Experts in the News

Climate change is altering the conditions that lead to hurricane development. That’s made some meteorologists reconsider how we measure those storms.

Experts have used the Saffir-Simpson scale since 1969 to classify hurricanes by their wind speeds, ranging from Category 1 to Category 5.

Zachary Handlos, the director of Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies at Georgia Tech which is examining how forecasters currently classify and communicate storm threats, says each storm is different and could result in a range of consequences.

"There's storm surge […] there's inland flooding from the significant rainfall — that was the big thing with Helene last year in our area," he said, noting that previously, Hurricane Irma only brought sustained winds to the region.

"You can also get tornadoes within hurricanes too, so not only are you dealing with flooding, storm surge, you also have to deal with tornadoes in the area at the same time," Handlos said.

He said any new scale should be complementary to the Saffir-Simpson scale, not replace it, as researchers still rely on it for historical study and communication with the public.

James T. Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, coauthored an article published in The Conversation detailing research which documents exceptional cases of lizards — survivors of limb damage or loss — that defy expectations about how natural selection works.

A NASA-funded research team at Georgia Tech that includes Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando and Senior Research Scientist Brant Jones has developed a method for extracting water from the Moon to generate the hydrogen and oxygen needed for propulsion fuels for solar system exploration. They describe their experimental work in Thermal extraction of H2O(s) from lunar regolith simulant with concentrated solar irradiation: Experimental analysis, published at Acta Astronautica.

The researchers propose an interesting way to extract water from the potentially water-rich icy regions at the Moon’s pole. These regions are of interest to space agencies because the presence of water, which can be extracted or retrieved, is required for human exploration.

Last Friday, the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab (SEPL), led by School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor Jenny McGuire, hosted its weekly Fossil Friday event. This hands-on outreach program invites participants to uncover ancient history, explore real fossils, and learn about the discoveries made by scientists beneath the approximately 80-foot drop of Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming.

The goal of Fossil Friday is straightforward: to build a community centered on science outreach and enable people to interact directly with fossils. The event is open to students, faculty, and Atlanta locals alike, offering a relaxed space to learn, discover, and have fun.

In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, Georgia Tech physical oceanographer Susan Lozier and researcher Yao Fu shed light on the shifting dynamics of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Their findings, produced in collaboration with an international team of scientists, reveal shifts across surface and deep ocean currents, with implications for climate prediction and ocean heat transport. This research underscores the importance of sustained observational efforts in understanding long-term ocean variability.

We may never agree on what AGI or “humanlike” AI means, or what suffices to prove it. As AI advances, machines will still make mistakes, and people will point to these and say the AIs aren’t really intelligent. Anna Ivanova, an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech, was on a panel recently, and the moderator asked about AGI timelines. “We had one person saying that it might never happen,” Ivanova told me, “and one person saying that it already happened.” So the term “AGI” may be convenient shorthand to express an aim—or a fear—but its practical use may be limited. In most cases, it should come with an asterisk, and a benchmark.

As autumn begins, Georgia skies become a busy highway for millions of migrating birds, heading south. Benjamin Freeman, a biologist at the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences, says the timeline for this fall migration period is just beginning here in the Peach State. 

Watch the 11 Alive interview featuring Professor Freeman.

On July 1, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected what was first believed to be an asteroid. As calculations for its orbit progressed, it was found to be from outside our solar system, only the third interstellar object ever detected.

[One] thing that astronomers discovered early on was that, rather than being an asteroid, the interstellar interloper dubbed 3I/ATLAS was a comet.

"It is doing things that we expect comets to do. It's producing the types of gasses that we see comets produce. It's got a coma and a tail now pointed in the expected direction," said James Wray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "I would say the short summary is it looks generally like a comet. But in detail, there are some intriguing differences from solar system comets."

School of Biological Sciences Professor Marvin Whiteley has been named the 2026 recipient of the American Society for Microbiology's D.C. White Award for Interdisciplinary Research. This award recognizes Whiteley’s distinguished accomplishments in interdisciplinary research and mentoring in microbiology.

Reproduction is strange in many social insects, but the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) takes the weirdness to the next level. Queens mate with males of another species and then clone them, researchers report today in Nature, which means this ant is the only known organism that propagates two species by itself. Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Romiguier of the University of Montpellier, who led the team, calls M. ibericus “in a sense, the most complex, colonial life form we know of so far.”

The finding “is almost impossible to believe and pushes our understanding of evolutionary biology,” says Michael Goodisman, an evolutionary biologist and professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved with the new research. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, social insects reveal another surprise."

A recently published study by the Georgia Institute of Technology reveals that liming, normally used to neutralize the acid in soil, can remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Chris Reinhard, associate professor of biogeochemistry at the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, said there’s been interest in the carbon cycle for a long time. 

“Some of our research at Georgia Tech and research as collaborators looks at the basics of how the Earth's carbon cycle works in the most general way,” said Reinhard. “But in the last 10 or so years, we've gotten really preoccupied with the impacts of human activity on the carbon cycle. And that spans a whole range of things, because we do all sorts of things to the Earth system as a species.”