Experts in the News

Rising land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet could slow ice loss and reduce sea-level rise in coming centuries. However, if emissions continue to rise, the effect could raise sea levels even more than the melting ice alone. 

Associate Professor Alexander Robel with the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences comments on a study recently published in ScienceAdvances that models the relationship between melting ice and rebounding land under different emission scenarios. He says the scenario where rebounding land increases sea level rise is based on worst-case assumptions about emissions as well as the rate at which the ice sheet retreats. 

Scientists have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy.

The neutrinos were detected over a span of a decade at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole, using more than 5,000 sensors covering an area the size of a small mountain.

School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and provides a brief commentary on this new research:

"This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," says Taboada.

A team of Georgia Tech researchers from the lab of Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev in the School of Psychology has made a groundbreaking advancement in artificial intelligence by developing a neural network that emulates human decision-making. This innovation could transform AI systems, making them more reliable and accurate. In their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers from Rahnev’s lab, introduced RTNet, a neural network designed to match human decision-making patterns.

(This research also appeared in The Debrief).

Georgia Tech researchers developed a neural network, RTNet, that mimics human decision-making processes, including confidence and variability, improving its reliability and accuracy in tasks like digit recognition. Working in the lab of Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev in the School of Psychology, researchers are training neural networks to make decisions more like humans. This science of human decision-making is only just being applied to machine learning, but developing a neural network even closer to the actual human brain may make it more reliable.

Over the past few decades, earth scientists have grappled with the concept of solar geoengineering: cooling the rapidly warming planet by injecting particles high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, for example. Now, researchers are proposing a new way to battle the effects of climate change that could prove even more costly and controversial: glacial geoengineering, designed to slow sea level rise.

A white paper, released on 11 July by glaciologists, calls for boosting research into daring plans that would protect vulnerable ice sheets by building flexible barriers around them or drilling deep into them to slow their slippage into the sea.

These untested ideas are stirring up a backlash among glaciologists, some of whom view them not only as outlandishly expensive and logistically flawed but also as a distraction from the problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In an article in Science, scientists, including School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Associate Professor Alex Robel, discuss the white paper and the distinction between supporting geoengineering and supporting its research. “I think the reality is that most people who will end up engaging in geoengineering research will do so because it increases the likelihood that geoengineering will actually happen,” says Robel.

Every few seconds, somewhere in the observable Universe, a massive star collapses and unleashes a supernova explosion. Physicists say Japan’s Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) observatory might now be collecting a steady trickle of neutrinos from those cataclysms — amounting to a few detections a year.

In an article published in Nature, School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada provides a brief commentary on this new research: "The data from Super-K are still too weak to claim a discovery, but the prospect of detecting the diffuse neutrinos is extremely exciting”, says Tabaoda, who is also the spokesperson for the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole. “Neutrinos would provide an independent measurement on the history of star formation in the Universe.”

On the timescale of sensory processing, neuronal networks have relatively fixed anatomical connectivity, while functional interactions between neurons can vary depending on the ongoing activity of the neurons within the network. In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers, including School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Hannah Choi, hypothesizes that different types of stimuli could lead those networks to display stimulus-dependent functional connectivity patterns. The team analyzed single-cell resolution electrophysiological data from the Allen Institute, with simultaneous recordings of stimulus-evoked activity from neurons across 6 regions of the mouse visual cortex. The work reveals unexpected stimulus-dependence regarding the way groups of neurons interact to process incoming sensory information.

Groundbreaking research is shedding new light on how biofilms grow — using physics and mathematical models. Biofilms grow everywhere — from plaque on teeth, to medical devices, to the open ocean. But until now, it’s been difficult to study just what controls their growth. In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the Yunker Lab in the School of Physics, including Lead Researcher Aawaz Pokhrel and Associate Professor Peter Yunker, leveraged physics to show that a biofilm’s geometry is the single most important factor in determining growth rate — more important than even the rate at which cells can reproduce. Since some research shows that 80% of infections in human bodies are caused by the bacteria in biofilms, understanding how colonies grow has important human health implications, potentially to help reduce their impact in medical settings or industrial processes. (This also appeared in Phys.org and Dental Review News.)

Recent demonstrations of moiré magnetism, featuring exotic phases with noncollinear spin order in the twisted van der Waals (vdW) magnet chromium triiodide CrI3, have highlighted the potential of twist engineering of magnetic (vdW) materials. In this paper, researchers, including School of Physics assistant professors Hailong Wang and Chunhui Du, reported the observation of two distinct magnetic phase transitions with separate critical temperatures within a moiré supercell of small-angle twisted double trilayer CrI3.

A team of researchers, led by Georgia Tech alumna Feifei Qian and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández, continue to work on the LASSIE Project, which stands for Legged Autonomous Surface Science in Analogue Environments. They want to see just how well a four-legged robot could make it up Mount Hood’s gravel and snow. “It’s literally a robotic dog form,” said Qian. “It can plow. It can basically dig a hole.” She added, "the information the robot sends back with each step could tell scientists whether it’s good to build a structure in a certain spot on the moon or whether it’d be good to excavate."

A geologically rapid Neoproterozoic oxygenation event is commonly linked to the appearance of marine animal groups in the fossil record. However, there is still debate about what evidence from the sedimentary geochemical record—if any—provides strong support for a persistent shift in surface oxygen immediately preceding the rise of animals. In this article, a team of researchers, including School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Postdoctoral Scholar Devon Cole, combined approaches from statistical learning, biogeochemical modeling and ecophysiology to better constrain changes in global ocean biogeochemistry and marine animal habitats through the Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic eras.

With global ocean heat at record levels, scientists have confirmed that a global coral bleaching event is underway. In an article published in The Conversation, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Annalisa Bracco discusses how research on reef connectivity and resilience may open new avenues for helping corals survive.