A team of researchers, led by Georgia Tech alumna Feifei Qian and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández, continue to work on the LASSIE Project, which stands for Legged Autonomous Surface Science in Analogue Environments. They want to see just how well a four-legged robot could make it up Mount Hood’s gravel and snow. “It’s literally a robotic dog form,” said Qian. “It can plow. It can basically dig a hole.” She added, "the information the robot sends back with each step could tell scientists whether it’s good to build a structure in a certain spot on the moon or whether it’d be good to excavate."

Recent demonstrations of moiré magnetism, featuring exotic phases with noncollinear spin order in the twisted van der Waals (vdW) magnet chromium triiodide CrI3, have highlighted the potential of twist engineering of magnetic (vdW) materials. In this paper, researchers, including School of Physics assistant professors Hailong Wang and Chunhui Du, reported the observation of two distinct magnetic phase transitions with separate critical temperatures within a moiré supercell of small-angle twisted double trilayer CrI3.

An article published in NewScientist reveals that Antarctica’s melting ice sheets may retreat faster than previously thought. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Oxford discovered that Antarctica’s melting ice sheets may retreat more quickly as warm seawater intrudes underneath them, leading to more melting and faster sea level rise. 

Their findings are built off a model developed by School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Associate Professor Alexander Robel and other researchers. Robel’s model found extensive intrusions could more than double the amount of ice loss from an ice sheet by adding heat from below and lubricating the flow of ice along the bedrock. “That positive feedback can cause there to be much more intrusion than we thought possible,” says Robel. “Whether that will be a tipping point that will lead to unrestrained incursion of seawater under the ice sheet – that’s probably a stretch.”