Experts in the News

Machine learning can help conservationists monitor climate impacts across large swaths of marine ecosystems over extended periods of time, a task never possible before. The Delta Maps machine learning tool provides a new way to assess which reefs might be best-suited for survival and which play a key role in delivering larvae to others, and therefore should be targeted for preservation efforts, according to researchers in a paper published recently in the journal Communications Biology. Two scientists in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences conducted the research: Annalisa Bracco, professor and associate chair, and Lyuba Novi, postdoctoral fellow.

Walk around a forest in Canada and you can’t miss the precise piles of round animal poop: Deer, moose, and rabbits. But there is one animal in the world (that we know of) that poops in cubes and it’s a wombat. How does the Tasmanian mammal do that? Yes, serious researchers want to know. A team from the University of Tasmania has determined that a wombat’s surprisingly long and intermittently stretchy intestines compress their poop (or stool) into cubes. David Hu, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences, worked on the wombat research with the University of Tasmania.

Walk around a forest in Canada and you can’t miss the precise piles of round animal poop: Deer, moose, and rabbits. But there is one animal in the world (that we know of) that poops in cubes and it’s a wombat. How does the Tasmanian mammal do that? Yes, serious researchers want to know. A team from the University of Tasmania has determined that a wombat’s surprisingly long and intermittently stretchy intestines compress their poop (or stool) into cubes. David Hu, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences, worked on the wombat research with the University of Tasmania.

It was anticipated more than a century ago that the distribution of real-world observations' first digits would not be uniform but would exhibit a trend where numbers with lower first digits (1,2,...) occur more frequently than those with higher first digits (...,8,9). This phenomenon is known as Benford's law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law. It was finally proven in 1995 by Theodore P. Hill, emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics. This law has been found to apply to a wide range of datasets, from countries' populations to financial data, physical constants and earthquakes. 

The headline for this article refers to a Swedish technology startup company using origami-inspired techniques for its 3D printing services. But it also mentions Georgia Tech winning a Department of Defense grant for a project titled Programming Multistable Origami and Kirigami Structures via Topological Design, which investigated how concepts from the art of paper folding can be combined with 3D printing to create lightweight, flexible structures that can change shape. Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, was part of the project team.

In early February, Isaiah Bolden (B.A. Bowdoin '15) moderated a discussion on climate change with Vice President Kamala Harris at Georgia Tech, where he is an assistant professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Addressing a venue "filled to the brim," Harris emphasized the importance of creating an equitable clean-energy economy as we transition away from fossil fuels. “In order for us to truly achieve that, it’s going to require all to be involved"--scientists, researchers, and academics, she said. Bolden described being greatly affected by witnessing a terrible flood displace whole communities in Nashville, Tennessee, his hometown. “I had this passion burgeoning right then and there as someone who has this aptitude for science, this aptitude for math, but then seeing that the science is not reaching the public in a way that it should,” he said. “What can I then do with my career as an environmental scientist to generate data and get that data into the hands of people who could do something with it?”

Thwaites, a notoriously unstable glacier in western Antarctica, is cracking and disintegrating, spelling bad news for sea level rise across the globe. Efforts are afoot to understand the geometry and chemistry of Thwaites, which is about the size of Florida, in order to gauge the impact that warming waters and climate change may have on it. An 11-foot tube-like underwater robot called Icefin — first developed at Georgia Tech — is offering us a detailed look deep under the ice at how the vulnerable ice shelf in Antarctica is melting. By way of two papers published this week in the journal Nature, Icefin has been providing pertinent details regarding the conditions beneath the freezing waters. Justin Lawrence, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is one of the co-authors of the papers. (This research is also covered in Wired, BBC.com, and at NYU.edu. Alexander Robel, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who leads the Ice and Climate Group, is quoted in the Wired article.)

In early February, Isaiah Bolden (B.A. Bowdoin '15) moderated a discussion on climate change with Vice President Kamala Harris at Georgia Tech, where he is an assistant professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Addressing a venue "filled to the brim," Harris emphasized the importance of creating an equitable clean-energy economy as we transition away from fossil fuels. “In order for us to truly achieve that, it’s going to require all to be involved"--scientists, researchers, and academics, she said. Bolden described being greatly affected by witnessing a terrible flood displace whole communities in Nashville, Tennessee, his hometown. “I had this passion burgeoning right then and there as someone who has this aptitude for science, this aptitude for math, but then seeing that the science is not reaching the public in a way that it should,” he said. “What can I then do with my career as an environmental scientist to generate data and get that data into the hands of people who could do something with it?”

C. Denise Okafor (M.S. CHEM 2010, Ph.D. CHEM 2015), assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry at Penn State, has been selected as a recipient of the 2023 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The Mason Award commemorates the late chemist and AAAS member Marion Tuttle Milligan Mason, who wanted to support the advancement of women in the chemical sciences. Okafor’s research combines computational and experimental investigations to develop a fundamental understanding of how protein function is regulated.

Last month, mathematicians Karen Vogtmann and Michael Borinsky posted a proof that there is a truckload of mathematical structure within a hitherto inaccessible mathematical world called the moduli space of graphs, which Vogtmann and a collaborator first described in the mid-1980s. “That’s a super hard problem. It’s amazing they were able to,” said Dan Margalit, professor in the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Margalit did not work on the moduli space proof.) 

Last month, mathematicians Karen Vogtmann and Michael Borinsky posted a proof that there is a truckload of mathematical structure within a hitherto inaccessible mathematical world called the moduli space of graphs, which Vogtmann and a collaborator first described in the mid-1980s. “That’s a super hard problem. It’s amazing they were able to,” said Dan Margalit, professor in the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Margalit did not work on the moduli space proof.) 

C. Denise Okafor (M.S. CHEM 2010, Ph.D. CHEM 2015), assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry at Penn State, has been selected as a recipient of the 2023 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The Mason Award commemorates the late chemist and AAAS member Marion Tuttle Milligan Mason, who wanted to support the advancement of women in the chemical sciences. Okafor’s research combines computational and experimental investigations to develop a fundamental understanding of how protein function is regulated.