School shootings occur almost weekly in the U.S., with effects rippling beyond the school district where a shooting happened. New research from Georgia Tech shows that spending at local businesses across an affected community declines for at least six months. 

Following school shootings, community members are 2% less likely to shop at area grocery stores. Convenience shops and liquor stores lose 3% of their business during this period. Restaurant and bar patronage drops even further — to 8%. 

Cumulatively, a local economy can lose $5.4 million over six months. 

“We set out to explore whether school shootings would have a direct causal impact on community economic activity,” said Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, Sharon A. and David B. Pearce Professor in the Scheller College of Business. “It may seem like a 2% loss is small, but that can add up to a pretty sizable revenue impact for a retailer with small margins.” 

The Data

The three-year study combined statistical data and experimental interviews. The researchers started by examining NielsenIQ data, which tracks what shoppers buy at stores by county. Their NielsenIQ sample included 63 fatal school shootings between 2012 and 2019. Next, the researchers combined this with a Center for Homeland Defense and Security dataset of school shootings. They also examined a study of the nutritional value of products people bought at grocery stores in areas with school shootings. 

The researchers hypothesized that people buy unhealthier foods to cope with negative emotions. Instead, their analysis showed people don’t buy comfort food after school shootings — because they generally don’t shop at all.

Pattabhiramaiah and his collaborators compared these datasets with those of neighboring counties that did not experience a school shooting. They followed purchasing patterns for a year, from six months before the event through six months after. The study’s statistical controls helped rule out other reasons people might shop less, such as weather events or holidays.

The Emotional Impact

It was important to the researchers to show that people not only spend less, but also why. So, the team conducted experimental studies in which participants read a hypothetical shooting scenario and were asked to share their emotional response to it and discuss how such an event might affect their shopping. 

This experimental data backed up the numbers. People are more likely to consolidate their shopping trips and dine out less. This often comes down to anxiety about being in public. 

“We show the main driver isn’t fear, or even sadness,” Pattabhiramaiah said. “If that were the case, we would see evidence of people indulging in comfort foods, as past studies have shown. Rather, the main feeling is anxiety.” 

One thing is clear from Pattabhiramaiah’s research. Policymakers need to think about how to help their communities recover when school shootings occur. Thriving local businesses are a sign of a community’s economic health — and also its emotional well-being. 

More than 1,000 cosplayers, gamers, and nerds took over Macon, Georgia’s, annual Cherry Blossom Festival in late March. They were there for the fourth year of the CBF Isekai convention, which celebrates all things anime, cosplay, and esports, but Isekai offers more than a weekend of fun. Participants could enter gaming competitions that might help them land a future cybersecurity or IT job. 

CBF Isekai is sponsored by SON Technologies — short for Swagged Out Nerds — a Macon esports company focused on workforce development. SON believes the best gamers can also become promising IT professionals. 

A startup founded by two Air Force veterans, SON is already making a name for itself in the esports world and has support from Georgia Tech. It is one of the Accelerate companies in the startup portfolio of Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), one of the oldest and most successful university-affiliated incubators in the United States.

Swagged Out Start

SON founders Jason Clarke and John Robinson first met when they both worked in cybersecurity in the Air Force. As they transitioned to civilian IT careers, they realized a perhaps unlikely source sparked their IT expertise — video games. In 2019, the two partnered to create an esports competition team for veterans, but they knew the company’s mission could be bigger.

“When people think of gamers, you think of a 40-year-old person in their mom’s basement,” Clarke said. “But we wanted to change the perception. Gamers have employable skills that can be used for substantial IT work.”

For example, when a person plays a multiplayer game like Fortnite, they can assume a leadership role, delivering directives to their teams. What may look like mere play actually entails planning, organizing, and executing. Even a simple task like troubleshooting a household wi-fi network is a skill that can be expanded on with the right training.

From Player to Professional

SON wants both kid and adult gamers to know they have options. They regularly host gaming tournaments and conventions to find people who would be right for their programs and cultivate community. Through a partnership with digital education company Aperion Global Institute and cybersecurity certification organization EC-Council, Clarke and Robinson administer a high school-level curriculum highlighting the synergies between IT and gaming. 

Adults also have opportunities. Past SON tournament competitors can take an eight-week program, Sticks to Clicks, to turn their gaming skills into IT proficiency. These initiatives come at a crucial time: Between now and 2030, according to O*NET OnLine, 51,000 cybersecurity jobs in the state of Georgia are expected to be vacant. 

Game-Changing Career Paths

The programs’ benefits are already tangible. One adult participant in Sticks to Clicks had an annual income of less than $10,000 before joining the program. In the first seven weeks, he earned a certification in CompTIA Security+. In the eighth and final week, he interviewed with some of SON’s workforce partners. He was ultimately hired to install network infrastructure for $46,000 a year. 

High school students have had similar success. In the 2025-26 school year alone, 150 students went through the SON program and received stackable credentials that can prepare them for IT careers even if they don’t go to college. 

All of this momentum got ATDC’s attention, and SON Tech was accepted as a portfolio company in Fall 2024. Both Georgia AIM and the Air Force went to Macon for the 2025 Isekai convention and met potential employees firsthand. They saw that SON was just getting started.

The ATDC Connection

SON joined ATDC in 2024 under the AI and Manufacturing vertical sponsored by Georgia AIM, a statewide coalition to advance manufacturing using AI. SON is one of ATDC’s first middle Georgia companies, but the entire state will experience benefits. Through ATDC, SON can use Georgia Tech resources, meet experts in grant applications and corporate networking, and plug into the startup ecosystem in Atlanta. The three-to-five-year program helps startups scale up. 

“The truth is when you’re starting a company, the first few years are the worst of your life,” said Nwanyinma Dike, who serves as the Georgia AIM and ATDC liaison. In this role, she advises SON. “Connecting into a community of folks rooting for you, listening to you, helping you breathe through whatever challenges occur is one of the most valuable resources ATDC has to offer.”

The size of the March Isekai event was only possible thanks to ATDC’s support. They helped SON fundraise by finding the right sponsors.

“We went from starting this convention in a pizza shop to now packing an entire plaza downtown,” Clarke said. “To see the growth is amazing. We've received a lot of industry backing because of the creative ways we're helping workforce development.”

Dike wants to ensure the event wasn’t a one-off and that SON can keep up the momentum. SON is already planning an even bigger 2026 Isekai convention, with exciting new partners in the pipeline who want to share in the energy of this creative workforce development solution and movement.

SON also announced a partnership with gaming company Blaze Fire Games and the Houston County School District. The school district can access Blaze Fire Games’ Recruit, Reclaim, and Retain career pathway program, which is designed to help close the technology industry’s vast talent gap.

“The partnership is exciting because it represents more than creating and launching an esports club,” said Isiah Reese, CEO and co-founder of Blaze Fire Games. “This agreement allows our company to continue creating opportunities and develop relevant, sustainable career-readiness skills required to compete in today’s environment.”

Sherri Johnson, the CEO and principal of Houston County College and Career Academy, agrees. "The partnership is a real game-changer for our students. These unique, forward-thinking, 21st-century digital economy workforce educational courses will empower our instructors to reimagine and enhance classroom learning within our cybersecurity and gaming career pathway programs.”

SON is ready to rise to whatever industry or challenge needs their model next. What they have been able to do for the IT and cybersecurity fields could eventually be applied to the Federal Aviation Administration or even healthcare technician jobs. There’s an entirely new way to develop the tech world field, and it may not start in a classroom but with a controller.

As more satellites launch into space, the satellite industry has sounded the alarm about the danger of collisions in low Earth orbit (LEO).  What is less understood is what might happen as more missions head to a more targeted destination: the moon.

According to The Planetary Society,  more than 30 missions are slated to launch to the moon between 2024 and 2030, backed by the U.S., China, Japan, India, and various private corporations. That compares to over 40 missions to the moon between 1959 and 1979 and a scant three missions between 1980 and 2000.

A multidisciplinary team at Georgia Tech has found that while collision probabilities in orbits around the moon are very low compared to Earth orbit, spacecraft in lunar orbit will likely need to conduct multiple costly collision avoidance maneuvers each year. The Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets published the Georgia Tech collision-avoidance study in March.

“The number of close approaches in lunar orbit is higher than some might expect, given that there are only tens of satellites, rather than the thousands in low Earth orbit,” says paper co-author Mariel Borowitz, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Borowitz and other researchers attribute these risky approaches in part to spacecraft often choosing a limited number of favorable orbits and the difficulty of monitoring the exact location of spacecraft that are more than 200,000 miles away.

“There is significant uncertainty about the exact location of objects around the moon. This, combined with the high cost associated with lunar missions, means that operators often undertake maneuvers even when the probability is very low — up to one in 10 million,” Borowitz explains. 

The Georgia Tech research is the first published study showing short- and long-term collision risks in cislunar orbits. Using a series of Monte Carlo simulations, the researchers modeled the probability of various outcomes in a process that cannot be easily predicted because of random variables. 

“Our analysis suggests that satellite operators must perform up to four maneuvers annually for each satellite for a fleet of 50 satellites in low lunar orbit (LLO),” said one of the study’s authors, Brian Gunter, associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. 

He noted that with only 10 satellites in LLO, a satellite might still need a yearly maneuver. This is supported by what current cislunar operators have reported. 

Favored Orbits

Most close encounters are expected to occur near the moon’s equator, an intersection point between the orbit planes of commonly used “frozen” and low lunar orbits, which are preferred by many operators. Other possible regions of congestion can occur at the Lagrangian points, or regions where the gravitational forces of Earth and the moon balance out. Stable orbits in these regions have names such as Halo and Lyapunov orbits. 

“Lagrangian points are an interesting place to put a satellite because it can maintain its orbit for long periods with very little maneuvering and thrusting. Frozen orbits, too. Anywhere outside these special areas, you have to spend a lot of fuel to maintain an orbit,” he said.

Gunter and other researchers worry that if operators aren’t coordinated about how they plan lunar missions, opportunities for collision will increase in these popular orbits.

“The close approaches were much more common than I would have intuitively anticipated,” says lead study author Stef Crum.

The 2024 graduate of Georgia Tech’s aerospace engineering doctoral program notes that, considering the small number of satellites in lunar orbit, the need for multiple maneuvers was “really surprising.”

Crum, who is also co-founder of Reditus Space, a startup he founded in 2024 to provide reusable orbital re-entry services, adds that the cislunar environment is so challenging because “it’s incredibly vast.”

His research also examines ways to improve object monitoring in cislunar space. Maintaining continuous custody of these objects is difficult because a target’s position must be monitored over the entire duration of its trajectory. 

“That wasn’t feasible for translunar orbits, given the vast volume of cislunar orbit, which stretches multiple millions of kilometers in three dimensions,” he says.

By estimating a satellite’s orbit using observed data and constraining the presumed location and direction of the satellite, rather than continuous tracking (a process known as continuous custody), Crum greatly simplified the process. 

“You no longer need thousands of satellites or a set of enormous satellites to cover all potential trajectories,” he explains. “Instead, one or a few satellites are required, and operators can lose custody for a time as long as the connection is reacquired later.”

Since the team started their study, there has been a lot of interest in the moon and cislunar activity — both NASA and China’s National Space Administration are planning to send humans to the moon. In the last two years, India, Japan, the U.S., China, Russia, and four private companies have attempted missions to the moon. 

Why the Moon

Spacefaring nations’ intense interest in exploring the lunar surface comes as no surprise given that the moon offers a variety of resources, including solar power, water, oxygen, and metals like iron, titanium, and uranium. It also contains Helium-3, a potential fuel for nuclear fusion, and rare earth metals vital for modern technology. With the recent discovery of water ice, it could be a plentiful source for rocket fuel that can be created from liquifying oxygen and hydrogen needed to launch deep space missions to destinations like Mars. In February, Georgia Tech announced that researchers have developed new algorithms to help Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander find water ice on the moon.

Commercial space companies like Axiom Space and Redwire Space, as well as space agencies, are actively building lunar infrastructure, from satellite constellations to orbital platforms to support communication, navigation, scientific research, and eventually space tourism. 

A key project involves the Lunar Gateway, a joint venture of NASA and international space agencies like ESA, JAXA, and CSA, as well as commercial partners. Humanity’s first space station around the moon will serve as a central hub for human exploration of the moon and is considered a stepping stone for future deep space missions.

Getting Ahead of a Gold Rush to the Moon

All this activity underscores the urgency to get out in front of potential crowding issues — something that hasn’t occurred in LEO, where near-miss collisions, or conjunctions, are frequent. LEO, which is 100 to 1,200 miles above the Earth’s surface, is host to more than 14,000  satellites and 120 million pieces of debris from launches, collisions, and wear and tear, reports Reuters.

“Using the near-Earth environment as an example, the space object population has gone from approximately 6,000 active satellites in the early 2020s to an anticipated 60,000 satellites in the coming decade if the projected number of large satellite constellations currently in the works gets deployed. That poses many challenges in terms of how we can manage that sustainably,” observed Gunter. “If something similar happens in the lunar environment, say if Artemis (NASA’s program to establish the first long-term presence on the moon) is successful and a lunar base is established, and there is discovery of volatiles or water deposits, it could initiate a kind of gold rush effect that might accelerate the number of actors in cislunar space.”

For this reason, Borowitz argues for the need to begin working on coordination, either in the planning of the orbits for future missions or by sharing information about the location of objects operating in lunar orbit. She pointed out that spacecraft outfitted for moon missions are expensive, making a collision highly costly. Also, debris from such a scenario would spread in an unpredictable way, which could be problematic for other objects.

Gunter agreed, noting, “If we’re not careful, we could be putting a lot of things in this same path. We must ensure we build out the cislunar orbital environment in a smart way, where we’re not intentionally putting spacecraft in the same orbital spaces. If we do that, everyone should be able to get what they want and not be in each other’s way.”

Borowitz says some coordination efforts are underway with the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and the creation of an action team on lunar activities; however, international diplomacy is a time-consuming process, and it can be a challenge to keep pace with advancements in technology.

She contends that the Georgia Tech study could provide baseline data that “could be helpful for international coordination efforts, helping to ensure that countries better understand potential future risks.”

Gunter and Borowitz say that follow-on research for the team could involve looking into the Lunar Gateway orbit and other special orbits to see how crowded that space will likely get, and then do an end-to-end simulation of these orbits to determine the most effective way to build them out to avoid collision risks. Ultimately, they intend to develop guidelines to help ensure that future space actors headed to the moon can operate safely.

Five teams of researchers from Georgia Tech and Emory University were selected to accelerate their journey from lab to market. Projects include improved cancer detection and therapies, a precise surgical tool and better MRI imaging. Teams will receive funding and commercialization support during the year. Read more about each project here.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)’s LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration has detected an extremely unusual binary black hole merger — a phenomenon that occurs when two black holes are pulled into each other's orbit and combine. Announced yesterday in a California Institute of Technology press release, the binary black hole merger, GW231123, is the largest ever detected with gravitational waves.

Before merging, both black holes were spinning exceptionally fast, and their masses fell into a range that should be very rare — or impossible. 

“Most models don't predict black holes this big can be made by supernovas, and our data indicates that they were spinning at a rate close to the limit of what’s theoretically possible,” says Margaret Millhouse, a research scientist in the School of Physics who played a key role in the research. “Where could they have come from? It raises interesting questions.”

A binary black hole merger absorbs characteristics from both of the contributors, she adds. “As a result, this is not only the most massive binary black hole ever seen but also the fastest-spinning binary black hole confidently detected with gravitational waves.”

“GW231123 is a record-breaking event,” says School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, who has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2002. “LIGO has been observing the cosmos for 10 years now. This discovery underscores that there is still so much that this instrument can help us learn.”

A cosmic view

The findings challenge current theories on how smaller black holes form, says School of Physics Assistant Professor and LIGO collaborator Surabhi Sachdev. Smaller black holes are the result of supernovae: dying and collapsing stars. During that collapse, explosions can tear apart or eject part of the star’s mass — limiting the size of the black hole that forms.

“Black holes from supernovae can weigh up to about 60 times the mass of our Sun,” she says. “The black holes in this merger were likely the mass of hundreds of suns.”

Because of its size, GW231123 also allowed the team to study the merger in unprecedented detail. “LIGO has observed scores of black hole mergers,” says Cadonati. “Of these, GW231123 has provided us with the clearest view of the ‘grand finale’ of a merger thus far. This adds a new clue to solve the puzzle that are black holes, including their origins and properties.”

“While we saw that our expectations matched the data, the extreme nature of this event pushed our models to their limits,” Millhouse adds. “A massive, highly spinning system like this will be of interest to researchers who study how binary black holes form.”

Decoding a split-second signal

Millhouse and School of Physics Postdoctoral Fellow Prathamesh Joshi used Einstein’s equations for general relativity to confirm LIGO’s detections.

To find black holes, LIGO measures distortions in spacetime — ripples that are created when two black holes collide. These patterns in gravitational waves can be used to find the signature signal of black hole collisions. 

“In this case, the signal lasted for just one-tenth of a second, but it was very clear,” says Joshi. "Previously, we designed a special study to detect these interesting signals, which accounted for all the unusual properties of such massive systems — and it paid off!”

“To ensure it wasn’t noise, the Georgia Tech team first reconstructed the signal in a model-agnostic way,” Millhouse adds. “We then compared those reconstructions to a model that uses Einstein's equations of general relativity, and both reconstructions looked very similar, which helped confirm that this highly unusual phenomenon was a genuine detection.”

Sachdev says that seeing the signal at both LIGO Observatories — placed in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana — was also critical. “These short signals are very hard to detect, and this signal is so unlike any of the other binary black holes that we've seen before,” she says. “Without both detectors, we would have missed it.”

A decade of discovery

While the team has yet to determine how the original black holes formed, one theory is that they may have resulted from mergers themselves. “This could have been a chain of mergers,” Sachdev explains. “This tells us that they could have existed in a very dense environment like a nuclear star cluster or an active galactic nucleus.” Their spins provide another clue as spinning is a characteristic usually seen in black holes resulting from a merge.

The team adds that GW231123 could provide clues on how larger black holes are formed — including the mysterious supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies.

“Gravitational wave science is almost a decade old, and we're still making fundamental discoveries,” says Millhouse. “It’s exciting that LIGO is continuing to detect new phenomena,  and this is at the edge of what we've seen thus far. There's still so much we can learn.”

The team expects to update their catalogue of black holes in August 2025, which will provide another window into how this exceptionally heavy black hole might fit into the universe, and what we can continue to learn from it.

Funding: The LIGO Laboratory is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated jointly by Caltech and MIT.

Radar systems using active electronically scanned array (AESA) technology are playing increasingly critical roles today, protecting warfighters and civilians alike as part of air and missile defense systems. These systems are also critical tools on modern test and training ranges, allowing aircrews to train against accurate simulations of the real-world threats they may face. 
 

To accelerate modernization of these systems, researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a novel system known as XPAT (X-band polarization-diverse AESA testbed). The system was developed for operation in airborne and ground-based applications that must be reconfigurable to meet a variety of mission requirements.
 

Now being tested in GTRI antenna ranges, XPAT includes advances such as state-of-the-art transmit-receive modules and patent-pending cold plates that are optimized to reduce thermal variances between electronic components. XPAT is designed to serve as a building block for future phased array radars in a variety of sizes and shapes, while allowing ease of assembly and maintenance using specialized interfaces for power, control, cooling, and radio frequency connections.

Read more in the GTRI newsroom