Biologists find diatom to reduce red tide's toxicity
August 20  It’s estimated that the red tide algae, Karenia brevis, costs approximately $20 million per bloom in economic damage off the coast of Florida alone. Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that a diatom can reduce the levels of the red tide’s toxicity to animals and that the same diatom can reduce its toxicity to other algae as well. If scientists can learn to use this process to reduce the toxicity of red tide, they could reduce the vast amount of economic damage done to the seafood and tourism industries. (full story... |  Julia Kubanek-SciTech profile-pg8)

Green, Greener, Greenest
New York Times - July 27 HIGHER education can’t resist a ranking: best college, best cafeteria, biggest endowment, biggest party school.. . .when the Princeton Review releases its annual guide to colleges this week, it will include a new metric: a “green rating,” . . .Green is good for the planet, but also for a college’s public image - 63 percent of college applicants surveyed said that a college’s commitment to the environment could affect their decision to go there. . .  the Princeton Review will give its top marks to — ta-da! — Arizona State, Bates, Binghamton University, the College of the Atlantic, Harvard, Emory, GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, Yale and the Universities of New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington.  (full story...)

Nanomagnets tackle cancer
Newswise - July 16 A new wave of therapies can exert a magnetic hold over disease — literally. The therapies employ powerful, roughly spherical magnets to help kill carefully targeted diseased cells and nothing else. What makes these magnets special is their size. Each is about a thousandth the diameter of a human hair . . . Kenneth Scarberry and his colleagues at the GEORGIA TECH in Atlanta describe an oxide version of the iron-cobalt recipe for their nanobeads. They gave their nanomagnets a “sugar coating” of polygalacturonic acid and then linked tiny proteinlike structures to the coating. The attached peptides serve as hooks to grab onto a receptor that’s only present on ovarian cancer cells.  ( story & video clip... | Ovarian Cancer Institute )

Recent awards & honors
We have a little catching up to do  here! Lots  of students, faculty and staff that received awards this summer or last spring. Congratulations to all!  (view the list... )