Experts in the News

Atlanta’s Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, was 10 years ago this weekend. The winter storm brought the metro area to a complete halt. It also changed the way many in Georgia looked at winter weather. About two-and-a-half inches of snow fell on January 28, 2014, but it was enough to turn interstates across the metro into parking lots. Everyone tried to get home all at once as the snow fell. Slush froze on the roadways, trapping drivers. Children were forced to sleep at schools and some drivers chose to abandon their cars and walk instead. "The air was so cold. I think forecast models struggled to completely estimate correctly the type of wintery precipitation that was about to happen," Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, explained. (This story was reprinted at AOL.com)

A major bottleneck in early detection is the molecular heterogeneity between ovarian cancer (OC) patients, which limits the likelihood of identifying individual biomarkers that are shared among patients. In a new study “A personalized probabilistic approach to ovarian cancer diagnostics,” published in Gynecologic Oncology, researchers from Georgia Tech have addressed this challenge by applying machine learning (ML) on patient metabolic profiles to identify biomarker patterns for personalized OC diagnosis. The Georgia Tech researchers include John McDonald, Professor Emeritus, School of Biological Sciences; Dongjo Ban, a Bioinformatics Ph.D. student in McDonald’s lab; Research Scientists Stephen N. Housley, Lilya V. Matyunina, and L.DeEtte (Walker) McDonald; and Regents’ Professor Jeffrey Skolnick, who also serves as Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology. (The study was also covered at The New York Post, Technology Networks, Medical Xpress, News-Medical.net, Medscape and Diagnostics World.)

Joe Mendelson, adjunct professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of research at Zoo Atlanta, writes about a study currently underway at the zoo on play behavior in diamondback terrapins. Play behavior is exactly the way someone would interpret it as a human — something that’s fun and silly and sometimes is for a purpose, and sometimes the purpose seems to be simply fun. Students from Georgia Tech and Georgia State University are helping Mendelson in making these observations, and they're hoping to make the case soon that they've documented purposeless play behavior in a turtle. 

Yeast is maybe the best-understood microorganism in the world. Humans have leveraged yeasts' biochemical abilities to produce bread, alcohol, and fermented milk products since the dawn of civilization. Yeasts are also one of the most common organism “models” in biology laboratories. And important bio-factories for plenty of medicines and useful biomolecules. Still, yeasts need to be fed with sugar or other compounds to stay alive. At least, that was true until Anthony Burnetti, a research scientist working in the lab of William Ratcliff’s, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, managed to make yeast able to harvest the energy of light. The story highlights the potential impact of the research on biofuel production.

This story about three alumni from Ohio Northern University's School of Science, Technology, and Mathematics who are making a mark in the world of physics and mathematics include Matthew Golden, who is now a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Physics. Golden's research in the Extreme Astrophysics lab focuses on the interface of machine learning and physics.

Chemical disequilibrium quantified using the available free energy has previously been proposed as a potential biosignature. However, researchers remotely sensing exoplanet biosignatures have not yet investigated how observational uncertainties impact the ability to infer a life-generated available free energy. This study's researchers pair an atmospheric retrieval tool to a thermodynamics model to assess the detectability of chemical disequilibrium signatures of Earth-like exoplanets, focusing on the Proterozoic eon when the atmospheric abundances of oxygen–methane disequilibrium pairs may have been relatively high. One of the study's authors is Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

Expedition cruises are the choice of adventurous, nature-loving and sustainability minded passengers who want to visit remote places, while also having a luxury experience. The locations of these expeditions are often threatened by climate change, giving travellers a chance to see endangered landscapes or species, possibly before they disappear. But burning fossil fuels to visit threatened environments definitely feels ironic. The desire to witness these endangered landscapes like Greenland, which is experiencing record melting, is sometimes labelled “last-chance tourism.” Meghana Ranganathan, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is quoted in this article 

What a strain is and how many strains make up a natural bacterial population remain elusive concepts despite their apparent importance for assessing the role of intra-population diversity in disease emergence or response to environmental perturbations. A research team sequenced 138 randomly selected Salinibacter ruber isolates from two solar salterns and assessed these genomes against companion short-read metagenomes from the same samples. In its paper published in Nature Communications, the team says its methodology and ANI thresholds outlined should represent a useful guide for future microdiversity surveys of additional microbial species. The researcher include Ph.D. Scholar Roth E. Conrad and Professor Kostas Konstantinidis, both in the School of Biological Sciences. Konstantinidis is also the Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

Silicon has long reigned as the material of choice for the microchips that power everything in the digital age, from AI to military drones. Silicon chips have been bumping against the limits of miniaturization for years, dividing chip makers on whether Moore’s law, the longstanding assumption that transistors will steadily get smaller and computers more powerful, is already dead. But the global semiconductor industry is still under just as much pressure to produce ever more powerful chips, and keep up the pace of technological progress. This month, researchers at Georgia Tech, led by Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, created the world’s first functional graphene-based semiconductor, marking what de Heer dubbed a “Wright brothers moment” for the next-generation materials that could make up the electronic devices of the future.  (This research was also covered at Physics World, Tech Briefs, TechSpot, Freethink, McGill Daily, and Fudzilla.)

The pandemic changed how we work and how we think about commuting. Workers are now more likely to see the daily commute as part of their workday. In this episode of WBUR Radio's On Point program, panelists are asked if employees should get paid for their commute. Included on the panel is Christopher Wiese, assistant professor of industrial/organizational psychology in the School of Psychology. 

By lassoing lizards, putting tiny chips on their legs, and tracking them for three years, Georgia Tech’s James Stroud revealed why species often appear unchanged for millions of years despite Charles Darwin’s theory of constant evolution. Darwin said that evolution was constantly happening, causing animals to adapt for survival. But many of his contemporaries disagreed. Everything changed in the past 40 years, when an explosion of evolutionary studies proved that evolution can and does occur rapidly — even from one generation to the next. Evolutionary biologists were thrilled, but the findings reinforced the same paradox: If evolution can happen so fast, then why do most species on Earth continue to appear the same for many millions of years? Stroud, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, set out to investigate it. (This research was also covered at Scientific American, Study Finds, India Education Diary, BNN Breaking, SciTechDaily, ScienceDaily, Earth.com, and Washington University/St. Louis.) 

School of Biological Sciences students are currently getting a taste of a New Zealand summer during their studies. The students are participating in the Pacific Study Abroad Program in Biology. They are spending the first six weeks in Dunedin, staying at Hayward College, and will spend a second six-week block in Australia. It is part of their spring semester program, and they will take classes in subjects such as physics, public policy and conservation biology. Professor Michael Goodisman said Georgia Tech brought over its own faculty lecturers. When they're not studying, the students and faculty will get a chance to explore New Zealand and Australia during the weekends.