Experts in the News

After 10 days in isolation, a group of Georgia Tech students will be returning from Arkansas having completed their first simulated Mars mission. Southeast Analog is a program run by students at Georgia Tech interested in spaceflight. 

The SEA-1 Thalassa mission included six "astronauts" on a simulated Mars habitat in Arkansas and 30 crew in mission control on campus. Students in the Southeast Analog program worked in three shifts around the clock to do astronaut training, spaceflight operations, and research.

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Dangerously high heat levels forced at least one metro Atlanta school district to pull students inside Monday as heat index values head toward triple digits this week. 

Georgia Tech biology adjunct professor Mike Sawka explained that extreme heat creates severe cardiovascular strain during exercise. "The main problem with heat stress is it puts stress on the cardiovascular system," Sawka said. "The blood flow that would normally go to the muscles has to be shared by the skin. So as you exercise, you're cheating the blood flow from the heart called your cardiac output". 

Sawka noted that extended exertion in hot weather puts the human body into overdrive, triggering a progression of severe health risks. "That can lead to either heat exhaustion, heat injury, or heat stroke, which is a continuum of serious heat illnesses, with heat stroke being the most severe," Sawka said. 

In an article published by The Conversation, Professor Joseph Montoya, Postdoctoral Fellow Xing Zhou, and their collaborator discuss sargassum blooms and their impact on the Caribbean and Gulf coasts and the coasts of the tropical Atlantic. According to their research, the vast mats of smelly, brown seaweed affecting these areas may have entered a "self-sustaining cycle, effectively feeding their own expansion."

Researchers in the School of Physics, working with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, have found that standard methods for identifying chirality in topological phases fail when applied to mixed quantum states. The study reveals that established diagnostics, including bulk-boundary correspondence and the modular commutator, are unreliable in these complex systems. Consequently, the research presents two new measures, based on relative entropy, to accurately diagnose chirality and determine the chiral central charge in decohered topological phases, indicating a need for a new set of tools when investigating mixed-state topology.

A recent study by researchers from Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences reveals a new connection between sulfoxaflor — a next-generation pesticide — and disruptions to bumblebee reproduction and gene expression. And while its use may be well-intentioned, it's also crippling the DNA of many worker bees responsible for our pollination. This link matters more than ever as the world slowly watches our pollinators meet an uncertain fate.

A similar story appeared in SciTech Daily.

Urban beekeeping as a hobby has grown across America. There has been a push everywhere to understand the role our pollinators play in agriculture and gardening. If you look closely around metro Atlanta, there are hives in neighborhoods, hotel rooftops, near parking decks. We begin our spotlight with the buzz of a Georgia Tech science building, home of the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project's hives.

The first named storm of the hurricane season weakened Wednesday night, but forecasters warned that it still posed a threat of massive amounts of rain and continued flash flooding.

Zachary Handlos, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the potential for flash flooding will be determined by how quickly Tropical Storm Arthur moves through the region.

“What it comes down to is, is the rainfall going to park itself or become stationary over any of these locations?” Handlos said. “That is a little harder to predict.”

In a conversation with Scientific American, President Ángel Cabrera (M.S. PSY 1993, Ph.D. PSY 1995) argues that dealing with mistrust in science will help the U.S. keep its competitive edge.

Bacteria have no neurons or memories in the human sense. Yet in a new study, researchers at Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon University — including School of Physics Associate Professor Shiladitya Banerjee and Postdoctoral Fellow Josiah Kratz — found that individual E. coli cells carried traces of past hardship into the future. When nutrients repeatedly rose and fell, the cells changed how quickly they grew, suggesting that even simple microbes can use experience to prepare for what may come next. 

Georgia Tech researchers have recreated the effects of solar wind on lunar minerals in a laboratory experiment, providing new evidence that the constant stream of charged particles from the sun plays a major role in shaping the moon’s surface.

The team exposed ilmenite, a mineral commonly found on both Earth and the moon, to a synthetic version of solar wind. The experiment produced nanophase iron, tiny metallic particles that are widely observed in lunar soil and are considered a key signature of space weathering.

A new Georgia Tech study found the chemical plume from the 2024 BioLab fire in Conyers, Ga., released bromine, not chlorine, as its dominant compound in the immediate aftermath. This finding stands in stark contrast to early public warnings about the fire, which prompted 17,000 evacuations, closed portions of I-20, and led to overnight shelter-in-place orders for weeks. Nearly two years later, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board is still investigating the fire and chemical release. 

The Georgia Tech paper containing the study was published in the March 2026 issue of Environmental Science & Technology Letters and identified 26 different chemical species in the air following the Sept. 29, 2024, fire at the BioLab facility in Conyers. The authors wrote that the chemically complex plume "exposed millions in metropolitan Atlanta to numerous toxic compounds" and represented the first detailed study of a pool chemical facility fire.