Experts in the News

Last Friday, the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab (SEPL), led by School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor Jenny McGuire, hosted its weekly Fossil Friday event. This hands-on outreach program invites participants to uncover ancient history, explore real fossils, and learn about the discoveries made by scientists beneath the approximately 80-foot drop of Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming.

The goal of Fossil Friday is straightforward: to build a community centered on science outreach and enable people to interact directly with fossils. The event is open to students, faculty, and Atlanta locals alike, offering a relaxed space to learn, discover, and have fun.

In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, Georgia Tech physical oceanographer Susan Lozier and researcher Yao Fu shed light on the shifting dynamics of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Their findings, produced in collaboration with an international team of scientists, reveal shifts across surface and deep ocean currents, with implications for climate prediction and ocean heat transport. This research underscores the importance of sustained observational efforts in understanding long-term ocean variability.

We may never agree on what AGI or “humanlike” AI means, or what suffices to prove it. As AI advances, machines will still make mistakes, and people will point to these and say the AIs aren’t really intelligent. Anna Ivanova, an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech, was on a panel recently, and the moderator asked about AGI timelines. “We had one person saying that it might never happen,” Ivanova told me, “and one person saying that it already happened.” So the term “AGI” may be convenient shorthand to express an aim—or a fear—but its practical use may be limited. In most cases, it should come with an asterisk, and a benchmark.

As autumn begins, Georgia skies become a busy highway for millions of migrating birds, heading south. Benjamin Freeman, a biologist at the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences, says the timeline for this fall migration period is just beginning here in the Peach State. 

Watch the 11 Alive interview featuring Professor Freeman.

On July 1, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected what was first believed to be an asteroid. As calculations for its orbit progressed, it was found to be from outside our solar system, only the third interstellar object ever detected.

[One] thing that astronomers discovered early on was that, rather than being an asteroid, the interstellar interloper dubbed 3I/ATLAS was a comet.

"It is doing things that we expect comets to do. It's producing the types of gasses that we see comets produce. It's got a coma and a tail now pointed in the expected direction," said James Wray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "I would say the short summary is it looks generally like a comet. But in detail, there are some intriguing differences from solar system comets."

School of Biological Sciences Professor Marvin Whiteley has been named the 2026 recipient of the American Society for Microbiology's D.C. White Award for Interdisciplinary Research. This award recognizes Whiteley’s distinguished accomplishments in interdisciplinary research and mentoring in microbiology.

Reproduction is strange in many social insects, but the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) takes the weirdness to the next level. Queens mate with males of another species and then clone them, researchers report today in Nature, which means this ant is the only known organism that propagates two species by itself. Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Romiguier of the University of Montpellier, who led the team, calls M. ibericus “in a sense, the most complex, colonial life form we know of so far.”

The finding “is almost impossible to believe and pushes our understanding of evolutionary biology,” says Michael Goodisman, an evolutionary biologist and professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved with the new research. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, social insects reveal another surprise."

A recently published study by the Georgia Institute of Technology reveals that liming, normally used to neutralize the acid in soil, can remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Chris Reinhard, associate professor of biogeochemistry at the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, said there’s been interest in the carbon cycle for a long time. 

“Some of our research at Georgia Tech and research as collaborators looks at the basics of how the Earth's carbon cycle works in the most general way,” said Reinhard. “But in the last 10 or so years, we've gotten really preoccupied with the impacts of human activity on the carbon cycle. And that spans a whole range of things, because we do all sorts of things to the Earth system as a species.”

The new Atmospheric Science and Chemistry Measurement Network (ASCENT) offers an example of what a stationary network of specialized air quality sensors might look like in the future. The network comprises 12 air-quality-monitoring stations located across the US and maintained by local university scientists. Each station contains a suite of instruments capable of determining the particle size distribution and chemical composition of PM2.5 in real time.

The final ASCENT site began sampling in May 2024, says Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, the lead researcher of the network and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since then, all the sites have been fully operational.

In January, as the Eaton fire burned, its plume blew through an ASCENT site located in southeast Los Angeles. In real time, the local researchers watched the measured concentration of lead-containing PM2.5 jump above safe limits. “Without the speciated chemical measurement, we would not know that [the community was] being exposed to high levels of lead for a short period of time during the fire,” Ng says.

The data from the LA fires are some of the first the ASCENT team has made publicly available, but ultimately all the data will be available for people to view. And when it comes to AQI, Ng sees ASCENT as a possible starting point for expanding PM2.5 standards.

A team of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences found some answers to the mystery of gene regulation by turning to the trusty roundworm C. elegans, a frequently studied model organism that has contributed to many important discoveries. In their new study published in GENETICS, the researchers used a powerful new approach to compare gene activity across several types of wildly diverse worm strains from all over the world to uncover their regulatory structure.

In this first of its kind study, the researchers crossed each strain of worm with their standard N2 lab strain to make a hybrid offspring. They then used a modern and powerful technique called allele-specific RNA sequencing to determine how the genes were being used in these new strains, and which parent DNA is driving the gene’s activity.

In an episode of the “Brain Inspired” podcast, Chris Rozell, director of the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology, discusses a new biomarker to help clinicians and psychiatrists care for patients with treatment-resistant depression. His team uses deep brain stimulation electrodes to record local field potentials and generative explainable AI to predict patients’ recovery trajectories. Rozell also shares his personal backstory and why community and support are so important in the scientific setting.