Experts in the News

In this story about the puzzling behavior that goes on inside black holes, Quanta Magazine uses the 2017 first-ever image of the black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy captured by an Event Horizon Telescope research team. That team included EHT founding members Feryal Özel, professor and chair of the School of Physics, and Dimitrios Psaltis, a professor in the School. The story also includes the recent machine learning-enhanced version of the image. 

Excess greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are a major driver of climate change. Mitigating climate change in the future will require both decarbonization — such as transitioning to renewable energy sources — and carbon dioxide removal, which involves extracting already existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A recent study led by Georgia Tech and Yale University has proposed a unique approach to permanently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through coastal ecosystem restoration. Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is one of the study's authors. (The study was also covered in ScienceDaily.)

Cooperation is everywhere. Cells cooperate in multicellular organisms, individuals cooperate in societies, and different species cooperate. Why would it not be the case that microbes cooperate with each other? Researchers have known for more than 20 years that bacteria participate in collective behaviors such as forming biofilms and acquiring nutrients from the environment. But being part of a cooperative group does not necessarily mean that every individual bacterium plays by the rules. Occasionally, cheaters arise. Steve Diggle, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, weighs in on what keeps microbial cheaters from ruining biofilm structures. 

The Planetary Society has announced the second round of winners of its Science and Technology Empowered by the Public (STEP) grant program, in which society members and donors have crowdfunded science and technology projects that advance space science and exploration. A winner of a 2023 STEP grant is a team led by Dartmouth College, which was awarded for their project to study small, extremely salty lakes in British Columbia, Canada, that may be analogous to ancient Mars as well as some of the Solar System’s ocean moons, places of key interest in the search for life. A member of that research team is Emily Hughes, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

After a three-year hiatus, scientists in the U.S. have just turned on detectors capable of measuring gravitational waves — tiny ripples in space itself that travel through the universe. Unlike light waves, gravitational waves are nearly unimpeded by the galaxies, stars, gas, and dust that fill the universe. This means that by measuring gravitational waves, astrophysicists can peek directly into the heart of some of these most spectacular phenomena in the universe. Since 2020, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory — commonly known as LIGO— has been sitting dormant while it underwent some exciting upgrades. These improvements will significantly boost the sensitivity of LIGO and should allow the facility to observe more-distant objects that produce smaller ripples in spacetime. Faculty and students in the School of Physics and Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics were part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration when the observatory made the first direct observation of gravitational waves. Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and associate dean for Research in the College of Sciences, served as LIGO deputy spokesperson and was on its data analysis team.

A major challenge for earth scientists is to understand how oceans respond to decreasing oxygen levels. Areas of low oxygen, oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) and anoxic marine zones (AMZs), are predicted to increase in both expanse and frequency in response to climate warming and human modifications of coastal zones. Global warming is causing oxygen-deficient waters to expand and intensify. Therefore, studies focused on microbial communities inhabiting oxygen-deficient regions are necessary to both monitor and model the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystem functions and services. This study presents a compendium of 5,129 single-cell amplified genomes (SAGs) from marine environments encompassing representative OMZ and AMZ geochemical profiles. The study's researchers include Frank Stewart, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Montana State University and an adjunct professor in the School of Biological Sciences. 

Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, has long captivated the curiosity of scientists. Some of the most intelligent minds agree that humankind should work towards occupying Mars. And there is a good reason for that. When life on Earth was evolving, Mars was going through significant climate change. Studying the red planet, both its past and present, can help us understand the details of the evolution of Earth and other planets in the solar system. One of the technologies that can help humans establish a base on Mars, fuel-generating microbes, was suggested in a Georgia Tech study led by Pamela Peralta-Yahya, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

A team of mechanical engineering students and alumni at Georgia Tech began developing and testing ForageFeeder, a $400 machine partly inspired by deer feeders that can disperse gorillas’ their meals at random intervals and locations throughout the day. Much like modern humans, zoo animals frequently deal with obesity due to a lack of activity. Tools and techniques such as the ForageFeeder not only promote Zoo Atlanta gorillas’ movement, but better simulate their natural foraging world. David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and the School of Physics, was faculty advisor for this project. (Read more about the story here.) 

A small but growing group of researchers is fascinated by an organ we often take for granted. We rarely think about how agile our own tongue needs to be to form words or avoid being bitten while helping us taste and swallow food. But that’s just the start of the tongue’s versatility across the animal kingdom. Without tongues, few if any terrestrial vertebrates could exist. The first of their ancestors to slither out of the water some 400 million years ago found a buffet stocked with new types of foods, but it took a tongue to sample them. The range of foods available to these pioneers broadened as tongues diversified into new, specialized forms — and ultimately took on functions beyond eating. This examination of how animal tongues shaped biological diversity includes research from David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Physics. 

As the Class of 2023 puts high school in its rearview mirror, graduates will go out into the world and wrestle with some of the same problems that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have. But, in addition to racism and environmental crises, metro Atlanta valedictorians say they expect their generation to face new challenges, such as the ones brought on by rapid technological advances. Whether the problems are old or new, the top students at area schools are confident their peers will bring a new mindset when searching for solutions. Duluth High School’s Hiteshri V. Chudasama, who will be studying biology at Georgia Tech, expects one of the primary issues for the Class of 2023 will be “battling boundaries regarding social media and AI.”

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Regina Barber and Emily Kwong, hosts of the Short Wave podcast, about the top science stories of the week, including the mysteries of multicellular organisms as researched by William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program in the School of Biological Sciences. Ratcliff and several colleagues, including research scientist Ozan Bozdag, used snowflake yeast to initiate the first long-term evolution experiment aimed at evolving new kinds of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors in the lab. Other College of Sciences researchers involved include Seyed Alireza Zamani Dahaj, computational biologist, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and the School of Physics; Thomas C. Day, Ph.D. candidate, School of Physics, and Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics.  Anthony J. Burnetti, research scientist; Penelope Kahn, research technician; Dung T. Lac, research technician; Kai Tong, postdoctoral scholar; and Peter Conlin, postdoctoral scholar, are all from the School of Biological Sciences. (This segment was also run on Connecticut Public Radio and Georgia Public Broadcasting.) 

In most of the numerical simulations that depicted the motions of the solar system's planets in the future, everything proceeded as expected. But in one percent of those simulations, things when literally sideways — thanks to Mercury's orbit flattening, causing chaos to other planet's orbits. Perhaps the solar system was not as stable as people once thought. For centuries, ever since Isaac Newton formulated his laws of motion and gravity, mathematicians and astronomers have grappled with this issue. Now, in three research papers, a trio of scientists have proved for the first time that instability inevitably arises in a model of planets orbiting a sun. Rafael de la Llave, a professor in the School of Mathematics whose speciality is dynamical systems, didn't work on the research papers but is quoted in the article.