College of Sciences

Tens of thousands of people in the Southeast were jolted by a magnitude 4.1 earthquake on Saturday, May 10. Seismologist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Zhigang Peng joined FOX Weather to talk about why so many people in the East reported feeling the earthquake and just how common they are in the region.

A similar story also appeared at 11 Alive News.

In a study published in Chem, scientists from Scripps Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology question the validity of the “formose reaction” hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that simple formaldehyde molecules reacted under early Earth conditions to form ribose. But the new findings reveal a key limitation: under controlled experimental conditions, the formose reaction does not yield linear sugars like ribose. Instead, it predominantly produces branched sugar structures, which are incompatible with the formation of RNA.

“Our results cast doubt on the formose reaction as the basis for the formation of linear sugars,” says co-senior author Charles Liotta, Regents’ Professor Emeritus in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.