019 book, titled with an AI-suggested pick-up line, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Shane's work caught the attention of Scientific American editor Sarah Lewin Frasier, who recently interviewed Shane to ask her to clarify which sorts of questions it does and does not make sense to pose to the latest generative AI apps such as ChatGPT. It's a useful and fun story. | 7 min read
| | | Today is both National Pancake Day and National Dumpling Day per a calendar I consult when seeking extra inspiration for this end note. Years ago, I was fortunate to travel in the Ukraine with family members, where one of my uncles so enjoyed the pierogies that we came to call him Uncle Dumpling. As for pancakes, my father, brother to Uncle Dumpling, is an ace pancake maker and makes them for us most Sundays when we're together. All this led me to a mention of a scientific claim that Kansas is flatter than a pancake. However, a 2014 follow-up by Joshua S. Campbell, reportedly a native Kansan, along with a co-author, made a geomorphometric analysis of the relative "flatness" of all 48 contiguous U.S. states. The published results are paywalled, so I'll give you a partial answer to the question of which state is the flattest. It's not Kansas.
| —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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