To request a media interview, please reach out to experts using the faculty directories for each of our six schools, or contact Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences communications director. A list of faculty experts is also available to journalists upon request.
Mind Uploading to Computer: Billionaires Dream of Immortality
Imagine your memories, way of thinking, and who you are being saved into a computer system. Not as a backup, but as a fully conscious version of yourself. Without a body, but with a mind. Sounds like science fiction? That’s exactly what mind uploading to a computer is. It’s an attempt to create a digital existence that can last forever.
In a virtual world where physics operates on different principles, a digital consciousness could eat virtual food, fly, travel to planets, or pass through walls.
Limitations? Only those imposed by technology and the current state of knowledge. Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Psychology does not rule out this possibility.
“Theoretically, mind uploading is possible. However, we are currently very far from this goal,” he writes in The Conversation.
Holistic News
Ask A Met: How Can I Become A Meteorologist?
Georgia Tech alum Miriam Guthrie (EAS 2025) answers a reader question about her experiences as a meteorologist intern at The Weather Channel and shares advice on how to prepare for a career in meteorology. Here is an excerpt of her response:
“A passion for weather is important [and] I would suggest really focusing on your math and science classes to prepare for the right school. When you're taking those hard math classes and you feel like you want to give up, remembering why you're passionate about this is really gonna help.
“I decided to go to Georgia Tech because it's a really good school for math and science, and I knew that that was something that I wanted to pursue.
“My time at the Weather Channel so far has been awesome. I love teaching people about the weather, and it's been exciting the past few days with the first hurricane of the year, Hurricane Erick, just with the chaos of it all. It's a fun job, but it is a chaotic kind of fun.”
The Weather Channel
Perseverance rover may hold secrets to newly discovered Mars volcano
A volcano seems to have been identified near the rim of Jezero crater on Mars, which is being explored by NASA’s Perseverance rover. The rover has been collecting samples that were intended to be returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return mission in the 2030s.
Some of the material in the samples was thought to have been volcanic, including signs of lava flows. Now, James Wray, professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and his colleagues have found a possible source – a dormant volcano on the south-eastern rim of Jezero named Jezero Mons.
High-resolution imagery from Mars orbiters have revealed fine-grained material on the mountain, consistent with ash from a volcano. The size and shape of Jezero Mons – 21 kilometres wide and two kilometres tall – also matches similar volcanoes on Earth.
“An igneous volcano interpretation seems most consistent with the observations,” says Wray, one fuelled by magma from below the surface. “It’s the strongest case we can make without actually walking across it.”
By counting craters near the volcano, Wray and his team estimate that Jezero Mons may have last erupted as recently as 1 billion years ago, possibly flinging ash, lava and rocks into Jezero crater, even as far as Perseverance’s landing site.
Similar stories appeared at 11 Alive, Science Alert, Earth Sky, ZME Science, and Gizmodo.
New Scientist
Large yeast clusters generate natural circulatory flows through metabolic activity to bypass diffusion limits
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and India's National Center for Biological Sciences have found that yeast clusters, when grown beyond a certain size, spontaneously generate fluid flows powerful enough to ferry nutrients deep into their interior.
In the study, "Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast," published in Science Advances, the research team — which included Georgia Tech Ph.D. scholar Emma Bingham, Research Scientist G. Ozan Bozdag, Associate Professor William C. Ratcliff, and Associate Professor Peter Yunker — used experimental evolution to determine whether non-genetic physical processes can enable nutrient transport in multicellular yeast lacking evolved transport adaptations.
A similar story also appeared at The Hindu.
Phys.org
The ocean is changing colors, researchers say. Here's what it means.
Warming waters are causing the colors of the ocean to change — a trend that could impact humans if it were to continue, according to new research.
Satellite data shows that ocean waters are getting greener at the poles and bluer toward the equator, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science by a research team that included Haipeng Zhao, postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), and Susan Lozier, College of Sciences Dean, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, and EAS professor.
The change in hue is being caused by shifting concentrations of a green pigment called chlorophyll, which is produced by phytoplankton
The presence of chlorophyll in open ocean is a proxy for concentrations of phytoplankton biomass. The colors indicate how chlorophyll concentration is changing at specific latitudes, in which the subtropics are generally losing chlorophyll, and the polar regions — the high-latitude regions — are greening, the researchers said.
Similar stories appeared at San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, Oceanographic Magazine, Earth.com, and Good Morning America.
ABC News