To request a media interview, please reach out to School of Physics experts using our faculty directory, or contact Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences communications director. A list of faculty experts and research areas across the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech is also available to journalists upon request.
Researchers at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology looked to the mudskipper, the amphibious fish that spends more than half of its adult life on land to study the evolution of blinking. The study, published in an April edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that blinking may be one of the overlooked and yet important traits that allowed for the successful transition to life on land. Simon Sponberg, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences, was one of the researchers for the study. (The study was also covered in the Los Angeles Times High School Insider.)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2023-06-10T00:00:00-04:00In this story about the puzzling behavior that goes on inside black holes, Quanta Magazine uses the 2017 first-ever image of the black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy captured by an Event Horizon Telescope research team. That team included EHT founding members Feryal Özel, professor and chair of the School of Physics, and Dimitrios Psaltis, a professor in the School. The story also includes the recent machine learning-enhanced version of the image.
Quanta Magazine 2023-06-06T00:00:00-04:00After a three-year hiatus, scientists in the U.S. have just turned on detectors capable of measuring gravitational waves — tiny ripples in space itself that travel through the universe. Unlike light waves, gravitational waves are nearly unimpeded by the galaxies, stars, gas, and dust that fill the universe. This means that by measuring gravitational waves, astrophysicists can peek directly into the heart of some of these most spectacular phenomena in the universe. Since 2020, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory — commonly known as LIGO— has been sitting dormant while it underwent some exciting upgrades. These improvements will significantly boost the sensitivity of LIGO and should allow the facility to observe more-distant objects that produce smaller ripples in spacetime. Faculty and students in the School of Physics and Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics were part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration when the observatory made the first direct observation of gravitational waves. Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and associate dean for Research in the College of Sciences, served as LIGO deputy spokesperson and was on its data analysis team.
Inverse 2023-05-28T00:00:00-04:00A team of mechanical engineering students and alumni at Georgia Tech began developing and testing ForageFeeder, a $400 machine partly inspired by deer feeders that can disperse gorillas’ their meals at random intervals and locations throughout the day. Much like modern humans, zoo animals frequently deal with obesity due to a lack of activity. Tools and techniques such as the ForageFeeder not only promote Zoo Atlanta gorillas’ movement, but better simulate their natural foraging world. David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and the School of Physics, was faculty advisor for this project. (Read more about the story here.)
Popular Science 2023-05-26T00:00:00-04:00A small but growing group of researchers is fascinated by an organ we often take for granted. We rarely think about how agile our own tongue needs to be to form words or avoid being bitten while helping us taste and swallow food. But that’s just the start of the tongue’s versatility across the animal kingdom. Without tongues, few if any terrestrial vertebrates could exist. The first of their ancestors to slither out of the water some 400 million years ago found a buffet stocked with new types of foods, but it took a tongue to sample them. The range of foods available to these pioneers broadened as tongues diversified into new, specialized forms — and ultimately took on functions beyond eating. This examination of how animal tongues shaped biological diversity includes research from David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Physics.
Science 2023-05-25T00:00:00-04:00NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Regina Barber and Emily Kwong, hosts of the Short Wave podcast, about the top science stories of the week, including the mysteries of multicellular organisms as researched by William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program in the School of Biological Sciences. Ratcliff and several colleagues, including research scientist Ozan Bozdag, used snowflake yeast to initiate the first long-term evolution experiment aimed at evolving new kinds of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors in the lab. Other College of Sciences researchers involved include Seyed Alireza Zamani Dahaj, computational biologist, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and the School of Physics; Thomas C. Day, Ph.D. candidate, School of Physics, and Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics. Anthony J. Burnetti, research scientist; Penelope Kahn, research technician; Dung T. Lac, research technician; Kai Tong, postdoctoral scholar; and Peter Conlin, postdoctoral scholar, are all from the School of Biological Sciences. (This segment was also run on Connecticut Public Radio and Georgia Public Broadcasting.)
National Public Radio 2023-05-18T00:00:00-04:00The Atlantic's Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer Ed Yong writes about the unique snowflake yeast experiment conducted by Georgia Tech researchers that shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors. The study, published recently in Nature, provided new insight into how "that change from micro to macro, from one cell to many, was one of the most pivotal evolutionary journeys in Earth’s history." William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program led the research team. Other researchers include Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, School of Biological Sciences; Seyed Alireza Zamani Dahaj, computational biologist, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and the School of Physics; Thomas C. Day, Ph.D. candidate, School of Physics, and Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics. Anthony J. Burnetti, research scientist; Penelope Kahn, research technician; Dung T. Lac, research technician; Kai Tong, postdoctoral scholar; and Peter Conlin, postdoctoral scholar, are all from the School of Biological Sciences. ((Atlantic subscription required; read more about the research here.)
The Atlantic 2023-05-12T00:00:00-04:00A research team from Georgia Tech is one of five chosen by NASA to collaborate on lunar science and lunar sample analysis research to support future exploration of the Moon as part of the agency’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI). SSERVI will support each of the new teams for five years at about $1.5 million per year, jointly funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. The Center for Lunar Environment and Volatile Exploration Research (CLEVER) is led by Thomas Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics, The team will characterize the lunar environment and volatile inventories required for near-term sustained human exploration of the Moon. Orlando is principal investigator for another lunar-related research team, Radiation Effects on Volatiles and Exploration of Asteroids and Lunar Surfaces (REVEALS), which is also a part of SSERVI. (Read more about this story here. This story was also covered at Newswise and SpaceRef.com)
NASA 2023-05-11T00:00:00-04:00Precisely how multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled ancestors remains poorly understood. The transition happened hundreds of millions of years ago, and early multicellular species are largely lost to extinction. To investigate how multicellular life evolves from scratch, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology decided to take evolution into their own hands. Led by William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, a team of researchers has initiated the first long-term evolution experiment aimed at evolving new kinds of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors in the lab. In this case, the cells are snowflake yeast, and they grew so large they could be seen with the naked eye. Other researchers include Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, School of Biological Sciences; Seyed Alireza Zamani Dahaj, computational biologist, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and the School of Physics; Thomas C. Day, Ph.D. candidate, School of Physics, and Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics. Anthony J. Burnetti, research scientist; Penelope Kahn, research technician; Dung T. Lac, research technician; Kai Tong, postdoctoral scholar; and Peter Conlin, postdoctoral scholar, are all from the School of Biological Sciences. (This story was also covered at ScienceAlert, NPR, Interesting Engineering, New Atlas, Newswise, and Tech Explorist. Read more about the research here.)
The New York Times 2023-05-10T00:00:00-04:00When traveling on rough and unpredictable roads, the more legs the better — at least for robots. Balancing on two legs is somewhat hard; on four legs, it’s slightly easier. But what if you had many many legs, like a centipede? Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have found that by giving a robot multiple, connected legs, it allows the machine to easily clamber over landscapes with cracks, hills, and uneven surfaces without the need for extensive sensor systems. Their results are published in a study this week in the journal Science. The researchers from the School of Physics include Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor, and Baxi Chong, postdoctoral scholar and a Ph.D. graduate student in the Quantitative Biosciences program. Two scientists from the School of Mathematics involved in the study are Grigoriy Blekherman, professor, and Daniel Irvine, postdoctoral scholar. And three members of Goldman's Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab are study co-authors: Ph.D. graduate students Juntao He and Tianyu Wang, and Daniel Soto, postgraduate research assistant. (This story is also covered in QHubo News, CBC Radio, Tech Briefs, New Atlas, the BBC, and ScienceDaily. Popular Science also mentions the Georgia Tech research in its story on a separate multi-legged robot developed by researchers in Japan. And Baxi Chong wrote about the research in The Conversation which was reprinted in RoboHub.)
Popular Science 2023-05-08T00:00:00-04:00On May the Fourth, a.k.a. Star Wars Day, Discover took a look at the science behind Georgia Lucas' pop culture phenomenon. It cited a previous Georgia Tech story that quizzed faculty about various aspects of the movie franchise, including A. Nepomuk Otte, professor in the School of Physics, and his argument that The Force ignores a central pillar of physics by acting in a one-sided manner, as when Yoda raised Luke's X-wing fighter from the Dagobah swamp. “Didn't we learn from physics classes about Newton’s third law?” Otte said in the story. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So why doesn't the little fella get squished like a mosquito?”
Discover 2023-05-04T00:00:00-04:00Blinking is crucial for the eye. It's how animals clean their eyes, protect them, and even communicate. But how and why did blinking originate? Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Seton Hill University, and Pennsylvania State University studied the mudskipper, an amphibious fish that spends most of its day on land, to better understand why blinking is a fundamental behavior for life on land. By comparing the anatomy and behavior of mudskippers to the fossil record of early tetrapods, the researchers argue that blinking emerged in both groups as an adaptation to life on land. One of the researchers, Brett Aiello, an assistant professor of biology at Seton Hill University, is a former postdoctoral fellow in the Agile Systems Lab at Georgia Tech. Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is a co-author of the study. (This story is also covered in Earth.com, SciTechDaily and the Latrobe Bulletin.)
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Events
Experts in the News
An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has spotted what could be the most energetic neutrino ever detected. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos — tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light — have been known to exist for only a decade or so, and are thought to be messengers from some of the Universe’s most cataclysmic events, such as growth spurts of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. “It would be really interesting to see where in the sky the neutrino originated,” says Nepomuk Otte, an associate professor in the School of Physics. Otte is leading a proposed project — with a prototype now being tested in Utah — that would search for Earth-skimming neutrinos by monitoring the atmosphere just above the horizon for flashes of light.
Nature 2024-06-21T00:00:00-04:00Knitting, the age-old craft of looping and stitching natural fibers into fabrics, is gaining renewed attention for its potential in advanced manufacturing. Beyond creating garments, knitted textiles hold promise for designing wearable electronics and soft robotics – structures that need to move and bend flexibly. A team of physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology has taken the technical know-how of knitting and added a mathematical foundation to it. Led by Elisabetta Matsumoto, associate professor in the School of Physics, and Krishma Singal, a graduate researcher in Matsumoto’s lab, the team used experiments and simulations to quantify and predict how knitted fabric responses can be programmed.
Earth.com 2024-06-20T00:00:00-04:00Robotics engineers have worked for decades, using substantial funding, to create robots that can walk or run with the ease of animals. Despite these efforts, today’s robots still cannot match the natural abilities of many animals in terms of endurance, agility, and robustness. Seeking to understand and quantify this disparity, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from top research institutions, including Dunn Family Associate Professor at the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences Simon Sponberg, conducted a comprehensive study to compare various aspects of robotic systems designed for running with their biological counterparts. (This also appeared at The Jerusalem Post, TechXplore, and SciTechDaily.)
Earth.com 2024-04-26T00:00:00-04:00A group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene, a development that could lead to advanced electronic devices and quantum computing applications. Seen as the building block of electronic devices, semiconductors are essential for communications, computing, healthcare, military systems, transportation and countless other applications. Semiconductors are typically made from silicon, but this material is reaching its limit in the face of increasingly faster computing and smaller electronic devices, according to the Georgia Tech research team who published their findings in Nature earlier this year. In a drive to find a viable alternative to silicon, Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, led a team of researchers based in Atlanta, Georgia and Tianjin, China to produce a graphene semiconductor that is compatible with microelectronics processing methods.
Gas World 2024-04-26T00:00:00-04:00In an opinion published in the May 2024 edition of APSNews, School of Physics Professor Andrew Zangwill reflects on the debate on the boundaries of physics and its impact on the discipline. Zangwill states “for more than a century, physicists have been drawing and redrawing the borders around the field, embracing and rejecting subfields along the way.”
American Physical Society News 2024-04-12T00:00:00-04:00The stars aligned to give a Georgia Tech undergraduate student and an alum the moment of a lifetime during the recent solar eclipse. Corinne Hill is currently majoring in physics with a concentration in astrophysics. Nathaniel Greve graduated in 2023 with a degree in computer science. The couple met in 2021 when they both played alto saxes in the Georgia Tech marching band. After being unable to experience totality in 2017, Greve said the pair made plans to go to Wapakoneta, Ohio, for 2024′s eclipse. Hill’s friends in the Astronomy Club went to the Ozarks to experience the eclipse, but Hill agreed to go to Ohio instead.
Atlanta News First 2024-04-11T00:00:00-04:00
