Without knowing what you mean by "peripheral information", this seems kind of overblown. The only pattern I can discern is the ages-old fascination of geeks with loud noises, bright flashes, and bad smells. This was at Georgia Tech, after all. There's quite a market for those little booklets about home explosive- and fireworks-making you find in the back of comic books and other magazines targeted at adolescents. I'll bet I'm not the only one here who sent away for the explosive cookbooks and caused my parents' hair to go grey during my teenage years.

This seems to be a "terrorist act" only by virtue of a recent change to Georgia law triggered by 9/11 hysteria:

Under Georgia state law, a terroristic act is described as the release of a "hazardous substance," specifically for "the purpose of causing the evacuation of a building" with "reckless disregard of the risk of causing such terror."

In other words, the traditional college prank of a stink bomb in the ventilator ducts is now a terrorist act.

If that law had been in effect when I was that age, I'd have been defined as a terrorist. Of course, it's worth noting, too, that in my early 20s I went to work for a defense contractor that made high-tech explosive detonators, and finally got it out of my system. Perhaps it's in our best interests to be a little more understanding about this kind of thing--future weapons designers need to practice!

Based on the info at hand, this sounds to me more a matter of a changing definition than an emerging trend.