Experts in the News

A new study from Georgia Tech astrophysicists Billy Quarles and Gongjie Li may have you seeing double — as in twin suns hovering over an alien exoplanet landscape. The researchers placed a (theoretical) duplicate of Earth inside so-called binary, or two-star, systems, and ran simulations on planetary axis tilts. The results indicate the planets would have tilts similar to Earth's, which bodes well for habitable climates that could potentially support alien life. There are a lot of multiple-star systems out there, so the study may boost the number of exoplanets that could harbor life. In addition to this CNET story, the study has also been covered in Daily Mail Online, King5 News in Seattle, and Express.co.uk. Li is an assistant professor in the School of Physics, while Quarles, the study's principal investigator, is a research scientist in Li's lab.

[I]f a promising Army project proves out, a future soldier might deploy a host of “shape-shifting” particles that form themselves into whatever they need to accomplish the mission. That would include a robotic swarm that could become its own bridge to cross a river before reforming into another shape for the next phase of the mission, one official said....Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University have taken a new approach to robot building, using “smarticles” that could lead to new ways for robots to move, according to an Army release. “People have been interested in making a certain kind of swarm robots that are composed of other robots,” said Dan Goldman, a physics professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. “These structures could be reconfigured on demand to meet specific needs by tweaking their geometry.”

Researchers are investigating a different kind of retinal prosthesis made from semiconductive polymers, a class of carbon-based plastics that can conduct electricity in much the same way that silicon microchips do.These polymers are best known for their use in some types of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, the richly colored screens found in millions of smartphones. But the materials also show promise for a new generation of cheap, flexible, lightweight solar cells. And they show even more promise as soft, flexible bioelectronic interfaces to living tissue — “one of the emerging and very exciting applications of organic semiconductors,” says Carlos Silva, a physicist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. These applications include drug delivery and biosensors.

The benefits of smart cities and an increasingly connected world are much-discussed. But the convenience, energy efficiency, automation, and personalized experience of internet-connected homes, cars, offices, and cities also invites security threats that are just beginning to be understood, and many that have yet to be discovered....“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” says Peter Yunker, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics and co-lead on the study.

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a measurement that should help robot-makers improve how much control their bots have over their movement. Their findings appear in the August issue of the journal Nature Communications. It works a bit like this: a cockroach has a highly attuned central nervous system coordinating its movement - as a Georgia Tech article about the research described it, "neurological signals guiding six impeccably evolved legs." A stick bug's legs function more independently, reacting to the environment as it moves. The work was carried out in the lab of Simon Sponberg. It was also featured in IEEE Spectrum.