Experts in the News

Odd things can happen when a wave meets a boundary. In the ocean, tsunami waves that are hardly noticeable in deep water can become quite large at the continental shelf and shore, as the waves slow and their mass moves upward. In a recent study led by School of Physics Dunn Family Professor Daniel Goldman and published in the journal Physical Review Letters, scientists have shown that a floating, symmetric oscillating robot will experience forces when it comes close to a boundary. These forces can be used for self-propulsion without the need for more typical mechanisms such as a propeller.

In preparation for NASA's SpaceX 30th commercial resupply mission, the agency streamed an International Space Station National Lab science webinar at 1 p.m. EST Friday, March 8, to discuss the hardware, technology demonstrations, and science experiments headed to the space station. School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Ph.D. Student Jordan McKaig served as an expert participant in the webinar.

Northern peatlands store approximately one-third of Earth’s terrestrial soil organic carbon due to their cold, water-saturated, and acidic conditions, which slow decomposition. To learn more, researchers — including School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Joel Kostka — leveraged the SPRUCE experiment, where scientists can combine air and peat warming in a whole-ecosystem warming treatment. Peatlands build carbon stocks over centuries, but rising temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rapidly changed the equilibrium at SPRUCE within a 4-year timescale, highlighting the vulnerability of these carbon-rich ecosystems to global climate change.

This past summer, waters around the world experienced what has been referred to as marine heatwaves. In this episode of the podcast Grass Roots Health, host Tim Jordan explores the issue of our water and land growing warmer with special guest, Annalisa Bracco, associate chair and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

The interdisciplinary nature of the semiconductor industry requires not just one education pipeline but many: Graduates with advanced degrees across the sciences are essential, but so are people with the skills to operate equipment as new fabs go online. Arijit Raychowdhury, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, praised the College of Sciences for our research in physics, chemistry, and quantum computing that is vital to semiconductors and manufacturing. 

For the scientific community, names and labels help organize the world's organisms so they can be identified, studied, and regulated. But for bacteria, there has never been a reliable method to cohesively organize them into species and strains. An international research team sought to overcome this challenge, which has long plagued scientists who study bacteria. Recently published in Nature Communications, Ocean Science and Engineering Ph.D. Student Roth Conrad contributed to the study.

The way muscles work changes when a person goes from slow, even movements to rapid, unsteady movements. Anyone who’s pulled a muscle after a sudden motion knows that. What we don’t know is exactly how muscle function changes when dynamic movement is introduced. A new NSF-funded project co-led by Simon Sponberg, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and School of Biological Sciences, will examine dynamic muscle function of humans and animals with the goal of creating improved physical therapy and rehabilitation programs and mobility assistance devices. That translates to more humans who can move with less pain. 

Students in Brandon Tate's (Ph.D. CHEM '15) chemistry lab are developing new ways to hasten the formation of renewable fuels, like hydrogen, to replace fossil fuels. Tate, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry and environmental studies at Bowdoin College, is working on a long-term goal to help introduce a sustainable source of energy that, like oil or gas, can power the needs of long-distance air and vehicle travel.

Are our bodies solid or liquid? This question begins the exploration of a study led by Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, that blurs the lines between solid and liquid states by examining materials that exhibit properties of both. The study, titled 'Rigidity percolation in a random tensegrity via analytic graph theory,' published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), introduces a novel approach to understanding the behavior of deformable solids through the incorporation of cable-like elements, offering insights with significant implications for biology, engineering, and nanotechnology.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence research have marked a significant step forward in refining the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). A collaborative effort by the team from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) at Meta, Georgia Institute of Technology, and StabilityAI, has introduced a breakthrough approach aimed at enhancing LLMs' self-improvement processes in complex tasks like mathematics, science, and coding. Alexander Havrilla, a machine learning Ph.D. student based in the School of Mathematics, is lead author of the study published as a pre-print.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with a team from China’s Tianjin University, claim to have developed the first functional semiconductor from graphene, a single-layer carbon structure renowned for its robust bonds. Led by Walter De Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, the study published in Nature details a graphene semiconductor compatible with standard microelectronic processing methods, a fundamental requirement for any viable alternative to silicon.

When Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made the observation that came to be known as Moore's Law, he projected that transistor density would continue doubling in density every two years... for another ten years. Working with Tianjin University in China, though, researchers at Georgia Tech have made a breakthrough in this department by growing graphene on doped silicon carbide wafers, introducing impurities into the graphene that give it a usable band gap, enabling the researchers to create graphene transistors the size of a carbon atom. In research led by School of Physics Regents' Professor Walter De Heer, these switches can reach into the teraHertz range and run cooler than silicon transistors, potentially breathing new life into the aging Moore's Law.