Experts in the News

Wildfires are becoming a bigger focus for scientists that study air pollution, said Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Ng is also the principal investigator of ASCENT, a new federally funded, national monitoring network that began last year to measure a wide range of air pollutants in real time. The readings from the Los Angeles area fires were captured at the network’s monitoring station in Pico Rivera, several miles from the active fires.

In this piece, Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, explains the work of climatologists, stating that “climatologists can take on a lot of roles. It’s important to understand the difference between weather and climate. So weather is the study of what's going on in the atmosphere right now. Climatology looks at data for a certain day and compares it to what’s called a climate normal. What this means is, they take a 30-year period of data for that day, and from that baseline, say, ‘Oh, the temperature today is above average or below average.'”

Language models have become an essential part of the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI) psychology. In an article published in Nature Human Behaviour, School of Psychology Assistant Professor Anna Ivanova discusses 14 methodological considerations that can be used to design more robust, generalizable studies that evaluate the cognitive abilities of language-based AI systems, as well as to accurately interpret the results of these studies.

During an episode of the podcast “Carbon Conversations,” Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, discusses her work and how computation tools can help us better understand the ocean, marine ecosystems, and climate dynamics.

Researchers, including Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, used modeling to demonstrate that the quick recovery of bleached corals in the past five mass bleaching events in Moorea and Tahiti (within the Society Islands of French Polynesia) may be the result of long-distance connectivity with the Tuamotu Islands and undisturbed coral reefs within a 300 km radius.

Five years after the "murder hornet” (Vespa mandarinia,) was first spotted in Washington state, the U.S. has declared the invasive species eradicated.

In an article published in Futurity, Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences Professor Mike Goodisman explained that eradicating the “murder hornet” will help the U.S. avoid a potential agricultural and commercial disaster due to the murder hornet’s threat to the already-declining honeybee population. 

“A threat to the honeybee population would be a commercial disaster,” Goodisman says. “Honeybees are critical in agriculture for pollinating a great variety of the foods we eat, and if we don’t have these pollinators, then we wouldn’t have many of the foods—fruits especially—that we are used to.”

The eradication of the hornet is a significant achievement, but Goodisman says it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will not re-emerge. Murder hornets can hibernate in various materials, cargo ships, and other commercial transportation, which can unknowingly spread invasive species worldwide.

Researchers at Georgia Tech including James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences were conducting a study of Cuban brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida when suddenly, a new species appeared on the scene: the Puerto Rican crested anole (Anolis cristatellus).

The subsequent Georgia Tech-led study of the two species and how they adapted to fill different roles, provides some of the clearest evidence to date of evolution in action.

“When two similar species compete for the same resources, like food and territory, they often evolve differences that allow them to coexist,” says Stroud, lead author of the study. "Most of what we know about how animals change in response to this process comes from studying patterns that evolved long ago. This was a rare opportunity where we could watch evolution as it happened.”

Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and the School of Physics including Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando, Assistant Professor Karl Lang, and post-doctoral researcher Micah Schaible are among the authors of a paper recently published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech demonstrated that space weathering alterations of the surface of lunar samples at the nanoscale may provide a mechanism to distinguish lunar samples of variable surface exposure age.

In an article published in Medical Xpress, Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry discussed the cryo-electron microscopy technology behind an important research discovery that could help create new drugs to lower "bad" cholesterol and hopefully prevent heart attacks and stroke.

Associate Professor Aditi Das and Professor MG Finn explained in an email that cryo-electron microscopy technology represents a revolution in biology and biochemistry because it allows scientists to determine the structures of biological molecules in great detail.

"When we know their structures, we have a big clue as to how they work, how to fix them if they are defective, or how to stop them if they cause harm. Nature is the supreme molecular architect, and we need techniques like cryo-EM to see the details of what she builds," Finn explained.

Research with this tool is going to have serious health benefits, the NIH said, because it allowed them for the first time to see how "bad" cholesterol, known as low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol or LDL-C, builds up in the body, and causes heart attacks and strokes in people who have genetically high LDL cholesterol.

(This story also appeared in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.)

A recent profile in Forbes, highlights Georgia Tech and its many strengths, including job placement and corporate engagement:

“By luring tech companies to Atlanta while simultaneously growing its enrollment, the Georgia Institute Of Technology is creating a super-sized rival to MIT, Caltech, and Stanford and fueling Silicon Valley South.”

Georgia Tech has received a rapid grant of more than $86,000 from the National Science Foundation to study air-monitoring data the university conducted during the BioLab incident in Rockdale County this fall. Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences deployed a mobile monitoring station at the city of Conyers' request shortly after the fire started on Sept. 29. The blaze lasted about two and a half weeks, created a plume of chemicals that wafted over the county and parts of metro Atlanta, and has prompted more than 20 class-action lawsuits blaming the company for illnesses and business closures.

Professor Greg Huey and his research group plan to calibrate and study the data, make it accessible to the public, identify as many compounds as possible that were in the plume, and prioritize reviews based on toxicity.

(This story also appeared at Atlanta Business Chronicle.)

Lipid-protein interactions are crucial for virtually all biological processes in living cells. However, existing structural databases focusing on these interactions are limited to integral membrane proteins. A systematic understanding of diverse lipid-protein interactions also encompassing lipid-anchored, peripheral membrane and soluble lipid binding proteins remains to be elucidated. 

To address this gap and facilitate the research of universal lipid-protein assemblies, researchers including School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Assistant Professor Andrew C. McShan developed BioDolphin — a curated database with over 127,000 lipid-protein interactions. BioDolphin provides comprehensive annotations, including protein functions, protein families, lipid classifications, lipid-protein binding affinities, membrane association type, and atomic structures.