College of Sciences

Joshua Weitz, a professor of biological sciences at Georgia Tech who is currently working on Covid-19 modeling, said that “a broad set of policies -- from mask wearing, testing strategies, to rules undermining the ability of faculty to decide how to teach -- are likely to put students, staff and faculty at Georgia Tech at greater risk.” Many in the campus community have advocated for “more aggressive, public-health driven approaches to prepare for the fall term,” Weitz said. Now, he continued, “we have approximately six weeks left before the start of the fall term, and these next few weeks will be crucial to change course.”

NASA scientist Bryan Duncan, who’s a Georgia Tech alumnus, uses satellites to study air quality. One pollutant in particular that he looks at is nitrogen dioxide, another one that affects people’s health. Once it's emitted, it's only around for a matter of hours, so researchers can see hot spots where it's coming from. "So it's a great indicator of pollution in general," Duncan said. 

A few years ago, climate scientist Kim Cobb had a brutal realization about how much she was flying for conferences and meetings. Those flights were adding lots of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In this podcast issue, Cobb discusses her push to get scientists to fly less, and what happened when the pandemic suddenly made that idea a reality. 

New research showes that the paradise tree snake use special movements to make remarkable flights through the air. Jennifer Rieser, a physicist at Georgia Tech, says that the snakes' undulation in the air "actually seems to have a pretty important consequence for their movement."

Atlanta saw a code orange air quality alert for parts of Sunday because of a Saharan dust cloud that’s moved over Georgia in recent days. Zachary Handlos with Georgia Tech says the dust clouds move across the Atlantic every year but generally they are not as big as this one