The College counts down the year's most read stories

We’re all in our Taylor Swift era.

At The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, the most popular ASU News stories of 2023 expanded across the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences.

Stories in the top ten spots featured a "Yellowstone" actor, top-ranked graduate programs, OpenAI and Taylor Swift.

The Netflix series “Chimp Empire,” released in April 2023, followed the Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, over a one-and-a-half-year period. 

Associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins Kevin Langergraber, who has studied the community for over 20 years, shared his insights on the film and how public exposure could support species conservation.

Michelle Randolph, who was a full-time student while working as an actor in several Montana small towns, graduated with honors from the Department of English in Spring 2023 with a degree in film (film and media studies).

Randolph played the character of Elizabeth "Liz" Strafford, “a feisty and capable young woman and Jack Dutton’s fiancée,” in Paramount’s wildly popular “Yellowstone” prequel, “1923.”

This isn’t the first time March Mammal Madness has made the top ten stories at The College. (Last year it clinched the No. 1 spot.) 

In 2023, the virtual March Madness-style tournament celebrated ten years of science engagement with schools across the country and reached more than 660,000 learners.

The College’s Spring 2023 Dean’s Medalists made waves as the highest-achieving students graduating from the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences for the semester.

The list of notable grads included a triple major in political science, French and religious studies; an international online student from the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis; and a quadruple major in anthropology, geographic information science, geography and history.

The US News & World Report ranked The College graduate programs among the best in the nation. Two programs in the School of Earth and Space Exploration were in the top ten: geochemistry (No. 6, tied with Columbia, Princeton and the University of Arizona) and geology (No. 8, tied with the Colorado School of Mines and ahead of the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Columbia University and Harvard).

The overall graduate earth sciences program was ranked No. 14, tied with UCLA and Yale University. Other highly ranked graduate programs were in physics, math and chemistry. 

RELATED NEWS: The US News & World Report also ranked ASU as No. 1 in innovation for the ninth year in a row in 2023.

In March 2023, the National Science Foundation announced $90.8 million in funding to ASU — the largest NSF research award in the university’s history.

Funding will support ASU’s compact X-ray free electron laser (CXFEL) project, supported by a talented team of ASU faculty, staff and students — including in the Department of Physics and the School of Molecular Sciences at The College — as well as collaborators from 10 universities and research institutions.

In the 1980s, two continent-sized blobs were found deep near the center of the Earth. An interdisciplinary team found that these strange blobs are remnants of an ancient planet that violently collided with Earth billions of years ago. 

"In other words, the massive blobs currently inside Earth, deep beneath our feet, are extraterrestrial,” said Ed Garnero, professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration. “Earth not only has 'blobs,' Earth has extraterrestrial blobs!"

ChatGPT, and the ethical implications of its use, became a common topic of conversation in 2023. Jacob Greene, assistant professor in the Department of English, discussed the pros and cons of the chatbot in February 2023.

“It could be used in both positive or negative ways,” he said. “I think it's inevitably going to become a part of the way writers write in any context.”
 

Study Hall, which offers college courses that begin on YouTube, launched its first four courses in 2023, creating a flexible new pathway to higher education that provides up to 12 transferable college credits. 

The seven-week courses, called College Foundations, are English Composition, College Math, U.S. History and Human Communication. Three of the four courses are hosted by scholars at The College.

Featured in The College’s most viewed story of the year, ​​a new course titled Psychology of Taylor Swift made waves in ASU News as well as local and national media outlets. 

The class, taught by Department of Psychology Graduate Teaching Assistant Alexandra Wormley, drew on themes from the songs and albums of Taylor Swift, who performed her Eras Tour across the globe in 2023 and was named the TIME Magazine Person of the Year.