Experts in the News

Other planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have seasonal cycles — and they can look wildly different from the ones we experience on Earth, experts told Live Science.

To understand how other planets have seasons, we can look at what drives seasonal changes on our planet. "The Earth has its four seasons because of the spin axis tilt," Gongjie Li, associate professor in the School of Physics, told Live Science. This means that our planet rotates at a slight angle of around 23.5 degrees.

"On Earth, we're very lucky, this spin axis is quite stable," Li said. Due to this, we've had relatively stable seasonal cycles that have persisted for millennia, although the broader climate sometimes shifts as the entire orbit of Earth drifts further or closer from the sun.

Such stability has likely helped life as we know it develop here, Li said. Scientists like her are now studying planetary conditions and seasonal changes on exoplanets to see whether life could exist in faroff worlds. For now, it seems as though the mild seasonal changes and stable spin tilts on Earth are unique.

This week could be a jackpot for birders in Georgia, as an estimated 10 million will fly every night over the state. When they aren't flying, they'll be on the ground feasting. In an 11Alive interview, Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, discusses the “river of migrating birds” over Georgia skies:

"So most of these small birds, they're actually... flying at night. So when they're flying, they're spending so much energy they're heating up, so they like to fly when it's cool at night. And they're flying a couple thousand feet up. They're flying all night and then sometime in the morning they'll land and they'll spend the day looking for food. And then the next night, they'll often rise up again and keep flying north, so they're flying a couple 100 miles a night.”

Discover the full interview here.

A similar story also appeared at The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm

Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.

The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.

Brain imaging research may be grappling with a fresh challenge. Scanning the brain of a single person can reveal the areas they use to complete a task, although the exact pattern differs from person to person. But averaging the results across many people—as scientists often do—fails to capture some important nuances, a new functional MRI (fMRI) study suggests.

The brain tackles decision-making tasks in particular through several different categories of brain activity, rather than a single one, according to the study, published in Nature Communications in February by a team that includes School of Psychology researchers. Across three decision-making tasks, participants’ brains differentially activated and suppressed various regions and networks in ways that could be grouped into distinct categories, or subtypes, highlighting the variability of neural signatures during behavior.

A new study from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control is showing a rise in the number of U.S. kids being diagnosed with autism. The logic behind the rise in diagnoses of autism, the cause of which still mystifies researchers, has been polarizing. 

Professor M.G. Finn, a biochemist and researcher in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said countless studies have ruled out a connection between vaccinations and autism. 

“Vaccines engage the immune system, and autism is not a disease of the immune system,” said Finn. “That has absolutely nothing to do, proven by study after study, with vaccines and immunizations. The fact that autism diagnosis may be increasing as a percent of the population is probably because there are numerous new and better ways to detect autism.”

In an article published in Science, Maria Martignoni, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, reflects on her path as a scientist and shares advice to students: 

"One does not need to have a clear life plan to belong in science. Many scientists know from the start that they want to be academic researchers. But for others the path unfolds gradually, with spurts of doubt and uncertainty along the way. In a way, that’s fitting. As researchers we are explorers, and part of our mission involves finding our way without always knowing where we are going.”

Postdoctoral researcher Aniruddha Bhattacharya and School of Physics Professor Chandra Raman have introduced a novel way to generate entanglement between photons – an essential step in building scalable quantum computers that use photons as quantum bits (qubits). Their research, published in Physical Review Letters, leverages a mathematical concept called non-Abelian quantum holonomy to entangle photons in a deterministic way without relying on strong nonlinear interactions or irrevocably probabilistic quantum measurements.

As the effects of the earthquake in Myanmar continue to be uncovered, scientists say the hazard of this tremor is comparable to a potential event along the San Andreas Fault in the western United States - which many say is also overdue for an earthquake. 

Computer models can simulate the extent of such a large earthquake, but researchers say Friday's catastrophe revealed new insights on what to expect. For one, the Myanmar earthquake was probably a supershear event - when shaking is stronger than expected for a particular earthquake, said Zhigang Peng, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Supershear events are rare and not fully understood. Scientists have found growing evidence that they usually occur on long, mature strike-slip faults, such as the Sagaing or San Andreas faults. But they don't know the exact conditions that may cause a rupture to trigger such extreme shaking.

Peng said that by examining what conditions caused this in Myanmar, "it informs our understanding of similar potential events, for example, on the San Andres Fault."

When a chemical fire broke out at the BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia in 2024, a plume of smoke blanketed the area, triggering evacuations and urgent warnings to stay indoors. But for many residents, this wasn’t just an isolated emergency—it was part of a larger pattern of industrial incidents at the plant that raised serious concerns about safety and oversight. 

The series “Manufacturing Danger: The BioLab Story” uncovers what led to the fire, how officials and the company responded, and the lingering questions about its impact on the community. The series includes expert analyses from Greg Huey, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Pamela Pollet, principal academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

This story also appeared at NPR.

In an article published in The Washington Post, Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences James Stroud provides an overview of his research: 

Every morning in Miami, our fieldwork begins the same way. Fresh Cuban coffee and pastelitos — delicious Latin American pastries — fuel our team for another day of evolutionary detective work. In this case, we are tracking evolution in real time, measuring natural selection as it happens in a community of Caribbean lizards.

Our research takes place on a South Florida island roughly the size of an American football field — assuming we are successful in sidestepping the American crocodiles that bask in the surrounding lake. We call it Lizard Island, and it's a special place.

Since 2015, we have been conducting evolutionary research here on five species of remarkable lizards called anoles. Our team is working to understand one of biology's most fundamental questions: How does natural selection drive evolution in real time?

This also appeared in The Conversation. 

Peter Yunker, associate professor in the School of Physics, reflects on the results of new experiments which show that cells pack in increasingly well-ordered patterns as the relative sizes of their nuclei grow.

“This research is a beautiful example of how the physics of packing is so important in biological systems,” states Yunker. He says the researchers introduce the idea that cell packing can be controlled by the relative size of the nucleus, which “is an accessible control parameter that may play important roles during development and could be used in bioengineering.”

How life on Earth evolved from unicellular to multicellular organisms remains a mystery, though evidence indicates that this may have occurred multiple times independently. To understand what could have happened, Will Ratcliff, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, has been conducting long-term evolution experiments on yeast in which multicellularity develops and emerges spontaneously.

In a recent episode of “The Joy of Why” podcast, Ratcliff discusses what his “snowflake yeast” model could reveal about the origins of multicellularity, the surprising discoveries his team has made, and how he responds to skeptics who question his approach.