Experts in the News

In a study published in Chem, scientists from Scripps Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology question the validity of the “formose reaction” hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that simple formaldehyde molecules reacted under early Earth conditions to form ribose. But the new findings reveal a key limitation: under controlled experimental conditions, the formose reaction does not yield linear sugars like ribose. Instead, it predominantly produces branched sugar structures, which are incompatible with the formation of RNA.

“Our results cast doubt on the formose reaction as the basis for the formation of linear sugars,” says co-senior author Charles Liotta, Regents’ Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Tens of thousands of people in the Southeast were jolted by a magnitude 4.1 earthquake on Saturday, May 10. Seismologist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Zhigang Peng joined FOX Weather to talk about why so many people in the East reported feeling the earthquake and just how common they are in the region.

A similar story also appeared at 11 Alive News.

According to new research published in the journal Nature, lava flows possibly originating from the Jezero Mons on Mars could have shaped the geology of the Jezero crater’s floor. According to the findings, the analysis of NASA's Perseverance rover samples could also reveal clues about ancient Mars when it was still geologically active.

The study was led by Sara C. Cuevas-Quiñones, a Ph.D. Planetary Science student from Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) and Brown University. The research team also included EAS Professor James Wray and EAS Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández. 

As Cuevas-Quiñones and her colleagues note in their paper, the detection of clay and carbonate minerals on Jezero crater's floor supports the conclusion that the sedimentary deposits on the crater's western edge are the result of aqueous activity that took place roughly 3.8 to 3.5 billion years ago. In addition, satellite observations have revealed a set of non-sedimentary geologic materials that cover most of the Jezero crater's floor.

Other planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have seasonal cycles — and they can look wildly different from the ones we experience on Earth, experts told Live Science.

To understand how other planets have seasons, we can look at what drives seasonal changes on our planet. "The Earth has its four seasons because of the spin axis tilt," Gongjie Li, associate professor in the School of Physics, told Live Science. This means that our planet rotates at a slight angle of around 23.5 degrees.

"On Earth, we're very lucky, this spin axis is quite stable," Li said. Due to this, we've had relatively stable seasonal cycles that have persisted for millennia, although the broader climate sometimes shifts as the entire orbit of Earth drifts further or closer from the sun.

Such stability has likely helped life as we know it develop here, Li said. Scientists like her are now studying planetary conditions and seasonal changes on exoplanets to see whether life could exist in faroff worlds. For now, it seems as though the mild seasonal changes and stable spin tilts on Earth are unique.

This week could be a jackpot for birders in Georgia, as an estimated 10 million will fly every night over the state. When they aren't flying, they'll be on the ground feasting. In an 11Alive interview, Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, discusses the “river of migrating birds” over Georgia skies:

"So most of these small birds, they're actually... flying at night. So when they're flying, they're spending so much energy they're heating up, so they like to fly when it's cool at night. And they're flying a couple thousand feet up. They're flying all night and then sometime in the morning they'll land and they'll spend the day looking for food. And then the next night, they'll often rise up again and keep flying north, so they're flying a couple 100 miles a night.”

Discover the full interview here.

A similar story also appeared at The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm

Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.

The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.

Brain imaging research may be grappling with a fresh challenge. Scanning the brain of a single person can reveal the areas they use to complete a task, although the exact pattern differs from person to person. But averaging the results across many people—as scientists often do—fails to capture some important nuances, a new functional MRI (fMRI) study suggests.

The brain tackles decision-making tasks in particular through several different categories of brain activity, rather than a single one, according to the study, published in Nature Communications in February by a team that includes School of Psychology researchers. Across three decision-making tasks, participants’ brains differentially activated and suppressed various regions and networks in ways that could be grouped into distinct categories, or subtypes, highlighting the variability of neural signatures during behavior.

A new study from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control is showing a rise in the number of U.S. kids being diagnosed with autism. The logic behind the rise in diagnoses of autism, the cause of which still mystifies researchers, has been polarizing. 

Professor M.G. Finn, a biochemist and researcher in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said countless studies have ruled out a connection between vaccinations and autism. 

“Vaccines engage the immune system, and autism is not a disease of the immune system,” said Finn. “That has absolutely nothing to do, proven by study after study, with vaccines and immunizations. The fact that autism diagnosis may be increasing as a percent of the population is probably because there are numerous new and better ways to detect autism.”

In an article published in Science, Maria Martignoni, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, reflects on her path as a scientist and shares advice to students: 

"One does not need to have a clear life plan to belong in science. Many scientists know from the start that they want to be academic researchers. But for others the path unfolds gradually, with spurts of doubt and uncertainty along the way. In a way, that’s fitting. As researchers we are explorers, and part of our mission involves finding our way without always knowing where we are going.”

Postdoctoral researcher Aniruddha Bhattacharya and School of Physics Professor Chandra Raman have introduced a novel way to generate entanglement between photons – an essential step in building scalable quantum computers that use photons as quantum bits (qubits). Their research, published in Physical Review Letters, leverages a mathematical concept called non-Abelian quantum holonomy to entangle photons in a deterministic way without relying on strong nonlinear interactions or irrevocably probabilistic quantum measurements.

As the effects of the earthquake in Myanmar continue to be uncovered, scientists say the hazard of this tremor is comparable to a potential event along the San Andreas Fault in the western United States - which many say is also overdue for an earthquake. 

Computer models can simulate the extent of such a large earthquake, but researchers say Friday's catastrophe revealed new insights on what to expect. For one, the Myanmar earthquake was probably a supershear event - when shaking is stronger than expected for a particular earthquake, said Zhigang Peng, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Supershear events are rare and not fully understood. Scientists have found growing evidence that they usually occur on long, mature strike-slip faults, such as the Sagaing or San Andreas faults. But they don't know the exact conditions that may cause a rupture to trigger such extreme shaking.

Peng said that by examining what conditions caused this in Myanmar, "it informs our understanding of similar potential events, for example, on the San Andres Fault."

When a chemical fire broke out at the BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia in 2024, a plume of smoke blanketed the area, triggering evacuations and urgent warnings to stay indoors. But for many residents, this wasn’t just an isolated emergency—it was part of a larger pattern of industrial incidents at the plant that raised serious concerns about safety and oversight. 

The series “Manufacturing Danger: The BioLab Story” uncovers what led to the fire, how officials and the company responded, and the lingering questions about its impact on the community. The series includes expert analyses from Greg Huey, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Pamela Pollet, principal academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

This story also appeared at NPR.