Karl Lang, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, joined FOX Weather to discuss what is driving the Nepal disaster, the risks posed by glacial lake outburst floods, and the long-term challenges communities face.

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Instructors say open-ended student comments are the most valuable kind of course feedback. But reading through hundreds or thousands of such comments is time-consuming, so the insights often go unused. Georgia Tech researchers have developed an AI platform that sorts written feedback into themes, with student comments aggregated. Next steps include deploying the platform as a secure cloud service; connecting it to campus systems that manage teaching and learning; and running a pilot at Georgia Tech. • Georgia Tech lab of Gregory Mayer

Georgia Research Alliance Notes

A new study by Professor Francesca Storici’s research team along with collaborators at multiple institutions has uncovered an unexpected feature of human DNA linked to gene activity and the physical organization of DNA. The findings, published in Cell, could change how scientists think about DNA organization, transcription, and genome function.

Futurity

If you dropped the exact same pulse of food onto two identical bacteria, you'd expect the exact same response. That's not what happened. In a study published in PRX Life in May 2026, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Tech found that E. coli exposed to unstable, feast-and-famine conditions adapted to new food far faster than bacteria pulled from a stable environment, even when the immediate conditions in front of them were identical.

You may think that one cell has no place to keep things such as memories. Scientists, including Josiah Kratz, a postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics, observed tens of thousands of individual E. coli bacteria through a special microfluidic apparatus and found that the cause was ribosomes, the components of the cell responsible for building proteins and determining the growth rate.

The News International

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

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

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

Fox 5 Atlanta