When you take a seat in the 2013 Ford Fusion sitting in Srinivas Peeta’s new lab, you enter a virtual world where researchers can throw anything at you: snow and ice, detours, traffic snarls. All you have to do is drive — and in the process, help shape the future of transportation.

The first cities where drones could ferry people to and fro are the nation’s largest and most-congested — places like Los Angeles. But a new research center at Georgia Tech aims to answer the key questions about what’s called urban and regional air mobility, and turn Atlanta into a test bed for the emerging technology along the way.

Even with more ice melted for longer periods of the year, freight companies still would be hesitant to use a shorter shipping route through the Arctic Ocean. That assessment of decision-makers’ attitudes and the potential use of what’s become known as the Northern Sea Route has won the 2018 Editor’s Choice Award from the journal Maritime Economics & Logistics.

The Federal Highway Administration has awarded selective Eisenhower Transportation Fellowships to three School of Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate students this year, supporting their work to improve travel forecasting models, rural transit services, and road safety.