In the News

School of Biological Sciences professor and director of Georgia Tech's Interdisciplinary PhD in Quantitative Biosciences program Joshua Weitz gives WABE listeners a tour of his Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Tool. 

The famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the site of many astronomical accomplishments, including the discovery of the whirling stars known as pulsars, collapsed in early December. Georgia Tech scientists John Wise and Emily Alicea-Munoz, both with the School of Physics, shared their special memories of Arecibo for Puerto Rican television. (Note: the television feature is in Spanish.) 

Cutting down on greenhouse gases to the point where they aren't accumulating in the atmosphere isn't enough to corral climate change; science needs to focus on actively removing carbon dioxide as well. That's according to a group of scientists who want more work on climate restoration, not just net-zero greenhouse gases. Kim Cobb weighs in on whether it may already be too late for some aspects of the environment. 

Did life on Earth emerge from oceans, or from land that featured wet-dry cycles? Scientists who support the idea of a terrestrial beginning say it offers a solution to a long-recognized paradox: that although water is essential for life, it is also destructive to life’s core components. Moran Frenkel-Pinter, a research scientist with Georgia Tech's Center for Chemical Evolution, gives her take on the new theories. 

Just as Covid-19 doesn’t care whether anyone wears a mask, climate change unfolds in spite of political rhetoric. This Inside Climate News story examines the climate policy proposals from all four U.S. Senate candidates in Georgia prior to the Jan. 5 runoff election, and also includes comments from representatives of the Georgia Climate Project. Georgia Tech is a partner in the Project along with eight other state universities and colleges. 

Georgia Tech's success in keeping Covid-19 infection rates low, which involved a redoubling of efforts following a Halloween uptick in cases, is highlighted by Greg Gibson, director of Georgia Tech's Center for Integrative Genomics. 

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, two human factors are battling it out: awareness of the virus’s severe consequences, and fatigue from nine months of pandemic precautions. The results of that battle can be seen in the oddly shaped case, hospitalization, and fatality-count graphs, says a new study co-authored by Georgia Tech Covid-19 researcher Joshua Weitz. Coverage of the new study also appeared in Futurity. 

Both are on an upwards trajectory, and Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb has described future wildfires as being even more of a dangerous prospect.

“Epidemics don’t necessarily have a single peak after which the risk subsides,” said Joshua Weitz, Patton Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and founding director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “People’s behaviors are both influenced by and influence epidemic dynamics, potentially driving plateaus, and oscillations in incidence."

Georgia Tech’s Serve-Learn-Sustain program received a first place award Thursday from the national campus sustainability association, AASHE, for its approach to teaching students methods to solve problems involving environmental sustainability and social justice.