The most important part of one of the most precise clocks in the world is a paper-thin, staple-size piece of lutetium. ... Murray Barrett didn’t aspire to be a clockmaker. After completing his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2002, where he studied atomic physics, he did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NIST in the quantum computing and information program. Barrett did his Ph.D. under the direction of Michael Chapman.
Good news for small, helpless robots who long to be a part of something bigger: Researchers have found a way to create “robots made of robots” that can move around, even though the individual parts can’t travel on their own. To create this robot horde, researchers designed several roughly iPhone-size machines called “smarticles”—short for smart particles—that could flap their small arms up and down but could not move from place to place by themselves. They then put five of the smarticles in a plastic ring.
Shapeshifters were once the basis for far-fetched science fiction drama. They are now on the outskirts of robot-based research being performed by the U.S.
Ants are notoriously much better than humans at organizing their collective traffic flow when foraging for food, but how they manage to do so isn't fully understood...Last year, physicist Daniel Goldman's lab at Georgia Tech studied how fire ants optimize their tunnel digging. Those tunnels are narrow, with barely enough room for two ants to pass, yet jams rarely happened. When an ant encounters a tunnel in which other ants are already working, i
[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
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.
Fire ants build living rafts to survive floods and rainy seasons. Georgia Tech scientists are studying if a fire ant colony’s ability to respond to changes in their environment during a flood is an instinctual behavior and how fluid forces make them respond. Hungtang Ko and David Hu will present the science behind this insect behavior, focusing their discussion on how the living raft changes size under various environmental conditions at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting on Nov. 26.
