Experts in the News

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.

A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula late Monday, triggering a tsunami that surged across the Pacific Ocean. Tsunami alerts stretched from Japan to South America, including portions of coastal Alaska and the West Coast, as well as Hawaii.

“This is certainly one of the biggest earthquakes we’ve seen recently,” said Andrew Newman, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “It’s smaller than the 2011 Japan quake, but it's almost the exact same size as the Chile earthquake in 2010. It created a lot of local damage there as well as a large tsunami.”

The quake occurred along a megathrust fault, which is a type of subduction zone where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. These faults, common around the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” are responsible for the largest earthquakes in recorded history. They're also responsible for generating tsunami waves. 

"In these megathrust faults, one dives beneath another. It's actually that upper plate when it pops up," Newnan said. "It creates really large waves. That part that pops up may pop up as much as 10 to 15 or 20 feet, depending on how big the earthquake is. That's going to lift the entire water column around it...and then that wave just kind of propagates away."

Each day, carbon dioxide emitted by Georgia Power’s coal, oil and gas plants is released into the atmosphere, where it will stay for hundreds of years and heat the planet. Last year, the utility quietly took steps to explore an alternative. Contractors hired by Georgia Power drilled holes into the Earth’s crust at three locations in rural Georgia, some more than a mile deep. Their goal? To see whether the formations below are suitable for “geologic carbon sequestration,” a method that could permanently lock away the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

Carbon capture and storage technology has its detractors, and significant environmental and cost questions around it exist. But major scientific reports have found it may be necessary to limit global warming. 

Felix Herrmann, a computational seismologist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Computational Science and Engineering, agrees. 

“It’s not a silver bullet,” Herrmann said. “But the reason why I’m an advocate for this, frankly, is I think it’s a bit naive to think we can switch off of oil and gas tomorrow.”

Community engagement has illustrated notable educational applications of the Life Detection Knowledge Base (LDKB). The webtool's utility as an educational resource for next generation mission planners and astrobiologists was demonstrated when Georgia Institute of Technology astrobiology course instructor Jennifer Glass, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, adopted it for a class project across several semesters from 2022 to 2023. In her graduate course, Seminal Papers in Astrobiology, Glass assigned students a biogenic or abiotic stance on a seminal astrobiology case study, such as the debate on the oldest microfossils. Students constructed and iterated arguments and evidence on their chosen topics for inclusion into multiple LDKB entries. A second example of the tool’s success in education came from a collaboration with the Young Scientists Program internship through the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. Through both efforts, students developed arguments and supporting evidence for inclusion in the LDKB, gaining useful skills in peer reviewing, scientific writing, and scientific debate.

In an article published in Physics Magazine, School of Physics Ph.D. student Jingcheng Zhou and Assistant Professor Chunhui (Rita) Du review efforts to optimize diamond-based quantum sensing. According to Zhou and Du, the approach used in two recent studies broadens the potential applications of nitrogen-vacancy center sensors for probing quantum phenomena, enabling measurements of nonlocal properties (such as spatial and temporal correlations) that are relevant to condensed-matter physics and materials science.

In a video interview published by 11 Alive, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry faculty Mike Evans explains the science behind two classic summer traditions: fireworks and grilling.

Thursday’s meteor captivated many across the Southeast, but perhaps no one was quite as thrilled as the amateur meteorite chasers who track down bits of space rock and the astronomy researchers whose lifework is analyzing space activity.

Toshi Hirabayashi, a Georgia Tech associate professor who studies space operations, celestial mechanics, and planetary science, quickly began analyzing videos of the fireball Thursday “just for fun.”

Based on his rough calculations, the object was moving “definitely faster than 10 miles per second” or roughly 36,000 mph, he said.

While it’s fun to see smaller meteorites hit the Earth, it’s critical to prepare for when a larger meteor comes blazing in and does real damage. In 2013, a meteor the size of a house exploded 14 miles above Russia, Hirabayashi said.

“We are working so hard to monitor, as well as develop technologies to defend Earth,” he said.

Hirabayashi was also cited in articles published by FoxWeather and WSB TV.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and India's National Center for Biological Sciences have found that yeast clusters, when grown beyond a certain size, spontaneously generate fluid flows powerful enough to ferry nutrients deep into their interior.

In the study, "Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast," published in Science Advances, the research team — which included Georgia Tech Ph.D. scholar Emma Bingham, Research Scientist G. Ozan Bozdag, Associate Professor William C. Ratcliff, and Associate Professor Peter Yunker — used experimental evolution to determine whether non-genetic physical processes can enable nutrient transport in multicellular yeast lacking evolved transport adaptations.

A similar story also appeared at The Hindu.

Imagine your memories, way of thinking, and who you are being saved into a computer system. Not as a backup, but as a fully conscious version of yourself. Without a body, but with a mind. Sounds like science fiction? That’s exactly what mind uploading to a computer is. It’s an attempt to create a digital existence that can last forever.

In a virtual world where physics operates on different principles, a digital consciousness could eat virtual food, fly, travel to planets, or pass through walls. 

Limitations? Only those imposed by technology and the current state of knowledge. Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Psychology does not rule out this possibility.

“Theoretically, mind uploading is possible. However, we are currently very far from this goal,” he writes in The Conversation.

Georgia Tech alum Miriam Guthrie (EAS 2025) answers a reader question about her experiences as a meteorologist intern at The Weather Channel and shares advice on how to prepare for a career in meteorology. Here is an excerpt of her response: 

“A passion for weather is important [and] I would suggest really focusing on your math and science classes to prepare for the right school. When you're taking those hard math classes and you feel like you want to give up, remembering why you're passionate about this is really gonna help.

“I decided to go to Georgia Tech because it's a really good school for math and science, and I knew that that was something that I wanted to pursue. 

“My time at the Weather Channel so far has been awesome. I love teaching people about the weather, and it's been exciting the past few days with the first hurricane of the year, Hurricane Erick, just with the chaos of it all. It's a fun job, but it is a chaotic kind of fun.”