The USA Gymnastics Championships went well for Collins Hill grad Elena Shinohara. Shinohara earned a spot on the 2019-20 U.S. Senior National Team in rhythmic gymnastics, and also received the prestigious 2019 Rhythmic Gymnastics Sportsperson of the Year Award from USA Gymnastics. Shinohara is a student at Georgia Tech, where she majors in biochemistry.

 

With help from a pair of NASA satellites, scientists - including Joseph Montoya of the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences - have identified what’s being called the biggest patch of seaweed ever seen. The vast mat of brown Sargassum algae extends all the way across the Atlantic Ocean — a distance of about 5,500 miles — and the researchers say the so-called bloom may represent the “new normal” for parts of the Atlantic. “It goes all the way from West Africa, through the central Atlantic, towards the Caribbean Sea and reaching the Gulf of Mexico,” said Mengqiu Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa and co-author of a paper describing the seaweed patch published July 5 in the journal Science. 
 

Antarctica faces a tipping point where glacial melting will accelerate and become irreversible even if global heating eases, research suggests. A NASA-funded study found instability in the Thwaites glacier meant there would probably come a point when it was impossible to stop it flowing into the sea and triggering a 50-cm sea level rise. Other Antarctic glaciers were likely to be similarly unstable. Alex Robel, an assistant professor at the US Georgia Institute of Technology (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) and the study’s leader, said if instability was triggered, the ice sheet could be lost in the space of 150 years, even if temperatures stopped rising. “It will keep going by itself and that’s the worry,” he said.The work was covered also by Fox News, Daily Mail, UPI, CNN, Time, Radio New Zealand, Cheddar, The Weather Network, and Yahoo News.

Scientists who studied the Alaskan tundra have warned that global warming could make microbes which live in the soil release more greenhouse gases. The permafrost soils on the northern latitude make up around 16 percent of the Earth's surface, but harbor about half of our planet's total carbon beneath its surface. As such, disruptions to this area have the potential to worsen climate change, the authors of the study published in the journal PNAS explained. Kostas T. Konstantinidis, co-author of the study and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (School of Civil Engineering and School of Biological Sciences), commented in a statement: "We saw that microbial communities respond quite rapidly—within four or five years—to even modest levels of warming."

Scientists led by the USF College of Marine Science used NASA satellite observations to discover the largest bloom of macroalgae in the world called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB), as reported in Science. They confirmed that the belt of brown macroalgae called Sargassum forms its shape in response to ocean currents, based on numerical simulations. It can grow so large that it blankets the surface of the tropical Atlantic Ocean from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.The team included others from USF, Florida Atlantic University, and Georgia Institute of Technology, represented by Joseph Montoya, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences.