Experts in the News

Georgia Tech researchers led by Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, a professor in the School of Earth of Atmospheric Sciences have finished investigating how the prehistoric weakening of a major ocean current led to a decline in ocean nutrients and negative impacts on North Atlantic ocean life. The results support predictions about how our oceans might react to a changing climate — and what that means for ocean life.

“The research tests a concept that has previously only been explored in theory and models,” says lead author Lynch-Stieglitz. “The large-scale Atlantic overturning circulation provides the nutrients that underly biological productivity in the North Atlantic.”

(This research also appeared in List23.)

As great minds throughout history have aptly demonstrated, high IQ's aren't always compatible with 'normality.' Several experts, including School of Psychology Professor Eric Schumacher are quoted in an article about seven behaviors that are linked to having a higher IQ. Schumacher's study on daydreaming, completed in 2017 with Christine Godwin, is referenced. "People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering," Schumacher says. "Our findings remind me of the absent-minded professor — someone who's brilliant, but off in his or her own world, sometimes oblivious to their own surroundings, or school children who are too intellectually advanced for their classes. While it may take five minutes for their friends to learn something new, they figure it out in a minute, then check out and start daydreaming," he adds. 

In June 2024, several earthquakes shook the northeast corner of Metro Atlanta, including the Buford and Lake Lanier regions of Gwinnett and Hall counties. In a radio interview with 95.5 WSB, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Zhigang Peng discusses a theory regarding water levels and earthquakes. "It turns out a reservoir is well known to cause earthquakes," Peng says. "Now, probably not at Lake Lanier, I have not heard anything related to this reservoir -- but looking at the broader regions, we have quite a few reservoirs in Georgia and the southern regions. Some of them are known to trigger or cause earthquakes.” 

https://bit.ly/3yAzasN

An article published in Phys.org reveals a new sustainable reaction for creating unique molecular building blocks. According to the published study, researchers from Georgia Tech’s Gutekunst Lab collaborated with Scripps Research and the University of Pittsburg to test whether newly invented nickel-catalyzed chemical reactions designed to build a diverse array of small molecule monomers could be scaled up to create unique polymers for drug delivery, energy storage, microelectronics, and more.

No one knows yet how much water the Moon has or how deep it goes. But one thing is certain: There’s much more than scientists first thought. In a series created for children of all ages called, "Curious Kids," and published in The Conversation, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernandez, and School of Aerospace Engineering Professor Glenn Lightsey discuss how scientists confirmed there is water on the moon and the careful steps we must take to access it.

Rising land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet could slow ice loss and reduce sea-level rise in coming centuries. However, if emissions continue to rise, the effect could raise sea levels even more than the melting ice alone. 

Associate Professor Alexander Robel with the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences comments on a study recently published in ScienceAdvances that models the relationship between melting ice and rebounding land under different emission scenarios. He says the scenario where rebounding land increases sea level rise is based on worst-case assumptions about emissions as well as the rate at which the ice sheet retreats. 

Scientists have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy.

The neutrinos were detected over a span of a decade at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole, using more than 5,000 sensors covering an area the size of a small mountain.

School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and provides a brief commentary on this new research:

"This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," says Taboada.

A team of Georgia Tech researchers from the lab of Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev in the School of Psychology has made a groundbreaking advancement in artificial intelligence by developing a neural network that emulates human decision-making. This innovation could transform AI systems, making them more reliable and accurate. In their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers from Rahnev’s lab, introduced RTNet, a neural network designed to match human decision-making patterns.

(This research also appeared in The Debrief).

Georgia Tech researchers developed a neural network, RTNet, that mimics human decision-making processes, including confidence and variability, improving its reliability and accuracy in tasks like digit recognition. Working in the lab of Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev in the School of Psychology, researchers are training neural networks to make decisions more like humans. This science of human decision-making is only just being applied to machine learning, but developing a neural network even closer to the actual human brain may make it more reliable.

Over the past few decades, earth scientists have grappled with the concept of solar geoengineering: cooling the rapidly warming planet by injecting particles high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, for example. Now, researchers are proposing a new way to battle the effects of climate change that could prove even more costly and controversial: glacial geoengineering, designed to slow sea level rise.

A white paper, released on 11 July by glaciologists, calls for boosting research into daring plans that would protect vulnerable ice sheets by building flexible barriers around them or drilling deep into them to slow their slippage into the sea.

These untested ideas are stirring up a backlash among glaciologists, some of whom view them not only as outlandishly expensive and logistically flawed but also as a distraction from the problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In an article in Science, scientists, including School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Associate Professor Alex Robel, discuss the white paper and the distinction between supporting geoengineering and supporting its research. “I think the reality is that most people who will end up engaging in geoengineering research will do so because it increases the likelihood that geoengineering will actually happen,” says Robel.

Groundbreaking research is shedding new light on how biofilms grow — using physics and mathematical models. Biofilms grow everywhere — from plaque on teeth, to medical devices, to the open ocean. But until now, it’s been difficult to study just what controls their growth. In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the Yunker Lab in the School of Physics, including Lead Researcher Aawaz Pokhrel and Associate Professor Peter Yunker, leveraged physics to show that a biofilm’s geometry is the single most important factor in determining growth rate — more important than even the rate at which cells can reproduce. Since some research shows that 80% of infections in human bodies are caused by the bacteria in biofilms, understanding how colonies grow has important human health implications, potentially to help reduce their impact in medical settings or industrial processes. (This also appeared in Phys.org and Dental Review News.)

On the timescale of sensory processing, neuronal networks have relatively fixed anatomical connectivity, while functional interactions between neurons can vary depending on the ongoing activity of the neurons within the network. In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers, including School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Hannah Choi, hypothesizes that different types of stimuli could lead those networks to display stimulus-dependent functional connectivity patterns. The team analyzed single-cell resolution electrophysiological data from the Allen Institute, with simultaneous recordings of stimulus-evoked activity from neurons across 6 regions of the mouse visual cortex. The work reveals unexpected stimulus-dependence regarding the way groups of neurons interact to process incoming sensory information.