On Campus

Black Georgia Tech Renaissance 

When: Feb. 3, noon – 5 p.m.  

Where: Ferst Center for the Arts 

A collaboration between the African American Student Union and the Georgia Tech Black Alumni Organization, the third annual Black Georgia Tech Renaissance celebrates art and culture, highlighted by the premiere of There Is Something in the Water, a film by Georgia Tech alumna Kamryn Harris. The event will also feature art created by students and alumni, including a visual art display curated by Georgia Tech alumna I. Johnson, professionally known as Sir Bow Tie.  

More Information. 
 

Screening of 'Je suis Noires' and Panel Discussion 

When: Tuesday, Feb. 6, 3 – 6 p.m. 

Where: Scholars Event Network Theater, Price Gilbert Library  

The Consulate General of Switzerland in Atlanta, in collaboration with the Georgia Tech School of Modern Languages’ French and German programs, will screen the Swiss documentary Je suis Noires (Becoming a Black Woman) by Rachel M'Bon and Juliana Fanjul. The movie explores the experiences and challenges faced by Black women in Switzerland, shedding light on issues of identity, racism, and the quest for belonging in a predominantly white society. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Christophe Ippolito, professor of French at Georgia Tech. 

More information. 
 

Second Annual Black Excellence in Psychology Speaker Series 

When: Feb. 7, 14, 21, and 28, 1 p.m.  

Where: Clary Theatre, Bill Moore Student Success Center 

Join the School of Psychology every Wednesday in February for the series featuring visiting psychologists leading engaging talks and discussions.  

• Feb. 7 – Natalie Watson-Singleton, associate professor, Department of Psychology at Spelman College – “Using Mindfulness-Based Digital Health Tools to Enhance the Well-Being of Black Americans” 

• Feb. 14 – Ciara Smalls Glover, associate professor, Department of Psychology at Georgia State University – “Cultural Shields: Strategies That Disrupt Racial Diversity and Promote Resilience” 

• Feb. 21 – Gena Cox, executive advisor, coach, and speaker; founder of Feels Human  – “R-E-S-P-E-C-T: The Key to Inclusion and Connection” 

• Feb. 28 – Enrica Ruggs, associate professor of management, College of Business at the University of Houston – “Black Experiences in I/O Psychology: An Examination of Research and Scholars in the Field” 

More information.  
 

AI, Art, and Afrofuturism With Nettrice R. Gaskins 

When: Thursday, Feb. 8, 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.  

Where: Scholars Event Network Theater, Price Gilbert Library 

Georgia Tech alumna and digital artist Nettrice R. Gaskins will share her expertise in STEAM learning, techno-vernacular creativity, and Afrofuturism, among other cultural movements. Gaskins’ AI-generated and assisted art has been displayed at the Smithsonian Institution and in publications, murals, films, and galleries around the country.  

More information. 
 

Black History Month Open Mic Night  

When: Friday, Feb. 9, 6 – 8 p.m.  

Where: Cypress Theater, John Lewis Student Center 

Hosted by the AASU, the Organization for Social Activism, and the Office of Student Diversity Programs, this event is dedicated to the celebration of Black artistry and expression.  

Impact Presents: A Conversation with Ambassador Andrew Young and Bill Curry 

When: Monday, Feb. 12, 5 – 6:30 p.m.  

Where: Atlantic Theater, John Lewis Student Center 

The Impact Speaker Series brings former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young to campus to reflect on his career as a pioneer in and champion of civil and human rights, serving as a member of Congress, African American U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and an ordained minister among other leadership positions. Young will share the stage with Georgia Tech Hall of Famer and two-time Super Bowl champion Bill Curry, with the conversation to be moderated by Chuck Easley, professor of the practice at Scheller and a former standout Yellow Jacket football player. 

More information.  

Black History Month Lecture

When: Wednesday, Feb. 21, 5 – 8 p.m. 

Where: Atlantic Theater, John Lewis Student Center 

Sponsored by the Division of Arts, Belonging, and Community at Georgia Tech and the AASU, the annual Black History Month Lecture will feature Aja Monet, a contemporary poet, writer, lyricist, and activist. Aligned with this year's national theme focusing on African Americans and the Arts, Monet will illuminate her journey of inspiration within the African American community through the power of her works. 

More information. 

Walking Tour of Historical Locations on Campus 

Where: Georgia Tech Campus 

Talk a stroll through campus and visit the numerous locations that tell the story of Black history at Georgia Tech, including The Three Pioneers statue honoring the Institute’s first Black students in Harrison Square, The First Graduate statue inside Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons depicting Ronald Yancey, the former site of the Pickrick Restaurant, and more.  

More information.
 

Arts and Experiences Around Atlanta

Ruth and the Green Book 

When: Jan. 31 – Feb. 25  

Where: Center for Puppetry Arts  

Based on Calvin Alexander Ramsey’s The Green Book, this production tells the story, through puppetry and animated projections, of 8-year-old Ruth and her family as they travel from Chicago to Alabama in the 1950s.  

More information.
 

Roswell Roots  

When and Where: Dates and locations vary.  

This month-long series of programming promotes cultural awareness through art, poetry, storytelling, and other educational programs.  

Full schedule.
 

College Football Hall of Fame Honors the Wyoming Black 14 

When: Tuesday, Feb. 6, 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.  

Where: College Football Hall of Fame 

The Hall of Fame will screen The Black 14: Healing Hearts and Feeding Souls for the public, highlighting the courage of 14 University of Wyoming football players who were kicked off the team in 1969 for attempting to speak out against racially biased Mormon policies prior to a gameagainst BYU. Three members of the team will participate in a panel discussion afterward.  

More information. 
 

Black History Month Movie Series  

When: Feb. 8 and 22, 7 p.m. 

Where: Atlantic Green at Atlantic Station 

• The Color of Friendship – Thursday, Feb. 8, 7 p.m.  

• Remember the Titans – Thursday, Feb. 22, 7 p.m.  
   

The National Center for Civil and Human Rights 

When: Hours vary. 

Where: 100 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. Atlanta, GA 30313 

Explore the immersive exhibits throughout the museum detailing the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the papers and artifacts of Martin Luther King Jr. On Saturday, Feb. 24, the museum will screen The Space Race as part of its Black History Month programming. 

More information.
 

Georgian Chamber Players Presents: A Musical Journey Celebrating Black History Month 

When: Tuesday, Feb. 27, 7 p.m.  

Where: McElreath Hall, 130 W. Paces Ferry Road NW Atlanta, GA 30305 

During this concert hosted by the Atlanta History Center, the principal players of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, led by concertmaster and violinist David Coucheron, will honor Black History Month with an array of musical tales and historical ancestry. 

More information.
 

Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park 

When: Hours vary. 

Where: 450 Auburn Ave. NE, Atlanta GA 30312 

Hear the story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, visit his home, and hear his voice in the church where he preached. The National Historic Park includes a visitor center, the Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Fire Station No. 6, and Freedom Hall. King’s birth home is temporarily closed for repairs, but all other buildings at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park remain open during regular park operating hours. 

More information.  

An annular eclipse is set to take place Saturday, Oct. 14. It will cross North, Central, and South America with varying degrees of visibility.

"The entire country will see at least a partial eclipse," Sowell said. "Go out and experience it and see it for yourself."

In Atlanta, viewers will see a partial solar eclipse and notice the sky is darker than usual. In parts of the country where the eclipse will be seen in totality, it will look like a "ring of fire" around the moon. This rare event won’t happen again in the U.S. for more than 20 years.

The Georgia Tech Observatory will be open for viewing of the event on Oct. 14 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., with telescopes on the grounds of the Howey Physics Building. All viewing events are contingent on clear weather; monitor astronomy.gatech.edu for updates.

Video courtesy of The Weather Channel.

Although mudskippers are distantly related to tetrapods, the group that includes humans and other four-limbed vertebrates, researchers believed studying the fish could unlock how blinking evolved as these animals began to move on land. 

The research team, which included several undergraduates, published their findings in the paper, “The Origin of Blinking in Both Mudskippers and Tetrapods Is Linked to Life on Land,” in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

“By comparing the anatomy and behavior of mudskippers to the fossil record of early tetrapods, we argue that blinking emerged in both groups as an adaptation to life on land,” said Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State and an author of the paper. “These results help us understand our own biology and raise a whole set of new questions about the variety of blinking behaviors we see in living species.”

Breaking Down Blinking

Mudskippers blink by sucking their eye downward into their eye socket. The evolution of this behavior did not require the evolution of a lot of new parts such as new muscles or special glands, though. Instead, mudskippers use their existing set of eye muscles in a new way.

“This is a very exciting result because it demonstrates that the evolution of a new, complex behavior can be achieved using a relatively rudimentary set of structures,” said Brett Aiello, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Agile Systems Lab and now assistant professor at Seton Hill.

Next, the research team set out to determine why mudskippers blink. In a series of experiments, they found that mudskippers blink for three main functions: to wet, clean, and protect the eye. These functions are also why humans and other land-dwelling vertebrates blink.

“We find that a single behavior can be deployed to accomplish three complex, distinct functions,” said Aiello. “These results not only help humans understand our own history, but also help us reevaluate the adaptations necessary for major transitions in the evolutionary history of vertebrates, like moving from water to land.”

Blinking isn’t just a unique research question, but also an important mechanism to understand, according to Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and author on the paper.

“We all blink without thinking, and understanding why we blink is just such a beautiful puzzle right in front of our eyes,” Bhamla said. “Through our research on mudskippers and by conducting biophysical and morphological analyses, we expose how blinking serves a multitude of functions for adapting to life out of water.”

Engaging Undergraduates

To explore such open-ended questions, the researchers engaged the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program, which allows undergraduates to conduct long-term, large-scale research projects as part of their coursework at Georgia Tech.

“The structure of the VIP course empowers students to really lean on their own creativity and drive the project in the directions that are most exciting to them,” said Aiello. “It helps our students gain the ability to solve unknown problems on the ground as they arise — a lot of people become scientists to push research somewhere where nobody else has tried to go before.”

The VIP structure is inherently multidisciplinary. While Aiello is a biologist, most students were engineers and brought their respective expertise. Manognya Sripathi was a biomedical engineering major with a minor in computer science and offered her unique experience to the mudskipper problem.

“I used my computer science skills to gather raw data and analyze and plot them using programs like MATLAB or Python,” Sripathi said. “I also used engineering skills to help build the experimental equipment, allowing us to apply engineering methods to study a biological problem in a unique way.”

Moving Beyond Mudskippers

Te research didn’t just expand knowledge of mudskippers — it also contributed to each student’s future aspirations. For example, Kendra Washington’s trajectory was influenced by the two semesters she spent in the lab.

“VIP drew me closer to the programming and device areas of my biomedical engineering major and solidified why I picked up a computer science minor,” she said. “I continued to pursue that fusion through later internships and research, and now work with hemodynamic monitoring. But in a sense, I still help characterize physiology through programming.”

VIP also expanded the students’ knowledge and scientific experience that have propelled them far beyond the lab. Hajime Minoguchi, a biomedical engineering graduate, now works as a systems integration research and development engineer thanks to his experience in the class.

“Working in an interdisciplinary team like this has allowed me to learn how to understand and communicate ideas between disciplines, which allowed me to be a more well-rounded engineer,” Minoguchi said. “My work requires a thorough understanding of biology, electrical circuitry, software, firmware, mechanical interactions, and physics. This VIP experience was instrumental for me in being successful at my current job.”

The research is far greater than the sum of its parts and brings a greater understanding of evolution, noted Simon Sponberg, an associate professor in the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences.

“Blinking is a reflection of a bigger question,” Sponberg said. “How did major evolutionary transitions occur that enabled organisms to inhabit basically every environment on this planet? What we learned is you don't need the evolution of a lot of specialized musculature or glands; evolution can tinker with the structures that are already there, allowing them to be used in a new way and for a new behavior.”

CITATION: Aiello BR, MS Bhamla, J Gau, JGL Morris, K Bomar, S da Cunha, H Fu, J Laws, H Minoguchi, M Sripathi, K Washington,G Wong, NH Shubin†, S Sponberg†, TA Stewart. The origin of blinking in mudskippers and tetrapods is linked to life on land.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220404120

About the Talk

The event is part of the School of Physics “Inquiring Minds” public lecture series, and will be held at the Ferst Center for the Arts. The talk is free and open to campus and the Atlanta community, and no RSVP is required. Refreshments begin at 4:30, and the lecture will start at 5 p.m. ET.

“The multiple industrial and agricultural revolutions have transformed the world,” Chu recently shared in an abstract for the lecture. “However, an unintended consequence of this progress is that we are changing the climate of our planet. In addition to the climate risks, we will need to provide enough clean energy, water, and food for a more prosperous world that may grow to 11 billion by 2100.” 

The talk will discuss the significant technical challenges and potential solutions that could provide better paths to a more sustainable future. “How we transition from where we are now to where we need to be within 50 years is arguably the most pressing set of issues that science, innovation, and public policy have to address,” Chu added. 

The event’s faculty host is Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech.

About Steven Chu

Steven Chu is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and a professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology in the Medical School at Stanford University.

Chu served as the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy from January 2009 until the end of April 2013. As the first scientist to hold a U.S. Cabinet position and the longest serving Energy Secretary, Chu led several initiatives including ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy), the Energy Innovation Hubs, and was personally tasked by President Obama to assist in the Deepwater Horizon oil leak.

In the spring of 2010, Chu was the keynote speaker for the Georgia Tech Ph.D. and Master's Commencement Ceremony.

Prior to his cabinet post, Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was active in pursuit of alternative and renewable energy technologies, and a professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford, where he helped launch Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary institute combining the physical and biological sciences with medicine and engineering. Previously he also served as head of the Quantum Electronics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

He is the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to laser cooling and atom trapping. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Pontifical Academy Sciences, and of seven foreign academies. He formerly served as president, and then chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Chu earned an A.B. degree in mathematics and a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as 35 honorary degrees.

He has published over 280 papers in atomic and polymer physics, biophysics, biology, bio-imaging, batteries, and other energy technologies. He holds 15 patents, and an additional 15 patent disclosures or filings since 2015.

CLEVER is the successor to Orlando’s pioneering REVEALS (Radiation Effects on Volatiles and Exploration of Asteroids and Lunar Surfaces) center, and both are part of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) program. 

REVEALS and CLEVER look ahead to the return of humans to the moon for sustained periods — a key part of NASA’s plan for space exploration in the coming decade. Volatiles such as water, molecular oxygen, methane, and hydrogen are crucial to supporting human activity on the moon. Dust is also important since the space-weathered particles can pose health effects to astronauts and hazards to the technology and hardware.

The interdisciplinary group of researchers supported by CLEVER will study how the solar wind and micrometeorites produce volatiles, research how ice and dust behave in the lunar environment, develop new materials to deal with potential dust buildup, and invent new analysis tools to support the upcoming crewed missions of the Artemis program.

 “The resources and knowledge that CLEVER will produce will be useful for the sustainable presence of humans on the moon,” Orlando says. “We have the correct mix of fundamental science and exploration — real, fundamental, ground-truth measurements; very good theory/modeling; and engineering — an easy mix with Georgia Tech and outside partners.” 

Orlando adds that CLEVER adopts a unique perspective on the challenges of understanding how to operate on Earth’s moon. “The atomic and molecular view of processes with angstrom distances and femtosecond time scales can help unravel what is happening on planetary spatial scales and geological time frames,” he says. “We can also translate our knowledge into materials, devices, and technology pretty quickly, and this is necessary if we want to help the Artemis astronauts.”

CLEVER includes investigators from Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, the Florida Space Institute, University of Hawaii, Auburn University, Space Sciences Institute, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NASA Ames, NASA Kennedy Space Center, and partners in Italy and Germany. In addition to pursuing a blend of fundamental science and mission support, CLEVER will also emphasize the research and career development of students and young investigators, another important goal of the SSERVI system.

Writer: M.G. Finn

Art: Brice Zimmerman

The ENVS degree will provide a strong foundation in the basic sciences, requiring core content in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences, and environmental policy. Flexible electives in upper-level coursework will allow students to customize their program of study to their interest and career goals.  

A launch event for the degree program will take place at the Kendeda Building on the afternoon of Friday, August 25, 2023.

“The new degree will prepare students to be future leaders who are well-versed on how the Earth's systems can be influenced by human activity and contribute to human well-being,” says Greg Huey, professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Graduates will be positioned to be leaders in industry, academia, education, and communication to create innovative solutions to the most significant environmental challenges of our time.”

Two faculty members in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) and a faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences will serve as inaugural leadership: Jennifer Glass, associate professor, is program director; Samantha Wilson, academic professional, is director of Undergraduate Studies; and Linda Green, senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences, is director of Experiential Learning.

The foundational science classes in this new degree will be complemented by courses in Public Policy and City Planning, including Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Environmental Policy and Politics, before opening up and providing students with flexibility in course options to better fit their career paths and interests. 

“Past EAS students have been interested in careers related to environmental consulting, environmental law, and continuing their studies in graduate school,” Wilson says. “The variety of environmental career paths was the driver behind allowing students to diversify their options within the degree.”

“This degree will give Georgia Tech students a unique opportunity to customize their environmental science program of study to their interests and career goals in science, policy, public service, non-profit, government, industry, academia, or beyond,” adds Glass. “We are committed to building an academic community in ENVS that values student leadership, diversity, inclusion, equity, accessibility, and belonging.”

Hands-on learning opportunities will include field station experiences and field trip excursions, study abroad programs, and internships, Green says. “This major sustains the Institute’s strategic plan to lead by example, champion innovation, and connect globally — particularly in an area so critical as addressing Earth’s environmental issues.”

Glass added that the Schools of Chemistry, Biological Sciences, and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences are currently revamping several classes to meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Students will advance to be global leaders of environmental solutions that draw upon the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and incorporate awareness of environmental justice issues. 

“We can’t wait for August to celebrate the ENVS launch with our incoming and current students,” Glass says.

More information on the Environment Science (ENVS) degree:

General information: jennifer.glass@eas.gatech.edu

Curriculum and enrollment: samantha.wilson@eas.gatech.edu

Co-curricular initiatives: linda.green@gatech.edu 

Learn more: Three new EAS undergraduate degrees

Beginning Summer 2023, prospective and current Georgia Tech students will have three new Bachelor of Science degrees to choose from in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The expanded undergraduate offerings target a wider range of job and research opportunities — from academia to analytics, NASA to NOAA, meteorology to marine science, climate and earth science, to policy, law, consulting, sustainability, and beyond.

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia has approved two new specific degrees within the School: Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences (AOS) and Solid Earth and Planetary Sciences (SEP). Regents also approved Environmental Science (ENVS) as an interdisciplinary College of Sciences degree between the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences. The existing Earth and Atmospheric Sciences B.S. degree will sunset in two years for new students. Learn more.

Mantle melts are buoyant and typically float toward the surface — think underwater volcanoes that erupt to form strings of islands. But Naif’s imaging instead showed a clear slice of semi-molten rock: low-degree partial melts, still sandwiched at the base of the plate some 37 miles beneath the ocean floor.

Then, the observation provided an explanation for how tectonic plates can gradually slide, lubricated by partial melting. The study also “raised several questions about why magma is stored in a thin channel — and where the magma originated from,” says Naif, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Fellow researchers went on to share competing interpretations for the cause of the channel — including studies that argued against magma being needed to explain the observation.

So Naif went straight to the source.

“I basically went on a multiyear hunt, akin to a Sherlock Holmes detective story, looking for clues of mantle magmas that we first observed in the 2013 Nature study,” he says. “This involved piecing together evidence from several independent sources, including geophysical, geochemical, and geological (direct seafloor sampling) data.”

Now, the results of that search are detailed in a new Science Advances article, “Episodic intraplate magmatism fed by a long-lived melt channel of distal plume origin”, authored by Naif and researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey at Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center, Northern Arizona University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and GNS Science of Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

Zeroing in

A relatively young oceanic plate — some 23 million years old — the Cocos Plate traces down the western coast of Central America, veering west to the Pacific Plate, then north to meet the North American Plate off the Pacific coast of Mexico.

Sliding between these two plates caused the devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the 2017 Chiapas earthquake, while similar subduction between the Cocos and Caribbean plates resulted in the 1992 Nicaragua tsunami and earthquake, and the 2001 El Salvador earthquakes.

Scientists study the edges of these oceanic plates to understand the history and formation of volcanic chains — and to help researchers and agencies better prepare for future earthquakes and volcanic activity.

It’s in this active area that Naif and fellow researchers recently set out to document a series of magmatic intrusions just beneath the seafloor, in the same area that the team first detected the channel of magma back in 2013.

Plumbing the depths

For the new study, the team combined geophysical, geochemical, and seafloor drilling results with seismic reflection data, a technique used to image layers of sediments and rocks below the surface. “It helps us to see the geology where we cannot see it with our own eyes,” Naif explains.

First, the researchers observed an abundance of widespread intraplate magmatism. “Volcanism where it is not expected,” Naif says, “basically away from plate boundaries: subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges.”

Think Hawaii, where “a mantle plume of hot, rising material melts during its ascent, and then forms the Hawaii volcanic chain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” just as with the Cocos Plate, where the team imaged the volcanism fed by magma at the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary — the base of the sliding tectonic plates.

“Below it is the convecting mantle,” Naif adds. “The tectonic plates are moving around on Earth's surface because they are sliding on the asthenosphere below them.”

The researchers also found that this channel below the lithosphere is regionally extensive — over 100,000 square kilometers — and is a “long-lived feature that originated from the Galápagos Plume,” a mantle plume that formed the volcanic Galápagos islands, supplying melt for a series of volcanic events across the past 20 million years, and persisting today.

Importantly, the new study also suggests that these plume-fed melt channels may be widespread and long-lived sources for intraplate magmatism itself — as well as for mantle metasomatism, which happens when Earth’s mantle reacts with fluids to form a suite of minerals from the original rocks.

Connecting the (hot spot) dots

“This confirms that magma was there in the past — and some of it leaked through the mantle and erupted near the seafloor,” Naif says, “in the form of sill intrusions and seamounts: basically volcanoes located on the seafloor.”

The work also provides compelling supporting evidence that magma could still be stored in the channel. “More surprising is that the erupted magma has a chemical fingerprint that links its source to the Galápagos mantle plume.”

“We learned that the magma channel has been around for at least 20 million years, and on occasion some of that magma leaks to the seafloor where it erupts volcanically,” Naif adds. 

The team’s identified source of the magma, the Galápagos Plume, “is more than 1,000 kilometers away from where we detected this volcanism. It is not clear how magma can stay around in the mantle for such a long time, only to leak out episodically.”

Plume hunters wanted

The evidence that the team compiled is “really quite subtle and requires a detailed and careful study of a suite of seafloor observations to connect the dots,” Naif says. “Basically, the signs of such volcanism, while they are quite clear here, also require high resolution data and several different types of data to be able to detect such subtle seafloor features.”

So, “if we can see such subtle clues of volcanism here,” Naif explains, “it means a similar, careful analysis of high resolution data in other parts of the seafloor may lead to similar discoveries of volcanism elsewhere, caused by other mantle plumes.”

“There are numerous mantle plumes dotted across the planet. There are also numerous seamounts — at least 100,000 of them! — covering the seafloor, and it is anyone’s guess how many of them formed in the middle of the tectonic plates because of magma sourced from distant mantle plumes that leaked to the surface.”

Naif looks forward to continuing that search, from seafloor to asthenosphere.

###

Funding: National Science Foundation: OCE-0625178, U.S. Science Support Program

Citation: DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add3761

About Georgia Tech 

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a horizon-to-horizon hazy band of stars. Now, for the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos — tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers.

In an article to be published June 30, 2023, in the journal Science, the IceCube Collaboration, an international group of over 350 scientists, presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the Milky Way.

The detected high-energy neutrinos hold energies millions to billions of times higher than those produced by the fusion reactions that power stars.

IceCube was built and is operated with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding and additional support from the fourteen countries that host institutional members of the IceCube Collaboration. IceCube Observatory searches for signs of high-energy neutrinos originating from our galaxy and beyond, out to the farthest reaches of the universe.

A cubic-kilometer neutrino detector operating at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station observes these high-energy neutrinos, explains Ignacio Taboada, spokesperson for IceCube and a physics professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. “IceCube is truly unique,” Taboada says. “Built deep in Antarctic ice, its over 5,000 light sensors search for the flashes of blue light — Cherenkov radiation produced by neutrinos in the upper atmosphere, the Milky Way, and deep into the cosmos.”

Searching the southern sky

“What's intriguing is that, unlike the case for light of any wavelength, in neutrinos, the universe outshines the nearby sources in our own galaxy," says Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of IceCube.

"As is so often the case, significant breakthroughs in science are enabled by advances in technology," says Denise Caldwell, director of NSF's Physics Division. "The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy — one that had only been hinted at before. As these capabilities continue to be refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy never before seen by humanity."

Interactions between cosmic rays — high-energy protons and heavier nuclei, also produced in our galaxy, and galactic gas and dust inevitably produce both gamma rays and neutrinos. Given the observation of gamma rays from the galactic plane, the Milky Way was expected to be a source of high-energy neutrinos.

“A neutrino counterpart has now been measured, thus confirming what we know about our galaxy and cosmic ray sources,” says Steve Sclafani, a physics Ph.D. student at Drexel University, IceCube member, and co-lead analyzer.

The search focused on the southern sky, where the bulk of neutrino emission from the galactic plane is expected near the center of our galaxy. However, until now, the background of muons and neutrinos produced by cosmic-ray interactions with the Earth’s atmosphere posed significant challenges.

To overcome them, IceCube collaborators at Drexel University developed analyses that select for "cascade" events, or neutrino interactions in the ice that result in roughly spherical showers of light. Because the deposited energy from cascade events starts within the instrumented volume, contamination of atmospheric muons and neutrinos is reduced. Ultimately, the higher purity of the cascade events gave a better sensitivity to astrophysical neutrinos from the southern sky.

Machine learning in the Milky Way

However, the final breakthrough came from the implementation of machine learning methods, developed by IceCube collaborators at TU Dortmund University, that improve the identification of cascades produced by neutrinos as well as their direction and energy reconstruction. The observation of neutrinos from the Milky Way is a hallmark of the emerging critical value that machine learning provides in data analysis and event reconstruction in IceCube.

“The improved methods allowed us to retain over an order of magnitude more neutrino events with better angular reconstruction, resulting in an analysis that is three times more sensitive than the previous search,” says IceCube member, TU Dortmund physics Ph.D. student, and co-lead analyzer Mirco Hünnefeld.

The dataset used in the study included 60,000 neutrinos spanning 10 years of IceCube data, 30 times as many events as the selection used in a previous analysis of the galactic plane using cascade events. These neutrinos were compared to previously published prediction maps of locations in the sky where the galaxy was expected to shine in neutrinos.

The maps included one made from extrapolating Fermi Large Area Telescope gamma-ray observations of the Milky Way and two alternative maps identified as KRA-gamma by the group of theorists who produced them.

“This long-awaited detection of cosmic ray-interactions in the galaxy is also a wonderful example of what can be achieved when modern methods of knowledge discovery in machine learning are consistently applied.” says Wolfgang Rhode, professor of physics at TU Dortmund University, IceCube member, and Hünnefeld’s advisor.

The power of machine learning offers great future potential, bringing other observations closer within reach.

“The strong evidence for the Milky Way as a source of high-energy neutrinos has survived rigorous tests by the collaboration,” says Taboada, the IceCube spokesperson. “Now, the next step is to identify specific sources within the galaxy.”

These and other questions will be addressed in planned follow-up analyses by IceCube.

“Observing our own galaxy for the first time using particles instead of light is a huge step,” says Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, professor of physics at Drexel University, IceCube member, and Sclafani’s advisor. “As neutrino astronomy evolves, we will get a new lens with which to observe the universe.”

About IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is funded and operated primarily through an award from the National Science Foundation to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The IceCube Collaboration, with over 350 scientists in 58 institutions from around the world, runs an extensive scientific program that has established the foundations of neutrino astronomy. IceCube’s research efforts, including critical contributions to the detector operation, are funded by agencies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including NSF. IceCube construction was also funded with significant contributions from the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS & FWO) in Belgium; the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Germany; the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, and the Swedish Research Council in Sweden; and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund.

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

In response to rising global temperatures, many plants and animals are moving to higher elevations to survive in cooler temperatures. But a new study from the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) and Georgia Tech finds that for flying insects — including bees and moths — this escape route may have insurmountable issues that could mean their doom.

The research team examined more than 800 species of insects from around the world and discovered that many winged insects are moving to higher elevations much slower than their non-flying counterparts. This is because the thinner air at higher elevations provides less oxygen for species to use. Because flight requires more oxygen to generate energy for movement than other styles of movement, such as walking, these species are migrating more slowly. 

The team’s findings were published in this week’s Nature Climate Change journal. Jesse Shaich, postbaccalaureate student at CU Denver, is also a member of the research team.

“When we think about where species will be able to live under climate change in the coming decades, we need to remember that animals are sensitive to more than just how hot or cold they are,” said CU Denver Assistant Professor of Integrated Biology Michael Moore, who led the study. 

Declining insect biodiversity has direct impact on humans

If flying insects’ native habitats get too warm too quickly, and they can’t find a suitable alternative or adapt in time, that will likely lead to their extinction. Beyond just being bad for the bugs themselves, loss of insects is bad news for humans as well. Most crop pollinators are the flying species the researchers expect to be vulnerable, and their extinction would be catastrophic to global food supply. Not only would this have implications for agriculture and food supply chains, but similar challenges are likely true for other species that need a lot of oxygen to live.

“Our earth’s biodiversity is rapidly declining, especially amongst insects. The global loss of insects will be ecologically catastrophic, so we urgently need to understand why and how this is happening,” said James Stroud, assistant professor of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

Broadening research on high elevation challenges

To conserve as many species as possible, researchers need to grasp the full scope of challenges plants and animals face, whether they can overcome these challenges, and to predict the locations where they can survive. High elevation environments are also difficult for new species because of the scarcity of food, stronger winds, more extreme cold snaps, and increased ultraviolet radiation.

Moore concludes, “If we want to design effective conservation strategies, we must consider a broader range of environmental factors that species need to live.” 

About Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

About the University of Colorado Denver
The University of Colorado Denver is the state’s premier public urban research university and equity-serving institution. Globally connected and locally invested, CU Denver partners with future-focused learners and communities to design accessible, relevant, and transformative educational experiences for every stage of life and career. Across seven schools and colleges in the heart of downtown Denver, our leading faculty inspires and works alongside students to solve complex challenges through boundary-breaking innovation, impactful research, and creative work. As part of the state’s largest university system, CU Denver is a major contributor to the Colorado economy, with 2,000 employees and an annual economic impact of $800 million. For more information, visit ucdenver.edu.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01794-2

Acknowledgments: Support was generously provided by the University of Colorado Denver (to M.P.M. and J.S.) and Washington University in St. Louis and the Georgia Institute of Technology (to J.T.S.). Conversations with J. de Mayo, J. Grady and A. Lenard and input from three reviewers improved this study.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have published a perspectives piece on the different tools used throughout the world that are aiding in the conservation of wildlife and biodiversity.

They highlight advances in technology, including both hardware and software, as well as frugal resources that are changing the way animals are protected. The research was published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface in August.  

“We are experiencing technological advancements of low-cost hardware, open-source software, machine learning, and more that can help with global conservation efforts,” said Andrew Schulz, postdoctoral researcher in the haptic intelligence department at Max Planck Institute and recent Ph.D. graduate from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “For researchers and people interested in learning about the ways conservation technology and tools are created, this piece serves as a starter guide to the field.”

In the article, the researchers presented five case studies of conservation tools, including open-source innovation, environmental DNA, computer vision, game theory and optimization, and frugal technology. Researchers also highlighted the importance of indigenous design in these conservation tool interventions and warned not to employ toxic practices, such as colonization of conservation or parasitic conservation. These practices take advantage of native lands, where conservationists refuse to work with local or indigenous populations and often do not cite or credit their help or expertise.    

One case study looked at AudioMoth, a device that allows low-cost access to bioacoustics research. Recently, an AudioMoth was paired with an animal observation tower to track bird migrations over Georgia Tech’s campus. AudioMoth can also monitor aquatic environments, like coral colonies, to assist with species identification and habitat restoration. It’s used in a wide range of fields to monitor the biodiversity of a habitat or even help with the early detection of poachers to prevent wildlife decline.

“One of the best parts about this project was working with so many excellent researchers,” Schulz said. They included Suzanne Stathatos from Caltech and the project’s co-leaders, Cassie Shriver and Benjamin Seleb, from Georgia Tech’s quantitative biosciences Ph.D. program. “As early-career researchers working together, it is great to see that the conversations about conservation tool construction are growing and being led by outstanding Ph.D. students.”

At Georgia Tech, conservation tools are constantly being built and implemented. The Tech4Wildlife student organization is working to implement conservation tech solutions, including a rabies dispenser for our campus foxes, bird monitors in the EcoCommons, and forage feeders for Zoo Atlanta’s gorillas.

"I'm proud to see Cassie, Ben, and Andrew collaborating across fields and institutions to move conservation technology forward, and it inspires me about the future of conservation science,” said William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the quantitative biosciences program.

CITATION: Conservation tools: the next generation of engineering–biology collaborations Andrew K. Schulz., Cassie Shriver, Suzanne Stathatos, and Benjamin Seleb et. Al, Journal of The Royal Society InterfaceVolume 20, Issue 205. Published:16 August 2023. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2023.0232

On the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix, the ruins of a Danish sugar plantation built from harvested coral bricks could be the key to understanding how and why the area was decimated by the 18th-century transatlantic slave trade.

With funding from the National Geographic Society, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) will travel to St. Croix to analyze this coral. They hope to determine how coral mining, dredging, and reef erosion affected near-shore biodiversity, contemporary coral populations, and bathymetry or underwater depth. The project uniquely combines archeology and oceanography.

“We can survey these corals to try and reconstruct the climate around St. Croix before, during, and after the slave trade — particularly with regard to sea surface temperature and trade wind strength,” said Isaiah Bolden, a co-principal investigator and assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “This could give us an interesting, climatically informed perspective on the timing of the transatlantic slave trade and why and how St. Croix became a part of this history.”

The Coral Codex

The first phases of the project involve collecting coral. Justin Dunnavant, co-PI, National Geographic Explorer, and assistant professor of archeology at UCLA, will use 3D photogrammetry, the process of combining photographs at different angles to create a 3D rendering, to determine which coral species were used in plantation construction. Then the researchers will collect live and historic coral samples with minimally invasive techniques so Bolden can analyze their composition.

Coral skeletons are a rich source of historical data. Like trees, living coral grows in annual rings and can be dated by counting these rings. For the dating of ancient samples, the team is also applying uranium-thorium dating, a type of radiometric dating that relies on a natural “clock” that forms as radioactive uranium locked inside of coral skeletons naturally decays into thorium.

Determining the ages of the plantation structures will help reveal whether the coral was harvested from the sea floor alive or if these buildings were constructed from preexisting coral rubble. Additional analyses can uncover clues of how the ecosystem has responded to direct human impacts from the 18th century to present. To this end, the project will also sequence proteins trapped in the skeletons of fossilized and contemporary corals on St. Croix to investigate genetic differences.

The coral skeletons can reveal more than age and genetic differences, though. Mineral “impurities” that get substituted into the growth bands of the limestone-like calcium carbonate skeleton of corals can be measured and used to infer sea surface temperature, salinity, pH, runoff, and many other environmental conditions during a coral’s lifetime.

"Corals try to build a pristine skeleton made of calcium and carbonate ions,” Bolden said. “The problem is seawater isn’t just a pure mixture of those two components, so some of this other stuff gets in the way. For example, the element strontium, which has a similar chemical behavior to calcium, is incorporated into the skeleton at a faster rate during cooler temperatures than warmer temperatures. This means we can use the ratio of strontium-to-calcium across growth bands in the coral skeleton as a clue toward past temperatures.”

Making these measurements involves drilling and dissolving powders from the coral growth bands and then using a mass spectrometer to analyze the chemical composition of the powders. The data, in turn, can be combined with instrumental records from the modern era to develop equations that translate the chemical changes into environmental changes.

“This is a really cool opportunity to study how local reefs have recorded and responded to climatic and anthropogenic changes during a definingly dark period of colonization and human civilization,” Bolden said. “How can we interface these new ecological and climate records with the written historical record to further detail the story of colonization and the slave trade in St. Croix?”

The St. Croix Ecosystem — Then and Now

The researchers will also collect contemporary data to build a better understanding of St. Croix’s existing modern coral reef ecosystems. They will collect and analyze seawater samples and conduct coral species and coverage surveys to capture current seasonal conditions and trends in reef health.

Throughout the project, the researchers will collaborate with local St. Croix universities and high schools to ensure the research isn’t just about the community, but also benefits it by giving students research opportunities.

“I'm really interested in this opportunity to bring a climate context to the history often taught in schools to discover things we haven’t learned,” Bolden said. “We’re talking about decolonizing geoscience and unearthing the stories that haven't been told.

While mammal extinctions are well-documented, very little research has explored the impact those losses had on the nuanced ways in which mammal communities interact with their environments. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using a novel methodology to investigate how mammals’ ability to function in their environments has been threatened in the past, and what challenges they can expect to face in the future.

Jenny McGuire, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and leader of the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab, and Daniel Lauer, a graduate student, looked millions of years into the past, observing how and why eastern African herbivores’ relationships with their environments changed across space and time in the face of biodiversity loss. They used a novel approach to build models that show how specific mammal traits — like body mass and tooth shape — evolved with their changing environments over time, revealing the factors that caused the biodiversity losses and how the losses affected the functioning of mammal communities. Their method offers a new strategy for investigating the implications of changing ecologies and prioritizing conservation efforts toward helping mammal communities flourish in the future.

Their research paper was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Combing the Data

The researchers began by diving into a collection of data from 186 sites across eastern Africa. The data contained records of over 200 extinct and 48 modern herbivore species (including the African elephant, giraffe, and hippopotamus), showing where and when each species lived at a given point in time over the past 7.4 million years. The data showed that mammal biodiversity in eastern Africa began to decline around 5 million years ago. It also revealed that aspects of biodiversity decline happened at multiple points, and that extinctions coincided with environmental changes and the emergence of early humans. But McGuire and Lauer wanted to know more.

“We wondered what we would find if we investigated how the mammals’ physical traits changed as their environments changed over time, rather than just looking at patterns in their biodiversity,” Lauer said. “This is important because if a mammal species possesses traits that are well-suited to its environment, it’s better able to contribute to the functioning of that environment. But if that is not the case, environments may not function as well as they could.”

To paint a fuller picture, they needed to examine biodiversity from a different perspective. This required a fresh approach, which led them to adapting a methodology known as ecometrics.

Ecometrics is an approach that looks at the relationships between the environmental conditions where animal communities are found — such as weather and vegetation — and the animal’s functional traits, which are traits that affect its biological performance. The team chose to focus on three traits: body mass, tooth height, and loph count (the number of ridges on molars).

Each of these traits exhibits a relationship based on the degree to which an environment is dominated by grasses versus woody plants. For example, if a species has a taller tooth, it can more durably consume the abrasive grassy vegetation of grasslands. With a shorter tooth, a species is instead suited to consume softer, woody vegetation, like shrubs.

For each of the three traits, they built a model of trait-environment relationships. They used trait data to estimate what the surrounding vegetation was like in each mammal community over time, specifically the percentage of trees and shrubs versus grassland.

“Using our models, we were able to use information about the traits occurring within mammal communities to estimate how the surrounding vegetation looked,” Lauer said. “Because these communities existed at different points in time, this enabled us to observe how consistent the mammals’ relationships with their environments remained through time.”

Analyzing Disruptions

Using their ecometric framework, the researchers uncovered a key difference between the mammal biodiversity declines that occurred before approximately 1.7 million years ago and those that occurred after. While biodiversity began declining around 5 million years ago, trait-environment relationships remained consistent despite that loss.

Their analysis demonstrated that earlier biodiversity losses were a result of species adapting to grassland environments or tracking their preferred environments across geographies. In short, those biodiversity losses didn't necessarily have any sort of negative impact on the ability of mammal communities to function properly in their environments.

But later, around 1.7 million years ago, when climates became more arid and variable and tree cover declined to below 35%, a major shift occurred. Rapid losses in the number and variety of species occurred, along with a significant disruption in trait-environment relationships. The researchers’ findings suggest that, unlike prior biodiversity losses, those occurring over the past 1.7 million years likely threatened the ability for many mammal species to function well in local environmental conditions.

“Our findings fascinated us, because we were able to differentiate between the different biodiversity losses that were happening and their implications,” Lauer said. “This work reinforces the idea that not all biodiversity losses are the same.”

Protecting the Vulnerable

Their findings have important implications for the types of environmental and climatic changes that could affect mammals going forward. In the past, when changes were gradual and wildlife were able to move freely on the landscape, they could readily adapt to these environmental conditions.

Now, fragmentation of wildlife habitats by fences, roadways, and cities has the potential to limit the ability of wildlife to adapt to the rapid environmental changes occurring today. That is exacerbated by both the fast pace and increasing variability of today’s climate, which puts animals at risk of losing their ability to function properly in their local environments.

Moving forward, the team’s analysis can shed light on which mammal communities should be prioritized for future conservation efforts. The study demonstrates that among all the communities that are experiencing biodiversity losses, priority should be given to those most at-risk — the communities for whom future biodiversity losses will profoundly affect their ability to function properly.

“By examining the past, we can get a remarkably clear understanding of how animals have responded to prior environmental changes,” McGuire said. “We plan to work with conservation practitioners to use our findings to develop well-informed strategies for conserving the most at-risk mammal communities.”

***

Co-authors include A. Michelle Lawing (Texas A&M University), Rachel A. Short (South Dakota State University), Fredrick K. Manthi (National Museums of Kenya), Johannes Müller (Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science), and Jason J. Head (University of Cambridge).

Citation: Lauer, D.A., Lawing, A.M., Short, R.A. et al. Disruption of trait-environment relationships in African megafauna occurred in the middle Pleistocene. Nat Commun 14, 4016 (2023).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39480-8

Funding: This work was completed as part of a collaborative initiative from NSFDEB-NERC, with funding from NSF 2124836 to A.M.L., F.K.M., and J.M.; NSF 2124770 to J.L.M.; and NERC NE/W007576/1 to J.J.H. R.A.S. was supported by the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology Program under grant DBI 2010680 and the USDA NIFA Hatch project SD00H787-23 (7004129 and 7004187). J.L.M. was also funded through NSF-CAREER and NSF 1945013.

While rarely in the news, these ice cage formations, known as methane clathrates, have garnered attention because of their potential to affect climate change. During offshore drilling, methane ice can get stuck in pipes, causing them to freeze and burst. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill is thought to have been caused by a buildup of methane clathrates.

But until now, the biological process behind how methane gas remains stable under the sea has been almost completely unknown. In a breakthrough study, a cross-disciplinary team of Georgia Tech researchers discovered a previously unknown class of bacterial proteins that play a crucial role in the formation and stability of methane clathrates.

A team led by Jennifer Glass, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Raquel Lieberman, professor and Sepcic-Pfeil Chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, showed that these novel bacterial proteins suppress the growth of methane clathrates as effectively as commercial chemicals currently used in drilling, but are non-toxic, eco-friendly, and scalable. Their study, funded by NASA, informs the search for life in the solar system, and could also increase the safety of transporting natural gas.

The research, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, underscores the importance of fundamental science in studying Earth’s natural biological systems and highlights the benefits of collaboration across disciplines.

“We wanted to understand how these formations were staying stable under the seafloor, and precisely what mechanisms were contributing to their stability,” Glass said. “This is something no one has done before.”

Sifting Through Sediment

The effort started with the team examining a sample of clay-like sediment that Glass acquired from the seafloor off the coast of Oregon.

Glass hypothesized that the sediment would contain proteins that influence the growth of methane clathrate, and that those proteins would resemble well-known antifreeze proteins in fish, which help them survive in cold environments.

But to confirm her hypothesis, Glass and her research team would first have to identify protein candidates out of millions of potential targets contained in the sediment. They would then need to make the proteins in the lab, though there was no understanding of how these proteins might behave. Also, no one had worked with these proteins before.

Glass approached Lieberman, whose lab studies the structure of proteins. The first step was to use DNA sequencing paired with bioinformatics to identify the genes of the proteins contained in the sediment. Dustin Huard, a researcher in Lieberman’s lab and first author of the paper, then prepared candidate proteins that could potentially bind to the methane clathrates. Huard used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of the proteins.

Creating Seafloor Conditions in the Lab

Huard passed off the protein candidates to Abigail Johnson, a former Ph.D. student in Glass’ lab and co-first author on the paper, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Georgia. To test the proteins, Johnson formed methane clathrates herself by recreating the high pressure and low temperature of the seafloor in the lab. Johnson worked with Sheng Dai, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to build a unique pressure chamber from scratch.

Johnson placed the proteins in the pressure vessel and adjusted the system to mimic the pressure and temperature conditions required for clathrate formation. By pressurizing the vessel with methane, Johnson forced methane into the droplet, which caused a methane clathrate structure to form.

She then measured the amount of gas that was consumed by the clathrate — an indicator of how quickly and how much clathrate formed — and did so in the presence of the proteins versus no proteins. Johnson found that with the clathrate-binding proteins, less gas was consumed, and the clathrates melted at higher temperatures.

Once the team validated that the proteins affect the formation and stability of methane clathrates, they used Huard's protein crystal structure to carry out molecular dynamics simulations with the help of James (JC) Gumbart, professor in the School of Physics. The simulations allowed the team to identify the specific site where the protein binds to the methane clathrate.

A Surprisingly Novel System

The study unveiled unexpected insights into the structure and function of the proteins. The researchers initially thought the part of the protein that was similar to fish antifreeze proteins would play a role in clathrate binding. Surprisingly, that part of the protein did not play a role, and a wholly different mechanism directed the interactions.

They found that the proteins do not bind to ice, but rather interact with the clathrate structure itself, directing its growth. Specifically, the part of the protein that had similar characteristics to antifreeze proteins was buried in the protein structure, and instead played a role in stabilizing the protein.

The researchers found that the proteins performed better at modifying methane clathrate than any of the antifreeze proteins that had been tested in the past. They also performed just as well as, if not better than, the toxic commercial clathrate inhibitors currently used in drilling that pose serious environmental threats.

Preventing clathrate formation in natural gas pipelines is a billion-dollar industry. If these biodegradable proteins could be used to prevent disastrous natural gas leaks, it would greatly reduce the risk of environmental damage.

“We were so lucky that this actually worked, because even though we chose these proteins based on their similarity to antifreeze proteins, they are completely different,” Johnson said. “They have a similar function in nature, but do so through a completely different biological system, and I think that really excites people.”

Methane clathrates likely exist throughout the solar system — on the subsurface of Mars, for example, and on icy moons in the outer solar system, such as Europa. The team’s findings indicate that if microbes exist on other planetary bodies, they might produce similar biomolecules to retain liquid water in channels in the clathrate that could sustain life.

“We’re still learning so much about the basic systems on our planet,” Huard said. “That’s one of the great things about Georgia Tech — different communities can come together to do really cool, unexpected science. I never thought I would be working on an astrobiology project, but here we are, and we’ve been very successful.”

Citation: Dustin J E Huard, et al. Molecular basis for inhibition of methane clathrate growth by a deep subsurface bacterial protein, PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2023.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad268

Funding: National Aeronautics & Space Administration, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund

Georgia Tech co-authors included Zixing Fan, Ph.D. student, and two undergraduates, Lydia Kenney (now a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University) and Manlin Xu (now a Ph.D. student in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program). Ran Drori, associate professor of chemistry at Yeshiva University, also contributed.

Sulfates usually are produced by atmospheric oxidation in the summer, when ample sunlight facilitates the oxidation that turns sulfur dioxide into dangerous aerosol particles. How is it that China can produce such extreme pollution loaded with sulfates in the winter, when there’s not as much sunlight and atmospheric oxidation is slow?

Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and his research team have conducted a study that may have the answer: All the chemical reactions needed to turn sulfur dioxide into sulfur trioxide, and then quickly into sulfate, primarily happen within the smoke plumes causing the pollution. That process not only creates sulfates in the winter in China, but it also happens faster and results in larger sulfate particles in the atmosphere.

“We call the source ‘in-source formation,’” Wang says. “Instead of having oxidants spread out in the atmosphere, slowly oxidizing sulfur dioxide into sulfur trioxide to produce sulfate, we have this concentrated production in the exhaust plumes that turns the sulfuric acid into large sulfate particles. And that's why we're seeing these large sulfate particles in China.”

The findings of in-source formation of larger wintertime sulfate particles in China could help scientists accurately assess the impacts of aerosols on radiative forcing — how climate change and global warming impact the Earth’s energy and heat balances — and on health, where larger aerosols means larger deposits into human lungs. 

“Wintertime Formation of Large Sulfate Particles in China and Implications for Human Health,” is published in Environmental Science & Technology, an American Chemical Society publication. The co-authors include Qianru Zhang of Peking University and Mingming Zheng of Wuhan Polytechnic University, two of Wang’s former students who conducted the research while at Georgia Tech. 

Explaining a historic smog

China still burns a lot of coal in power plants because its costs are lower compared to natural gas, Wang says. It also makes for an easy comparison between China’s hazy winters and a historic event that focused the United Kingdom’s attention on dangerous environmental hazards — the Great London Smog.

The event, depicted in the Netflix show “The Crown,” saw severe smog descend on London in December 1952. Unusually cold weather preceded the event, which brought the coal-produced haze down to ground level. UK officials later said the Great London Smog (also called the Great London Fog) was responsible for 4,000 deaths and 100,000 illnesses, although later studies estimated a higher death toll of 10,000 to 20,000.

“From the days of the London Fog to extreme winter pollution in China, it has been a challenge to explain how sulfate is produced in the winter,” Wang says. 

Wang and his team decided to take on that challenge. 

Aerosol size and heavy metal influence?

The higher sulfate levels in China, notably in January 2013, defy conventional explanations that relied on standard photochemical oxidation. It was thought that nitrogen dioxide or other mild oxidants found in alkaline or neutral particles in the atmosphere were the cause. But measurements revealed the resulting sulfate particles were highly acidic. 

During Zheng’s time at Georgia Tech, “She was just looking for interesting things to do,” Wang says of the former student. “And I said, maybe this is what we should do — I wanted her to look at aerosol size distributions, how large the aerosols are.” 

Zheng and Wang noticed that the size of the sulfate particles from China’s winter were much larger than those that resulted from photochemically-produced aerosols. Usually measuring 0.3 to 0.5 microns, the sulfate was closer to 1 micron in size. (A human hair is about 70 microns.) Aerosols distributed over a wider area would normally be smaller. 

“The micron-sized aerosol observations imply that sulfate particles undergo substantial growth in a sulfur trioxide-rich environment,” Wang says. Larger particles increase the risks to human health.

“When aerosols are large, more is deposited in the front part of the respiratory system but less on the end part, such as alveoli,” he adds. “When accounting for the large size of particles, total aerosol deposition in the human respiratory system is estimated to increase by 10 to 30 percent.”

Something still needs to join the chemical mix, however, so the sulfur dioxide could turn into sulfur trioxide while enlarging the resulting sulfate particles. Wang says a potential pathway involves the catalytic oxidation of sulfur dioxide to sulfuric acid by “transition metals.”

High temperatures, acidity, and water content in the exhaust can greatly accelerate catalytic sulfur dioxide oxidation “compared to that in the ambient atmosphere. It is possible that similar heterogeneous processes occurring on the hot surface of a smokestack coated with transition metals could explain the significant portion of sulfur trioxide observed in coal-fired power plant exhaust,” Wang says.

“A significant amount of sulfur trioxide is produced, either during combustion or through metal-catalyzed oxidation at elevated temperatures.”

An opportunity for cleaner-burning coal power plants

The impact of in-source formation of sulfate suggests that taking measures to cool off and remove sulfur trioxide, sulfuric acid, and particulates from the emissions of coal-combustion facilities could be a way to cut down on pollution that can cause serious health problems.

“The development and implementation of such technology will benefit nations globally, particularly those heavily reliant on coal as a primary energy source,” Wang says.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.3c05645

Funding: This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 41821005 and 41977311). Yuhang Wang was supported by the National Science Foundation Atmospheric Chemistry Program. Qianru Zhang would also like to thank the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2022M720005) and China Scholarship Council for support. Mingming Zheng is also supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Peking University (7100604309).

Dunlap was hired earlier this year as the Urban Honey Bee Project's (UHBP) first-ever beekeeper in residence. Throughout her residency, she'll conduct research into the pollinator's place in our ecosystem and how beekeeping may offer relief to veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while connecting with the bees through art.  

Dunlap had been gardening for over a decade, but in 2016, when she got the urge to find new ways to engage with nature, she recalled a powerful piece of imagery that shaped her childhood — Wu-Tang Clan's music video for “Triumph” and its depiction of the group's members as a powerful swarm of Africanized killer bees.  

"The political messaging and tying Africanized killer bees in with the stereotypes and the tropes of African Americans in the media, and the way that that was so poetically tied in, visually stuck with me,” she said. “It was the first time I recognized a political message being articulated through art. For that reason, it stuck with me that bees were a form of strong symbolism tied to resilience." 

Living in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dunlap became a certified beekeeper under the Mecklenburg County Beekeepers Association in 2017. She continued practicing as she moved around the country, with stops in Chicago and Denver, eventually landing in Atlanta in 2021. Looking for a way to connect to the local beekeeping community, she attended an April presentation by UHBP Director Jennifer Leavey, who offered Dunlap a chance to get involved at Georgia Tech.  

She now handles the inspection of the hives on The Kendeda Building roof, where she monitors for pests and ensures the bees have proper nutrition to sustain their population through the seasons. The UHBP began in 2012 with the goal of educating the Tech community on the importance of these pollinators within the Atlanta ecosystem and beyond — a charge that Dunlap carries on.  

Over the next year, she will continue working on her sound art project that examines the frequency at which bees “buzz” and how it, along with the responsibilities of beekeeping, is being used by VA hospitals and programs to ease the effects of PTSD. While the science behind the connection is still being explored, beekeeping was recommended more than a century ago — to soldiers returning home from World War I — according to a CNBC profile of Bees4Vets, a nonprofit based in Nevada.  

From the Hive to the Canvas 

Whether it was baking sourdough bread or learning a new language, many people, including Dunlap, took the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic to pick up a new hobby. She began a master's program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the goal of using beeswax in encaustic painting, which uses hot wax mixed with pigments. The use of natural materials collected through her beekeeping practice connects Dunlap to her work.  

“It's a way of tapping into another level of consciousness. It's a way of articulating the noncommunicable relationship between me and the bees. When there's a language gap between people, we try to fill it in with translation, but without a direct way to translate the language or the sensation that I feel from the bees, this allows me to document my practice in an abstract form,” she said.  

By layering the wax and applying heat throughout the process, Dunlap watches the pieces take shape, often with the unpredictability of an active hive, as she says the art “can create itself.” She collects the wax in small amounts, knowing that she can only produce her art if the bees are healthy.  

"It's an eco-conscious practice, making sure I don't use more than I need," she explained. “I love the landscape it creates, and it's all about me creating a direct relationship with my medium and knowing that I earned it by developing a relationship with the bees." 

As Dunlap continues her year-long residency with the UHBP, she intends to help educate the community, both on campus and around the Atlanta area, in the hopes that more prospective beekeepers will explore their curiosity to unlock the full potential of the practice. 

"It's been a practice that keeps unveiling itself to me," she said. "As you get more engaged, you learn there is so much more to it than just the day-to-day hive inspections. There is a lot of beauty to it as well." 

Students at Tech have several ways to get involved with research and beekeeping, including the Living Building Science VIP team, the Beekeeping Club, and various classes and workshops hosted by the UHBP. 

That’s how Rachel Moore describes the view from the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet. “It's a really challenging environment, but it was really, really interesting to be there. I was there for nearly 50 days.”

Moore is an expert at collecting data in difficult research environments, traveling to some of the most extreme places on Earth in order to research microbes, and what hints they might give regarding astrobiology. 

“It all started in grad school, when I joined a microbial ecology lab,” Moore recalls. “I pretty quickly learned that I love to do really difficult, challenging projects. I got interested in working around fire, biomass burning and forests, and I started collecting bacteria from the air. That was a challenge in and of itself, just trying to collect these really tiny things while standing in the smoke from the forest fires. But from that I learned that I loved to go out into the environment and collect things and try to understand everything around me.”

“I have a lot of different projects, but they all connect through astrobiology,” Moore says. “I’m interested in anything that hasn't been answered yet.” Moore is also leading a project called EXO Methane, which is investigating if different Archaea could survive in Martian and Enceladus-like environments. She’s also collaborating on a project that will send a probe to Venus next year.

Moore started her postdoctoral research at Georgia Tech, and is now continuing her work as a Research Scientist in the same laboratory. “The first project I started in this lab focused around how microbes can survive a really, really dry environment,” she adds. To study this, Moore traveled to the Atacama desert in Chile — the driest place on Earth, and also one of the best analogs to the surface of Mars. “What we were interested in there is how organisms survive intense radiation and intense desiccation. And how does that change as you look at different sites in the Atacama?”

Then, this past summer, Moore traveled to another extreme environment — Greenland. “Instead of being hot and dry, Greenland is extremely cold and dry,” Moore explains. “So it was similar in some aspects, but completely different in terms of logistics and sampling methods. Because we were there in the summer, the sun never set. We were also at high elevation — 10,530 feet above sea level.”

Beneath the ice

The project was started by Nathan Chellman and Joe McConnell from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), and Moore’s role this year was to investigate the microbiology component of the research. “They had been seeing some anomalies in methane and carbon monoxide in ice samples,” Moore says. “We were curious if microbes might be producing some of this, either in the ice core after it’s been sampled, or while it’s still in the glacier.”

“The microbes would not be swimming around or anything” in the ice cores, Moore explains, “but it’s possible that their metabolism is still active, and they’re potentially able to make some of the gases, like methane, in this frozen environment. Our goal was to measure these things in the environment.”

Gathering samples wasn’t easy. “We set up a lab on the glacier, and we set it up in a trench to try to keep any of the ice cores that we pulled out roughly at the same temperature as the glacier itself,” Moore says. Because of that, “weather was a huge, huge thing. Anytime it would get stormy, the wind would blow all of the snow around, and it would fill the entrance to our trench. We had to dig ourselves out several times. People would put out flags so that you could see your way back to the main house or back to your dorms.”

The team hopes that this research will give a more defined record of the past from the Greenland Ice Sheet, improving climate change predictions. Moore also notes applications in astrobiology, adding that “there are a lot of icy worlds like Mars, Enceladus, and Europa, with either an icy crust over the ocean or glaciers on the northern and southern poles.”

Moore was also able to test new technology in the field, using a tool built by Georgia Tech undergraduates alongside her advisor Christopher Carr, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. An ice melter that can be used to take and clean ice samples, the tool is a miniaturized prototype that may be able to help take measurements on Mars, or in similar remote environments in the future.

“Being able to take a tool that Georgia Tech undergraduates made to Greenland and test it on 600-year-old ice in the field was a really cool experience,” Moore adds. “We brought Starlink with us, and so I was able to video call the undergraduate team while I was testing their tool, which was really special.”

The team is now lab-analyzing ice cores that they brought back from Greenland, unraveling which microbes might be present and potentially active. “It's really interesting to see: Is this all chemistry? Is it biology based? Or is there some intersection of the two?” Moore says. “Maybe there's some chemistry or photochemistry happening, plus some biology happening. Whatever it is, we'll have to wait and see.”

John McDonald, professor emeritus in the School of Biological Sciences, founding director of the ICRC, and the study’s corresponding author, explains that the new test’s accuracy is better in detecting ovarian cancer than existing tests for women clinically classified as normal, with a particular improvement in detecting early-stage ovarian disease in that cohort.

The team’s results and methodologies are detailed in a new paper, “A Personalized Probabilistic Approach to Ovarian Cancer Diagnostics,” published in the March 2024 online issue of the medical journal Gynecologic Oncology. Based on their computer models, the researchers have developed what they believe will be a more clinically useful approach to ovarian cancer diagnosis — whereby a patient’s individual metabolic profile can be used to assign a more accurate probability of the presence or absence of the disease.

“This personalized, probabilistic approach to cancer diagnostics is more clinically informative and accurate than traditional binary (yes/no) tests,” McDonald says. “It represents a promising new direction in the early detection of ovarian cancer, and perhaps other cancers as well.”

The study co-authors also include Dongjo Ban, a Bioinformatics Ph.D. student in McDonald’s lab; Research Scientists Stephen N. Housley, Lilya V. Matyunina, and L.DeEtte (Walker) McDonald; Regents’ Professor Jeffrey Skolnick, who also serves as Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology; and two collaborating physicians: University of North Carolina Professor Victoria L. Bae-Jump and Ovarian Cancer Institute of Atlanta Founder and Chief Executive Officer Benedict B. Benigno. Members of the research team are forming a startup to transfer and commercialize the technology, and plan to seek requisite trials and FDA approval for the test.

Silent killer

Ovarian cancer is often referred to as the silent killer because the disease is typically asymptomatic when it first arises — and is usually not detected until later stages of development, when it is difficult to treat.

McDonald explains that while the average five-year survival rate for late-stage ovarian cancer patients, even after treatment, is around 31 percent — but that if ovarian cancer is detected and treated early, the average five-year survival rate is more than 90 percent.

“Clearly, there is a tremendous need for an accurate early diagnostic test for this insidious disease,” McDonald says.

And although development of an early detection test for ovarian cancer has been vigorously pursued for more than three decades, the development of early, accurate diagnostic tests has proven elusive. Because cancer begins on the molecular level, McDonald explains, there are multiple possible pathways capable of leading to even the same cancer type.

“Because of this high-level molecular heterogeneity among patients, the identification of a single universal diagnostic biomarker of ovarian cancer has not been possible,” McDonald says. “For this reason, we opted to use a branch of artificial intelligence — machine learning — to develop an alternative probabilistic approach to the challenge of ovarian cancer diagnostics.”

Metabolic profiles

Georgia Tech co-author Dongjo Ban, whose thesis research contributed to the study, explains that “because end-point changes on the metabolic level are known to be reflective of underlying changes operating collectively on multiple molecular levels, we chose metabolic profiles as the backbone of our analysis.”

“The set of human metabolites is a collective measure of the health of cells,” adds coauthor Jeffrey Skolnick, “and by not arbitrary choosing any subset in advance, one lets the artificial intelligence figure out which are the key players for a given individual.”

Mass spectrometry can identify the presence of metabolites in the blood by detecting their mass and charge signatures. However, Ban says, the precise chemical makeup of a metabolite requires much more extensive characterization.

Ban explains that because the precise chemical composition of less than seven percent of the metabolites circulating in human blood have, thus far, been chemically characterized, it is currently impossible to accurately pinpoint the specific molecular processes contributing to an individual's metabolic profile.

However, the research team recognized that, even without knowing the precise chemical make-up of each individual metabolite, the mere presence of different metabolites in the blood of different individuals, as detected by mass spectrometry, can be incorporated as features in the building of accurate machine learning-based predictive models (similar to the use of individual facial features in the building of facial pattern recognition algorithms).

“Thousands of metabolites are known to be circulating in the human bloodstream, and they can be readily and accurately detected by mass spectrometry and combined with machine learning to establish an accurate ovarian cancer diagnostic,” Ban says.

A new probabilistic approach

The researchers developed their integrative approach by combining metabolomic profiles and machine learning-based classifiers to establish a diagnostic test with 93 percent accuracy when tested on 564 women from Georgia, North Carolina, Philadelphia and Western Canada. 431 of the study participants were active ovarian cancer patients, and while the remaining 133 women in the study did not have ovarian cancer.

Further studies have been initiated to study the possibility that the test is able to detect very early-stage disease in women displaying no clinical symptoms, McDonald says.

McDonald anticipates a clinical future where a person with a metabolic profile that falls within a score range that makes cancer highly unlikely would only require yearly monitoring. But someone with a metabolic score that lies in a range where a majority (say, 90%) have previously been diagnosed with ovarian cancer would likely be monitored more frequently — or perhaps immediately referred for advanced screening.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ygyno.2023.12.030

Funding

This research was funded by the Ovarian Cancer Institute (Atlanta), the Laura Crandall Brown Foundation, the Deborah Nash Endowment Fund, Northside Hospital (Atlanta), and the Mark Light Integrated Cancer Research Student Fellowship.

Disclosure

Study co-authors John McDonald, Stephen N. Housley, Jeffrey Skolnick, and Benedict B. Benigno are the co-founders of MyOncoDx, Inc., formed to support further research, technology transfer, and commercialization for the team’s new clinical tool for the diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

The Churchill Scholarship selects 18 scholars annually for one year of master’s study at the University of Cambridge. Kojouharov received the Churchill Scholarship for science, mathematics, and engineering, and Rathbun received the Kanders Churchill Scholarship for science policy. Churchill Scholars are selected on the basis of academic and research achievement.

About the Scholars

Velin Kojouharov

At the University of Cambridge, Kojouharov will pursue a Master of Philosophy in biological sciences. His long-term goal is to “design biologically inspired robots that can move in complex and dangerous environments.”

His research at Cambridge will focus on the net-winged midge larvae, an insect that lives in fast-flowing streams of the Alps. “By working with both zoologists and engineers, I hope to design a robot, inspired by the larvae, that can crawl around in similar conditions,” he said.

The potential application of this robot includes environmental monitoring and search and rescue in fast-flooding or extreme weather conditions.

Kojouharov expressed his gratitude to Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, for his research guidance over the last three years. “He has encouraged me to ask bigger, more interesting research questions.” He also thanked Ph.D. student and mentor Tianyu Wang.

As a Tech student, Kojouharov also received the Stamps President’s Scholarship, Goldwater Scholarship, Astronaut Scholarship, and the ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship.

Shea Rathbun

Rathbun plans to pursue a master of philosophy in public policy at the University of Cambridge, and she’s looking forward to studying in the U.K. to see firsthand how it has worked toward accomplishing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. She also hopes to learn how those practices can be applied in the U.S. Her long-term goal is to “combine engineering and policy to make cities around the world sustainable, equitable, and resilient.”

Rathbun acknowledged the contributions of her mentors, Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education, and James Tsai, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, in advancing her undergraduate research. Her mentors helped shape her perspective on transportation equity and equitable city planning during her time at Georgia Tech.

At Tech, she also received the Alex G. and Faye Spanos Scholarship and funding from the Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Endowment.

Fellowship Planning

Georgia Tech's pre-graduate and pre-professional advising team aids students in the process of applying for prestigious awards such as the Churchill Scholarship. Awards are available for students as early as their second year. Fellowship advisors work with students each step of the way, identifying opportunities, reading drafts of essays, and arranging mock interviews.

Karen Mura, prestigious fellowships advisor, worked closely with both of this year's Churchill Scholars as they applied for this and other awards.

"Shea and Venny are remarkable students with significant real-world experience that prepares them well to make a global impact throughout their professional life," she said. "I have enjoyed engaging with them as they plan their next steps and noting their personal growth along the way."

Scholarships help Georgia Tech attract top students and propel them to prestigious fellowships and recognitions. Learn how your gift to Georgia Tech makes scholarships possible at transformingtomorrow.gatech.edu.

It is the most significant honor the Institute bestows on an individual and comes at a time Nadella described as a "golden age" of computer science.  

"I think what motivates all of us, as this community of folks who are associated with Georgia Tech, is not just the technology, because it's just merely a tool. But it's a powerful means to a more powerful end, which is about empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The innovation you're driving here at Georgia Tech comes at one of the most consequential moments in the history of technology. As we enter this age of artificial intelligence, it's communities like this one that will help create the world we want to live in," Nadella said.  

With over 2,000 Georgia Tech alumni on its staff and a prominent presence in the city of Atlanta, Microsoft recently became the second company in history to surpass a $3 trillion market value. Accepting the degree, Nadella, who became the company's CEO in 2014, spoke of aligning values between Microsoft and Georgia Tech and looking forward to working together to create technologies and solutions for the world's most pressing challenges.  

"When you talk to Satya, he always leads with the impact that the company is having on people and organizations around the world," Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera said during the ceremony. "That sounds awfully familiar with our mission at Georgia Tech — to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. Our motto is progress and service. We define our success by the impact that we have in the lives of others. So, that explains why we're so excited to bring Satya into the family of Yellow Jackets." 

A fireside chat between Cabrera and Nadella followed the ceremony. Along with the transformative nature of AI and its ability to improve workflows and productivity in business, Nadella spoke of its potential to bring personalized instruction to students worldwide.  

He also participated in a roundtable discussion with faculty members about the implementation and impact of AI in higher education, robotics, cybersecurity computing, and other areas. Alex Orso, interim dean of the College of Computing, was among the participants and discussed ways to foster the exchange of talent between Georgia Tech and Microsoft. He also discussed how Georgia Tech's online computer science master's program, in collaboration with the Division of Lifetime Learning, can serve as a global platform to educate students before, during, and after college. 

Irfan Essa, senior associate dean in the College of Computing and co-director of Georgia Tech's AI Hub, added that Nadella and the faculty shared ideas for how industry and academia can collaborate to produce a strong workforce in the years to come.  

"We are a leader in this area and a part of the conversation," he said. "Industry leaders like Microsoft and places like Georgia Tech have to figure out a collaborative system to have more conversations about understanding the future workforce but also learning from companies about what kinds of things we should be providing from a broad standpoint educationally." 

Nadella then sat down with a group of students, all former Microsoft interns, to discuss their educational experience and what he called a "paradigm shift" across the industry, similar to the rise of the internet and cloud computing.  

Rynaa Grover will graduate with a master's degree in computer science in May and has accepted a position with Microsoft. "The research that goes on at Georgia Tech is very advanced and in line with the industry. It's incredible to be in this field at this point in time and to be able to contribute to such a big firm; it's really empowering," said Grover, who worked with Microsoft's machine learning platforms as an intern and with large language models in Assistant Professor Srijan Kumar’s lab. 

Yi Qin will also join Microsoft after graduating with a master's in human-computer interaction.  

"This was such a memorable experience for me,” she said. “Conversations like this make me feel like we are capable of doing a lot of great things. We should capture every opportunity that we have, have a growth mindset, and create whatever impact we want to make." 

A recent executive order issued by President Joe Biden seeks to establish "new standards for AI safety and security" while addressing consumer privacy concerns and promoting innovation. Georgia Tech experts have examined the key elements of the order and offer their thoughts on its scope and what comes next.  

A Precautionary Tale 

The order calls for the development of standards, tools, and tests to ensure the safe use of AI. From voice scams and phishing campaigns to larger-scale threats, the technology’s potential dangers have been widely documented. But Margaret Kosal, associate professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, says that additional context is often needed to dispel hysteria. 

"No one is going to be hooking up AI to launch nuclear weapons, but AI capabilities may enable targeting, or enable the command and control and the decision-making time to be compressed,” she said.  
 
The order will create an AI Safety and Security Board tasked with addressing critical threats. Companies developing foundation models that "pose a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety” will be required to notify the federal government when training the model and required to share the results of all red-team safety tests — a simulated cyberattack to test a system's defenses.  

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a CNBC report details a 1,267% rise in phishing emails. Srijan Kumar, assistant professor in the College of Computing, attributes the increase to the technology's availability and an inability to rein in "bad actors."  

He says these scams will only continue to get more sophisticated and personalized. They “can be created by knowing what you might be willing to fall prey to versus what I might fall prey to,” said Kumar, whose systems have influenced misinformation detection on sites like X (formerly Twitter) and Wikipedia. “AI is not going to autonomously do all of those bad things, but this order can ensure there are consequences for people who misuse it.”  

A Delicate Balance 

Building an AI platform requires large amounts of data regardless of its intended application. Two primary goals of the executive order are protecting privacy and advancing equity.  

To protect personal data, the order tasks Congress with evaluating how agencies collect and use commercially available information and address algorithmic discrimination.  

Acknowledging that everyone should be allowed to have their voice represented in the outputs of AI data sets, Deven Desai, associate professor in the Scheller College of Business, noted, "There are people who don't want to be part of data sets, which is their right, but this means their voices won't be reflected in the outputs.”   

The order also includes sections to address intellectual property concerns among inventors and creators, though legal challenges will likely set new precedents in the years ahead.  

When that time comes, Kosal says that defining “theft” in the context of AI becomes the true challenge and that, ultimately, money will play a significant role. "If you spit out a Harry Potter book and read it yourself, nobody will care. It's when you start selling it to make money, and you don't share proceeds with the original people, then it becomes an issue," she said.   

What Does AI-Generated Mean? 

The order instructs the Department of Commerce to develop guidelines for content authentication and watermarking to label AI-generated content. Desai questions what it means for something to be truly created by AI.  

An important distinction lies between using AI to assist a writer in organizing their thoughts and using the technology to generate content. He likens the trend to the music industry in the 1980s.  

"Synthesizers really changed people's ability to generate music and, for a while, people thought that was horrible. They can just program the music. They're not. I am still the human responsible for that music, or that article in this case, so what is the point of the label?" he asks. 

As AI assistance becomes commonplace in content creation, trusting the source of information is increasingly important. Recently, articles published on Sports Illustrated's website featured AI-generated content provided by a third-party company that had used a machine to write the content and create fake bylines. Sports Illustrated, which may not have known of the problem, ran the material without disclosure to readers. CEO Ross Levinsohn was ousted shortly after the story broke.  

“Perhaps if the third party had disclosed its use of AI software, SI would have been able to assess how much AI was used and then chosen not to run the material, or to run it with a disclaimer that AI helped write the material,” Desai said. "Of course, even if they label the content as AI-generated, a reader still won't know exactly how much of the content came from AI or a human.” 

AI and the Workforce 

As AI systems and models become more sophisticated, workers may become more concerned about being replaced. To counteract these concerns, the order calls for a study to examine AI’s potential impact on labor markets and investments in workforce training efforts.  

Kumar compares the rise of AI to similar technological innovations throughout history and sees it as an opportunity for workers and industries to adapt. "It's less a matter of AI replacing workers and more of reskilling people to use the new technology. It's no different from when assembly lines in the auto industry were created."  

Promoting Innovation and Competition 

The power to harness the full potential of AI has initiated a race to the top. Desai believes that part of the executive order providing resources to smaller developers can help level the playing field.   

"There is a possibility here for markets to open up. Current players using models that weren't built with transparency in mind might struggle, but maybe that's OK." 

The issue of reliability and transparency comes into focus for Desai, especially as it relates to government usage of AI. The order calls on agencies to "acquire specified AI products and services faster, more cheaply, and more effectively through more rapid and efficient contracting."  

When taxpayer dollars are at stake, government can’t afford to trust a technology it doesn’t fully understand — a topic Desai has explored elsewhere. "You can’t just say, ‘We don’t know how it works, but we trust it.’ That’s not going to work. So that’s where there may be a slowdown in the government’s ability to use private sector software if they can’t explain how the thing works and to show that it doesn’t have discriminatory issues.” 

What's Next 

Promoting and policing the safe use of AI cannot be done independently. Georgia Tech experts agree that participation on a global scale is necessary. To that end, the European Union will unveil its comprehensive EU AI Act, which includes a similar framework to the president's executive order.  

Due to the evolving nature of AI, the executive order or the EU's actions will not be all-encompassing. Law often lags behind technology, but Kosal points out that it's crucial to think beyond what currently exists when crafting policy.  

Experts also agree that AI cannot be regulated or governed through a single document and that this order is likely the first in a series of policymaking moves. Kosal sees tremendous opportunity with the innovation surrounding AI but hopes the growing fear of its rise does not usher in another AI winter, in which interest and research funding fade. 

"Our decision to locate in Columbus was driven by several crucial factors, and we are thrilled about the opportunities that this vibrant city presents for our growth and development,” said Prashant Patil, Micromize founder and CEO. “The work of CHIPS4CHIPS in supporting the semiconductor industry is commendable, and we are excited to be part of this innovative ecosystem.”

This exciting development was announced Tuesday, Jan. 23, at the Marcus Nanotechnology Center on Georgia Tech’s campus to a large group of state legislators and other state officials, a delegation of business and civic leaders from Columbus, and leadership from Georgia Tech and ATDC. The announcement is a true look at how statewide partnerships can lead to success for the Columbus region.

Micromize, a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, selected Georgia as its new home, in part, to take advantage of the semiconductor packaging expertise at Georgia Tech. The company plans to establish its headquarters and manufacturing facility in Columbus, further solidifying its presence in the state’s vibrant technology ecosystem. Additionally, Micromize will center its cutting-edge research and development on Georgia Tech's campus.

"The collaboration with Micromize is a significant milestone for CHIPS4CHIPS and the entire region,” said Ben Moser, president and CEO of United Way of the Chattahoochee Valley and chair of CHIPS4CHIPS. “This announcement marks the first of what we believe will be many to come, and we are thankful that Micromize recognizes the potential of our region for this industry. Columbus is poised for remarkable development, and we look forward to the positive impact that Micromize will bring to our community.”

The strategic relocation is expected to create significant economic opportunities in the region. Micromize will bring 20-25 jobs to Columbus through its headquarters and manufacturing facility, contributing to the local workforce, and fostering growth.

Micromize will center its Research & Development Lab at Georgia Tech’s 3D Systems Packaging Research Center, which is regarded as the world’s best for semiconductor packaging research. This partnership represents a synergistic collaboration of industry leaders, research institutions, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Micromize's move to Columbus not only underscores the city's growing prominence as a technology hub, but also highlights the collaborative efforts driving innovation and economic development in the state of Georgia.

In addition to C4C’s nationally recognized workforce development efforts, the Fort Moore Army base, and its skilled workforce, the region’s proximity to a port and airport will facilitate efficient shipping, and Columbus played a pivotal role in supporting the company by providing essential infrastructure, he said.

“Our collaboration with Georgia Tech enriches our talent pool, adds exponentially to our research and development capabilities, and access to mentorship at ATDC enhances our commercialization potential,” Patil said. “We are also proud to be part of the effort to revitalize semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, with Columbus serving as our starting point as we embark on this exciting journey of growth and innovation.”

Georgia Tech, a leader in microchips and nanotechnology research, innovation, and fabrication, provides fertile ground for Micromize's relocation. The Institute’s commitment to advancing semiconductor technology aligns with the national push at the federal level (via the CHIPS and Science Act) to bring more semiconductor production to the U.S., making it more competitive in research, development, and manufacturing.

“As the state’s technology startup incubator, we’re excited to welcome Micromize into our portfolio and to support them into the next phase of growth and expansion,” said ATDC Director John Avery.

“Microchips, semiconductor packaging, and microelectronics are critical to our national economy and national security. Micromize’s choosing Georgia as its home to grow reflects what is proving to be a successful model when business, government, and research institutions such as Georgia Tech collaborate.”

Serving as a liaison between the community and responding officers, command center staff monitor calls, emails, and texts from Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff. They also provide background information on suspects, research license plate numbers and warrants, and monitor the cameras on campus to provide video support for criminal investigations and to ensure officer safety during traffic stops.  

Shireka Graham, director of emergency communications, reminds all members of the Georgia Tech community not to hesitate to reach out to the operations center.  

"We want students, faculty, and staff to know that we are the heartbeat of the operation — they might not see us, but we are here for them,” she said. “We are the voice behind the call, and just like the police officers and other field responders, we're there with them.” 

Sometimes, she noted, people are reluctant to call because they don't think their situation is an emergency or that it's important. “But if they're in doubt, call us and let us get someone out there to evaluate the situation and get them the help they need," Graham said.  

"Our students are our top priority,” she said. “We know there is a lot of pressure” at Tech, especially during finals, “so we encourage our students to call us if they need someone to talk to. We can connect them with the Center for Mental Health Care and Resources, and if they call us, we will send a responder and remain on the line with them until help arrives." 

The operations center can be reached through a 911 call, the LiveSafe app (calls, texts, and audio and video messages), the center's administrative line for non-emergencies (404.894.2500), emergency elevator buttons, and 555 blue light emergency phones across campus. For those reaching out to the command center, Graham said it's important to share as much information as possible to help dispatchers provide the best response.  

Trained to Assist 

Before assuming their duties, dispatchers complete a rigorous 12-week training program, and ongoing training is required annually. The law enforcement arm of GTPD earned Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) accreditation in 2013, and Graham challenged her staff with earning the same accreditation — which they accomplished in 2022. The Operations Center is Georgia's only university or college communications center to receive it. 

“Being CALEA-accredited provides the best practices and standards to enhance our commitment to better serve and build trust within the Georgia Tech community,” Graham said. “The intensive process comprises 207 standards and 20-plus annual continued education training hours” for each dispatcher. “It's important to us to provide the highest level of customer service, process each call effectively and efficiently, and assure we're skilled to handle critical incidents regarding our students and the community we serve."   

Working alongside the dispatchers in the command center is a group of student assistants, and giving them an opportunity to see the inner workings of GTPD as video technicians is one of many outreach efforts to connect with the campus community.  

"Who knows the campus better than the students? They're the ones walking it every single day, so having them collaborate with us is very beneficial in meeting our common goal of ensuring safety for our campus," she said.   

In 2022, the team became the first university Public Safety Communications agency in the state to be recognized by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Missing Kids & 9-1-1 Readiness Program. 

Public officials and employees are required to disclose all business transactions occurring during the previous calendar year. Reports for 2023 transactions are due Jan. 31.

This requirement applies to transactions by the employee or any business in which the employee, spouse, or dependent has more than a 25% interest. There is an exception for transactions less than $250 where the total of all transactions does not exceed $9,000 in the calendar year. If an employee has no business transactions to report, it is not necessary for that employee to file the State Business Transaction Disclosure Report.

Disclosure reports are being filed through the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission’s legacy system, which is no longer accessible on their website. In order to file a report for 2023 business transactions, employees must contact Haley Barrett, director of Communications for the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, at hbarrett@ethics.ga.gov or 470.355.6003 for assistance in completing the filing process or to answer any questions you may have.

Definition of Business Transactions

Business transactions mean the sale or leasing of any personal property, real property, or services on behalf of oneself or a third party as an agency, broker, dealer, or representative. It also applies to the purchase of surplus real or personal property on behalf of oneself or on behalf of any third party as an agency, broker, dealer, or representative.

“During this time of exponential growth at Georgia Tech, it is clear that we need to keep a laser focus on supporting the growing operational needs of the Institute as well as the regulatory compliance matters which we must uphold,” said Bolton. “In aligning our expertise to better support the Institute’s academic and research mission, we are able to provide excellence to the entire campus community without exception.”  

Effective Feb. 1, Jim Fortner, vice president for Finance and Planning (F&P) and interim chief financial officer, will assume the role of vice president and deputy chief business officer and continue to report directly to Bolton. In this capacity, Fortner will advance how A&F delivers on the operational needs of a growing campus. During this transitional period, Fortner will continue to lead F&P until the next leader is selected.  

“I am honored to serve in this role in A&F to support the Institute’s business needs,” said Fortner. “A&F has a depth and breadth of experienced and committed talent, and I look forward to working across the division to build upon on our successes and continue to improve how we support the campus today and in the future.”  

In addition, Jarmon DeSadier, senior director of Employee Relations for Georgia Tech Human Resources, will begin his role on Feb. 1 as interim vice president for the Office of Equal Opportunity, Compliance, and Conflict Management and report to Bolton. In alignment with Georgia Tech’s recently announced new approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, this newly created unit will be responsible for overseeing and implementing policies, programs, and initiatives related to equal opportunity, compliance with applicable laws and regulations, and effective conflict management within the Institute.  

"As I step into the role of interim vice president for this emerging unit at Georgia Tech, I am energized by Georgia Tech’s continued commitment to promoting equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or any other characteristic.” said DeSadier. “We will aim to be a trusted resource for information, guidance, and support, fostering an environment where individuals can thrive and contribute their best.”  

Details about the searches for these permanent leadership roles will be announced in the coming weeks.  

Technological advances in many fields rely on the ability to print metallic structures that are nano-sized — a scale hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Sourabh Saha, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Jungho Choi, a Ph.D. student in Saha’s lab, developed a technique for printing metal nanostructures that is 480 times faster and 35 times cheaper than the current conventional method.

Their research was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Printing metal on the nanoscale — a technique known as nanopatterning — allows for the creation of unique structures with interesting functions. It is crucial for the development of many technologies, including electronic devices, solar energy conversion, sensors, and other systems.

It is generally believed that high-intensity light sources are required for nanoscale printing. But this type of tool, known as a femtosecond laser, can cost up to half a million dollars and is too expensive for most research labs and small businesses.

“As a scientific community, we don’t have the ability to make enough of these nanomaterials quickly and affordably, and that is why promising technologies often stay limited to the lab and don’t get translated into real-world applications,” Saha said.

“The question we wanted to answer is, ‘Do we really need a high-intensity femtosecond laser to print on the nanoscale?’ Our hypothesis was that we don’t need that light source to get the type of printing we want.”

They searched for a low-cost, low-intensity light that could be focused in a way similar to femtosecond lasers, and chose superluminescent light emitting diodes (SLEDs) for their commercial availability. SLEDs emit light that is a billion times less intense than that of femtosecond lasers.

Saha and Choi set out to create an original projection-style printing technology, designing a system that converts digital images into optical images and displays them on a glass surface. The system operates like digital projectors but produces images that are more sharply focused. They leveraged the unique properties of the superluminescent light to generate sharply focused images with minimal defects.

They then developed a clear ink solution made up of metal salt and added other chemicals to make sure the liquid could absorb light. When light from their projection system hit the solution, it caused a chemical reaction that converted the salt solution into metal. The metal nanoparticles stuck to the surface of the glass, and the agglomeration of the metal particles creates the nanostructures. Because it is a projection type of printing, it can print an entire structure in one go, rather than point by point — making it much faster.

After testing the technique, they found that projection-style nanoscale printing is possible even with low-intensity light, but only if the images are sharply focused. Saha and Choi believe that researchers can readily replicate their work using commercially available hardware. Unlike a pricey femtosecond laser, the type of SLED that Saha and Choi used in their printer costs about $3,000.

“At present, only top universities have access to these expensive technologies, and even then, they are located in shared facilities and are not always available,” Choi said. “We want to democratize the capability of nanoscale 3D printing, and we hope our research opens the door for greater access to this type of process at a low cost.”

The researchers say their technique will be particularly useful for people working in the fields of electronics, optics, and plasmonics, which all require a variety of complex metallic nanostructures.

“I think the metrics of cost and speed have been greatly undervalued in the scientific community that works on fabrication and manufacturing of tiny structures,” Saha said.

“In the real world, these metrics are important when it comes to translating discoveries from the lab to industry. Only when we have manufacturing techniques that take these metrics into account will we be able to fully leverage nanotechnology for societal benefit.”

Citation: J. Choi, S. K. Saha, Scalable Printing of Metal Nanostructures through Superluminescent Light Projection. Adv. Mater. 2024, 36, 2308112.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202308112

Funding: Funding includes grants from the G.W.W. School of Mechanical Engineering and the EVPR’s office at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Imaging was performed at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (ECCS-2025462).

The first step to attending the event is to register through CareerBuzz, though walk-up attendance is also permitted.

A few tips for students to be prepared:  

Attending the fair is about more than just employment. Coming out with a solid lead is a great goal, but it’s also about networking and the experience of participating in the fair. Learn more about how to prepare for the fair.

The Spring All Majors Career Fair takes place Jan. 22 – 23 in the Exhibition Hall, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. Students should wear professional business attire and bring their BuzzCard and several copies of their resume. Students can register to attend the fair through CareerBuzz for priority access. Walk-up attendance is also welcome. 

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has released new images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, using data from observations taken in April 2018.

With the participation of the newly commissioned Greenland Telescope and a dramatically improved recording rate across the array, the 2018 observations give researchers a view of the source independent from the first observations in 2017. 

“This persistence is a remarkable confirmation of our earlier interpretation that the EHT images do reveal the shadow of the black hole — and strengthens the tests of Einstein’s theories that we have performed,” says Dimitrios Psaltis, professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology who served as EHT project scientist at the time of the 2019 announcement.

Psaltis and Georgia Tech School of Physics Chair Feryal Özel are members of the EHT collaboration, and are the scientists who developed many of the theoretical tools to analyze and interpret the images.

“Modeling the image features of this black hole across observations that span many years — and comparing them to the images of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way — already provide powerful checks on our plasma models” says Özel, who led the 2022 announcement of the image of the Milky Way black hole.

New era of black hole imaging

A recent paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics presents the team’s new images from the 2018 data that reveal a familiar ring the same size as the one observed in 2017. This bright ring surrounds a deep central depression, “the shadow of the black hole,” as predicted by general relativity. Excitingly, the brightness peak of the ring has shifted by about 30º compared to the images from 2017, which is consistent with our theoretical understanding of variability from turbulent material around black holes.

“A fundamental requirement of science is to be able to reproduce results,” says Keiichi Asada, an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. “Confirmation of the ring in a completely new data set is a huge milestone for our collaboration and a strong indication that we are looking at a black hole shadow and the material orbiting around it.”

In 2017, the EHT took the first image of a black hole. This object, M87*, is the beating heart of the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and lives 55 million light years away from Earth. The image of the black hole revealed a bright circular ring, brighter in the southern part of the ring. Further analysis of the data also revealed the structure of M87* in polarized light, giving us greater insight into the geometry of the magnetic field and the nature of the plasma around the black hole.

The new era of black hole direct imaging, spearheaded by the extensive analysis of the 2017 observations of M87*, opened a new window that let researchers investigate black hole astrophysics and allow them to test the theory of general relativity at a fundamental level.

“Our theoretical models tell us that the state of the material around M87* should be uncorrelated between 2017 and 2018,” EHT researchers explain. “Thus, multiple observations of M87* will help us place independent constraints on the plasma and magnetic field structure around the black hole and help us disentangle the complicated astrophysics from the effects of general relativity.”

Greenland Telescope

To help accomplish new and exciting science, the EHT is under continuous development. The Greenland Telescope joined the EHT for the first time in 2018, just five months after its construction was completed far above the Arctic Circle. This new telescope significantly improved the image fidelity of the EHT array, improving the coverage, particularly in the North-South direction. The Large Millimeter Telescope also participated for the first time with its full 50 m surface, greatly improving its sensitivity. The EHT array was also upgraded to observe in four frequency bands around 230 GHz, compared to only two bands in 2017.

Repeated observations with an improved array are essential to demonstrate the robustness of our findings and strengthen our confidence in our results.  In addition to the groundbreaking science, the EHT also serves as a technology testbed for cutting-edge developments in high-frequency radio interferometry.

"Advancing scientific endeavors requires continuous enhancement in data quality and analysis techniques," says Rohan Dahale, a Ph.D. candidate at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Spain. "The inclusion of the Greenland Telescope in our array filled critical gaps in our earth-sized telescope. The 2021, 2022, and the forthcoming 2024 observations witness improvements to the array, fueling our enthusiasm to push the frontiers of black hole astrophysics."

Remarkably similar

The analysis of the 2018 data features eight independent imaging and modeling techniques, including methods used in the previous 2017 analysis of M87* and new ones developed from the collaboration’s experience analyzing Sgr A*.

The EHT team explains that the image of M87* taken in 2018 is remarkably similar to what they saw in 2017. “We see a bright ring of the same size, with a dark central region and one side of the ring brighter than the other. The mass and distance of M87* will not appreciably increase throughout a human lifetime, so general relativity predicts that the ring diameter should stay the same from year to year. The stability of the measured diameter in the images from 2017 to 2018 robustly supports the conclusion that M87* is well described by general relativity.”

Mass matters, brightness peak

“One of the remarkable properties of a black hole is that its radius is strongly dependent on only one quantity: its mass,” says Nitika Yadlapalli Yurk, a former graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), now a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “Since M87* is not accreting material (which would increase its mass) at a rapid rate, general relativity tells us that its radius will remain fairly unchanged over human history. It’s pretty exciting to see that our data confirm this prediction.”

While the size of the black hole shadow did not change between 2017 and 2018, the location of the brightest region around the ring did change significantly, the team adds. The bright region rotated about 30º counterclockwise to settle in the bottom right part of the ring at about the 5 o’clock position.

Historical observations of M87* with a less sensitive array and fewer telescopes also indicated that the shadow structure changes yearly (Wielgus 2020, ApJ, 901, 67) but with less precision. While the 2018 EHT array still cannot observe the jet emerging from M87*, the black hole spin axis predicted from the location of the brightest region around the ring is more consistent with the jet axis seen at other wavelengths.  

“The biggest change, that the brightness peak shifted around the ring, is actually something we predicted when we published the first results in 2019,” says Britt Jeter, a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. “While general relativity says the ring size should stay pretty fixed, the emission from the turbulent, messy accretion disk around the black hole will cause the brightest part of the ring to wobble around a common center. The amount of wobble we see over time is something we can use to test our theories for the magnetic field and plasma environment around the black hole.”

2024 and beyond

“While all the EHT papers published so far have featured an analysis of our first observations in 2017,” the research team adds, “this result represents the first efforts to explore the many additional years of data the EHT collaboration has collected.” In addition to 2017 and 2018, the EHT conducted successful observations in 2021 and 2022 and is scheduled to observe in the first half of 2024. Each year, the EHT array has improved in some way, either through the addition of new telescopes, better hardware, or additional observing frequencies. “Within the collaboration, we are working very hard to analyze all this data and are excited to show you more results in the future.”

###

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202347932 

ABOUT EHT

The EHT collaboration involves more than 300 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever obtained by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems, creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved are ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).  Data were correlated at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) and MIT Haystack Observatory.  The postprocessing was done within the collaboration by an international team at different institutions.

The EHT consortium consists of 13 stakeholder institutes: the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University, and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

ABOUT GEORGIA TECH

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

IMAGE:

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has released new images of M87* from observations taken in April 2018, one year after the first observations in April 2017. The new observations in 2018, which feature the first participation of the Greenland Telescope, reveal a familiar, bright ring of emission of the same size as we found in 2017.  This bright ring surrounds a dark central shadow, and the brightest part of the ring in 2018 has shifted by about 30º relative from 2017 to now lie in the 5 o’clock position. (Credit: EHT Collaboration)

If an agreement is not reached by the Jan. 19 deadline, it will result in a partial government shutdown, which will affect many programs, including the federal contracting work performed by Georgia Tech. Currently, Georgia Tech receives more than $85 million per month in federal funding for its research activities.

“As we have anticipated in previous scenarios, most Institute operations would not be immediately affected. However, a prolonged federal shutdown would require measures to preserve cash and maintain campus operations,” said Jim Fortner, vice president for Finance and Planning and interim chief financial officer.

Leadership continues to monitor the situation and is ready to implement strategies to help ensure business continuity in the event of a partial or full federal government shutdown. Current mitigation strategies include monitoring cash balances, accelerating federal invoicing, and assessing the need to defer major purchases and non-essential travel. More information, including how specific federal agencies are affected, will be provided as the situation develops.   

Interns will gain valuable experience working with local government, community, and non-profit leaders while receiving a summer living stipend of $8,000* for the 12-week internship. *The summer living stipend is paid bi-weekly at a rate of $16.66 an hour and is taxed as income.

Interns selected for positions are required to live within the community they serve and work in person at the work site indicated on the individual job description. PSI interns will be responsible for the cost of housing/food/transportation. All interns must have reliable transportation to get to their positions daily.

With a presence across the Southeast United States, the talent and diversity from these cohorts have demonstrated major feats. In just a few years, the PSI has evolved from a modest initiative to an unparalleled platform for innovation. The 2023 PSI cohort of 63 interns stands as its largest, most competitive, and most diverse group, to date.

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is addressing this challenge by developing a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform that standardizes the development and testing of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML models to enhance the speed and efficiency with which these models are utilized during real-time decision-making situations.   

“It’s been difficult for organizations to transition these models from a research environment and turn them into fully-functional products that can be used in real-time,” said Austin Ruth, a GTRI research engineer who is leading this project. “Our goal is to bring AI/ML to the tactical edge where it could be used during active threat situations to heighten the survivability of our warfighters.” 

Rather than treating ML development in isolation, GTRI’s MLOps platform would bridge the gap between data scientists and field operations so that organizations can oversee the entire lifecycle of ML projects from development to deployment at the tactical edge. 

The tactical edge refers to the immediate operational space where decisions are made and actions take place. Bringing AI and ML capabilities closer to the point of action would enhance the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making processes and contribute to more agile and adaptive responses to threats. 

“We want to develop a system where fighter jets or warships don’t have to do any data transfers but could train and label the data right where they are and have the AI/ML models improve in real-time as they’re actively going up against threats,” said Ruth.   

For example, a model could monitor a plane’s altitude and speed, immediately spot potential wing drag issues and alert the pilot about it. In an electronic warfare (EW) situation when facing enemy aircraft or missiles, the models could process vast amounts of incoming data to more quickly identify threats and recommend effective countermeasures in real time. 

AI/ML models need to be trained and tested to ensure their effectiveness in adapting to new, unseen data. However, without having a standardized process in place, training and testing is done in a fragmented manner, which poses several risks, such as overfitting, where the model performs well on the training data but fails to generalize unseen data and makes inaccurate predictions or decisions in real-world situations, security vulnerabilities where bad actors exploit weaknesses in the models, and a general lack of robustness and inefficient resource utilization.

“Throughout this project, we noticed that training and testing are often done in a piecemeal fashion and thus aren’t repeatable,” said Jovan Munroe, a GTRI senior research engineer who is also leading this project. “Our MLOps platform makes the training and testing process more consistent and well-defined so that these models are better equipped to identify and address unknown variables in the battle space.” 

This project has been supported by GTRI’s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) Program, winning an IRAD of the Year award in fiscal year 2023. In fiscal year 2024, the project received funding from a U.S. government sponsor. 

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photos: Sean McNeil 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $940 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

A new $2,000,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will support the research. 

The research builds on previous collaboration between Rosa Arriaga, an associate professor in the College of Computing and Andrew Sherrill, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University, who worked together on a computational system for PTSD therapy. 

Arriaga and Christopher Wiese, an assistant professor in the School of Psychology will lead the Georgia Tech team, Saeed Abdullah, an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology will lead the Penn State team, and Sherrill will serve as overall project lead and Emory team lead.

The grant, for “Understanding the Ethics, Development, Design, and Integration of Interactive Artificial Intelligence Teammates in Future Mental Health Work” will allocate $801,660 of support to the Georgia Tech team, supporting four years of research.

“The initial three years of our project are dedicated to understanding and defining what functionalities and characteristics make an AI system a 'teammate' rather than just a tool,” Wiese says. “This involves extensive research and interaction with mental health professionals to identify their specific needs and challenges. We aim to understand the nuances of their work, their decision-making processes, and the areas where AI can provide meaningful support.In the final year, we plan to implement a trial run of this AI teammate philosophy with mental health professionals.”

While the project focuses on mental health workers, the impacts of the project range far beyond. “AI is going to fundamentally change the nature of work and workers,” Arriaga says. “And, as such, there’s a significant need for research to develop best practices for integrating worker, work, and future technology.”

The team underscores that sectors like business, education, and customer service could easily apply this research. The ethics protocol the team will develop will also provide a critical framework for best practices. The team also hopes that their findings could inform policymakers and stakeholders making key decisions regarding AI. 

“The knowledge and strategies we develop have the potential to revolutionize how AI is integrated into the broader workforce,” Wiese adds. “We are not just exploring the intersection of human and synthetic intelligence in the mental health profession; we are laying the groundwork for a future where AI and humans collaborate effectively across all areas of work.”

Collaborative project

The project aims to develop an AI coworker called TEAMMAIT (short for “the Trustworthy, Explainable, and Adaptive Monitoring Machine for AI Team”). Rather than functioning as a tool, as many AI’s currently do, TEAMMAIT will act more as a human teammate would,  providing constructive feedback and helping mental healthcare workers develop and learn new skills.

“Unlike conventional AI tools that function as mere utilities, an AI teammate is designed to work collaboratively with humans, adapting to their needs and augmenting their capabilities,” Wiese explains. “Our approach is distinctively human-centric, prioritizing the needs and perspectives of mental health professionals… it’s important to recognize that this is a complex domain and interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to create the most optimal outcomes when it comes to integrating AI into our lives.”

With both technical and human health aspects to the research, the project will leverage an interdisciplinary team of experts spanning clinical psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, human-computer interaction, and information science.

“We need to work closely together to make sure that the system, TEAMMAIT, is useful and usable,” adds Arriaga. “Chris (Wiese) and I are looking at two types of challenges: those associated with the organization, as Chris is an industrial organizational psychology expert — and those associated with the interface, as I am a computer scientist that specializes in human computer interaction.”

Long-term timeline

The project’s long-term timeline reflects the unique challenges that it faces.

“A key challenge is in the development and design of the AI tools themselves,” Wiese says. “They need to be user-friendly, adaptable, and efficient, enhancing the capabilities of mental health workers without adding undue complexity or stress. This involves continuous iteration and feedback from end-users to refine the AI tools, ensuring they meet the real-world needs of mental health professionals.”

The team plans to deploy TEAMMAIT in diverse settings in the fourth year of development, and incorporate data from these early users to create development guidelines for Worker-AI teammates in mental health work, and to create ethical guidelines for developing and using this type of system.

“This will be a crucial phase where we test the efficacy and integration of the AI in real-world scenarios,” Wiese says. “We will assess not just the functional aspects of the AI, such as how well it performs specific tasks, but also how it impacts the work environment, the well-being of the mental health workers, and ultimately, the quality of care provided to patients.”

Assessing the psychological impacts on workers, including how TEAMMAIT impacts their day-to-day work will be crucial in ensuring TEAMMAIT has a positive impact on healthcare worker’s skills and wellbeing.

“We’re interested in understanding how mental health clinicians interact with TEAMMAIT and the subsequent impact on their work,” Wiese adds. “How long does it take for clinicians to become comfortable and proficient with TEAMMAIT? How does their engagement with TEAMMAIT change over the year? Do they feel like they are more effective when using TEAMMAIT? We’re really excited to begin answering these questions.

A recent executive order issued by President Joe Biden seeks to establish "new standards for AI safety and security" while addressing consumer privacy concerns and promoting innovation. Georgia Tech experts have examined the key elements of the order and offer their thoughts on its scope and what comes next.  

A Precautionary Tale 

The order calls for the development of standards, tools, and tests to ensure the safe use of AI. From voice scams and phishing campaigns to larger-scale threats, the technology’s potential dangers have been widely documented. But Margaret Kosal, associate professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, says that additional context is often needed to dispel hysteria. 

"No one is going to be hooking up AI to launch nuclear weapons, but AI capabilities may enable targeting, or enable the command and control and the decision-making time to be compressed,” she said.  
 
The order will create an AI Safety and Security Board tasked with addressing critical threats. Companies developing foundation models that "pose a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety” will be required to notify the federal government when training the model and required to share the results of all red-team safety tests — a simulated cyberattack to test a system's defenses.  

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a CNBC report details a 1,267% rise in phishing emails. Srijan Kumar, assistant professor in the College of Computing, attributes the increase to the technology's availability and an inability to rein in "bad actors."  

He says these scams will only continue to get more sophisticated and personalized. They “can be created by knowing what you might be willing to fall prey to versus what I might fall prey to,” said Kumar, whose systems have influenced misinformation detection on sites like X (formerly Twitter) and Wikipedia. “AI is not going to autonomously do all of those bad things, but this order can ensure there are consequences for people who misuse it.”  

A Delicate Balance 

Building an AI platform requires large amounts of data regardless of its intended application. Two primary goals of the executive order are protecting privacy and advancing equity.  

To protect personal data, the order tasks Congress with evaluating how agencies collect and use commercially available information and address algorithmic discrimination.  

Acknowledging that everyone should be allowed to have their voice represented in the outputs of AI data sets, Deven Desai, associate professor in the Scheller College of Business, noted, "There are people who don't want to be part of data sets, which is their right, but this means their voices won't be reflected in the outputs.”   

The order also includes sections to address intellectual property concerns among inventors and creators, though legal challenges will likely set new precedents in the years ahead.  

When that time comes, Kosal says that defining “theft” in the context of AI becomes the true challenge and that, ultimately, money will play a significant role. "If you spit out a Harry Potter book and read it yourself, nobody will care. It's when you start selling it to make money, and you don't share proceeds with the original people, then it becomes an issue," she said.   

What Does AI-Generated Mean? 

The order instructs the Department of Commerce to develop guidelines for content authentication and watermarking to label AI-generated content. Desai questions what it means for something to be truly created by AI.  

An important distinction lies between using AI to assist a writer in organizing their thoughts and using the technology to generate content. He likens the trend to the music industry in the 1980s.  

"Synthesizers really changed people's ability to generate music and, for a while, people thought that was horrible. They can just program the music. They're not. I am still the human responsible for that music, or that article in this case, so what is the point of the label?" he asks. 

As AI assistance becomes commonplace in content creation, trusting the source of information is increasingly important. Recently, articles published on Sports Illustrated's website featured AI-generated content provided by a third-party company that had used a machine to write the content and create fake bylines. Sports Illustrated, which may not have known of the problem, ran the material without disclosure to readers. CEO Ross Levinsohn was ousted shortly after the story broke.  

“Perhaps if the third party had disclosed its use of AI software, SI would have been able to assess how much AI was used and then chosen not to run the material, or to run it with a disclaimer that AI helped write the material,” Desai said. "Of course, even if they label the content as AI-generated, a reader still won't know exactly how much of the content came from AI or a human.”