Experts in the News

Unlike some pretty metal plants that thrive in the darkness, yeast generally doesn’t function well in the light. This fungi turns carbohydrates into ingredients for beer or bread when left to ferment in the dark. It must be stored in dark dry places, as exposure to light can keep fermentation from happening all together. However, a group of School of Biological Sciences researchers have engineered a strain of yeast that may actually work better with light that could give these fungi an evolutionary boost in a simple way. The findings are described in a study published January 12 in the journal Current Biology. Co-authors are Research Scientist Anthony Burnetti, Ph.D. Scholar Autumn Peterson, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences William Ratcliff, and Carina Baskett, Head of Grant Writing and Trainee Development for Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection. (This research was also covered at Technology Networks, New Atlas, ScienceDaily, Interesting Engineering, Biofuels Digest, Infobae, and Phys.org.)

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. 

Spring, summer, fall and winter – the seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time every year. It’s easy to take this cycle for granted here on Earth, but not every planet has a regular change in seasons. So why does Earth have regular seasons when other planets don’t? Gongjie Li, assistant professor in the School of Physics, explains about axial tilts of planets, which have big implications for everything from seasons to glacier cycles, since that tilt can determine just how much sun a planet will get. The magnitude of that tilt can even determine whether a planet is habitable to life. (This article by Li was also reprinted in in IFL Science, Qrius, and the Longmont (Colorado) Leader.) 

In the cosmos, the rhythm of seasons is a dance choreographed by the distinct axial tilt of each planet. The study of these celestial ballets has been the focus of astrophysicist Gongjie Li, assistant professor in the School of Physics. Funded by NASA, Li’s research delves into the reasons behind seasonal patterns, centering on the effects of a planet’s axial tilt or obliquity. Earth has an axis tilted about 23 degrees from vertical, a feature that triggers the varying intensity of sunlight across different hemispheres, resulting in changing seasons. Li articulates that planets ideally aligned axially with their orbit around the sun, assuming a circular orbit, wouldn’t bear witness to seasons due to a constant influx of sunlight.

While 2023 has already been called the world's hottest year, the full set of climate data up to December 31 shows global temperatures reached "exceptionally" high levels last year, according to the European Union's key climate service. It found Earth was 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, with temperatures during the year overtaking the previous record set in 2016 by a large margin. This story offers a glimpse of some of the defining events from the world's hottest year in pictures and charts. Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said it was "very plausible" that intensely warm ocean temperatures aided several of these events, including extreme rainfall and severe coral bleaching, although formal studies would be required to confirm it.

No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in the outputs of large language models like ChatGPT. It's a big problem when chatbots spew untruths. But Wired writer Steven Levy says we should also celebrate these hallucinations as prompts for human creativity and a barrier to machines taking over. Santosh Vempala, professor in the School of Computer Science, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and adjunct professor in the School of Mathematics, has studied AI hallucinations and is quoted in the article. 

Africa is on fire. It has been for thousands of years. The continent contains more than 50 percent of the total area on Earth that is burning, on average, and there is no sign of it stopping; indeed, the migrating hemisphere-hopping African wildfire season is steadily increasing. The fire is essentially feeding itself in a vicious cycle involving aerosols, tiny particles that have a large impact on Earth's climate. Their interaction with the climate is intricate; they reinforce regulations of African ecosystems and pave the way for evolving wildfire patterns each year. The findings appear in a new study co-authored by Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

Alien hunters should search for technological life on planets that possess a high oxygen abundance in their atmospheres, according to new research that aims to hone the search for technosignatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. The study from scientists at the University of Roma Tor Vergata in Italy and the University of Rochester in the U.S. argues that a planet's atmosphere needs to contain at least 18 percent oxygen to facilitate a technological civilization. The reason for this, they say, is a simple one: oxygen is needed for fire. This story cites another study detailing a future oxygen-related challenge for the Earth — as the sun ages and brightens in a billion years to produce more heat that warms our planet in turn, Earth's atmosphere will become deoxygenated, with oxygen levels dropping below 10 percent. That study's co-author is Christopher Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little in all that time. Logic told Stroud that if evolution had favored the same traits over millions of years, then he should expect to see little to no change over a single generation. Except that’s not what he found. Instead of stability, Stroud saw variability. One season, shorter-legged anoles survived better than the others. The next season, those with larger heads might have an advantage. This story builds on Stroud's recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, joined Fox Weather to talk about the "falling iguana alerts" now issued by the National Weather Service in Miami when temperatures dip unseasonably lower during the winter, causing the large lizards to fall out of Florida trees. Stroud, an evolutionary ecologist, spoke of his lab's studies to find out whether iguanas are adapting to colder temperatures brought on by climate change, or whether genetic factors are involved. Iguanas, normally found in hotter Central and South American climates, are considered an invasive species for Florida. 

Thomasville native Jacques Gay, a Ph.D. scholar in physical chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been selected for the National Science Foundation's International SuperComputing collaborative NSF IRES ASSURE Program. As a US graduate student, Gay will get to collaborate with supercomputing centers in China, Japan and Germany through the program. He has been selected to work with Dr. Paolo Carloni of Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany. There, Gay said he will help develop molecular mechanic-based drug design computations with quantum accuracy. According to the NSF, only 20-25 students throughout the United States are chosen for this prestigious program.

Global forest fires emitted 33.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2001 and 2022, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This makes the CO2 emissions generated by forest fires each year higher than those from burning fossil fuels in Japan — the world’s sixth-largest CO2 emitter. Driving the emissions spike was the growing frequency of “extreme forest-fire events”. Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, tells Nature the report complements his work, which “indicates a roughly 20 percent rise in global burnt area by the 2050s compared to the 2000s”.