Experts in the News

The Genomic Enumeration of Antibiotic Resistance in Space (GEARS) experiment, managed by NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, is designed to analyze microbial resistance in space. As part of the study, astronauts collect samples from interior surfaces aboard the ISS to detect antibiotic-resistant bacteria, particularly Enterococcus faecalis, a microorganism naturally found in the human body. This initiative marks the initial phase of broader research on microbial behavior in space and its implications for medicine on Earth.

"Enterococcus is an ancient organism that has coexisted with humans since our evolutionary origins," explained Christopher Carr, co-principal investigator of GEARS and assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Aerospace Engineering. "It thrives inside and outside its host, contributing to its status as the second leading cause of hospital-acquired infections. Our goal is to understand how this microbe adapts to space conditions."

GEARS aims to refine methods for detecting and identifying resistant bacteria, expanding upon ongoing microbial monitoring efforts aboard the ISS.

Mustard gas, or sulfur mustard, is one of the most harmful chemical warfare agents, causing severe blistering of the skin and mucous membranes upon contact. To enhance battlefield detection of this hazardous substance, a team of chemists, including M.G. Finn, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Biological Sciences, will develop a streamlined method for detecting vesicants—a broader class of chemical agents that includes sulfur mustard.

“We will initially focus on model compounds that act like mustards, but that can be handled safely in the laboratory. This will allow us to test different molecular sensor designs, with Professor Jennifer Heemstra's lab and ours working together on complementary approaches,” Finn explains.

School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada provided brief commentary on KM3NeT, a new underwater neutrino experiment that has detected what appears to be the highest-energy cosmic neutrino observed to date.

“This is clearly an interesting event. It is also very unusual,” said Taboada, spokesperson for the IceCube experiment in Antarctica. IceCube, which has a similar detector-array design as KM3NeT but is encased in ice rather than water, has detected neutrinos with energies as high as 10 PeV, but nothing in 100 PeV range. “IceCube has worked for 14 years, so it’s weird that we don’t see the same thing,” Taboada said. Taboada is not involved in the KM3Net experiment. 

The KM3NeT team is aware of this weirdness. They compared the KM3-230213A event to upper limits on the neutrino flux given by IceCube and the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray experiment in Argentina. Taking those limits as given, they found that there was a 1% chance of detecting a 220-PeV neutrino during KM3NeT’s preliminary (287-day) measurement campaign. 

This also appeared in Scientific American and Smithsonian Magazine.

Marvin Whiteley, professor in the School of Biological Sciences, has been named the new editor in chief of mBio, an open-access journal that explores the interconnected microbial world and publishes research in microbiology and allied fields. Whiteley’s term will begin on July 1, 2025. 

A chemical plant fire near Atlanta last fall released a toxic plume that disrupted the lives of nearby residents. Many still experience health problems and don't know what was released in the plume.

Researchers like Greg Huey, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, say early tests found other chemicals in addition to chlorine in the plume. They found irritants like bromine and isocyanic acid that can cause symptoms like coughing and wheezing. His team is analyzing more air quality data and expects to share the findings in the coming weeks.

“This might help people know what they're exposed to in this incident. But more importantly, if ever something like this happens again, we might have better ideas what to look for,” Huey explains.

Wildfires are becoming a bigger focus for scientists that study air pollution, said Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Ng is also the principal investigator of ASCENT, a new federally funded, national monitoring network that began last year to measure a wide range of air pollutants in real time. The readings from the Los Angeles area fires were captured at the network’s monitoring station in Pico Rivera, several miles from the active fires.

In this piece, Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, explains the work of climatologists, stating that “climatologists can take on a lot of roles. It’s important to understand the difference between weather and climate. So weather is the study of what's going on in the atmosphere right now. Climatology looks at data for a certain day and compares it to what’s called a climate normal. What this means is, they take a 30-year period of data for that day, and from that baseline, say, ‘Oh, the temperature today is above average or below average.'”

Language models have become an essential part of the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI) psychology. In an article published in Nature Human Behaviour, School of Psychology Assistant Professor Anna Ivanova discusses 14 methodological considerations that can be used to design more robust, generalizable studies that evaluate the cognitive abilities of language-based AI systems, as well as to accurately interpret the results of these studies.

During an episode of the podcast “Carbon Conversations,” Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, discusses her work and how computation tools can help us better understand the ocean, marine ecosystems, and climate dynamics.

Researchers, including Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, used modeling to demonstrate that the quick recovery of bleached corals in the past five mass bleaching events in Moorea and Tahiti (within the Society Islands of French Polynesia) may be the result of long-distance connectivity with the Tuamotu Islands and undisturbed coral reefs within a 300 km radius.

Five years after the "murder hornet” (Vespa mandarinia,) was first spotted in Washington state, the U.S. has declared the invasive species eradicated.

In an article published in Futurity, Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences Professor Mike Goodisman explained that eradicating the “murder hornet” will help the U.S. avoid a potential agricultural and commercial disaster due to the murder hornet’s threat to the already-declining honeybee population. 

“A threat to the honeybee population would be a commercial disaster,” Goodisman says. “Honeybees are critical in agriculture for pollinating a great variety of the foods we eat, and if we don’t have these pollinators, then we wouldn’t have many of the foods—fruits especially—that we are used to.”

The eradication of the hornet is a significant achievement, but Goodisman says it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will not re-emerge. Murder hornets can hibernate in various materials, cargo ships, and other commercial transportation, which can unknowingly spread invasive species worldwide.

Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and the School of Physics including Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando, Assistant Professor Karl Lang, and post-doctoral researcher Micah Schaible are among the authors of a paper recently published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech demonstrated that space weathering alterations of the surface of lunar samples at the nanoscale may provide a mechanism to distinguish lunar samples of variable surface exposure age.