In the News

When a bird extends its wings in flight, microscopic fasteners stick to each other to prevent gaps between the feathers and improve the bird’s macroscopic maneuverability. “This fastener mechanism is showing the deeper physics understanding underneath the interesting biological structure that we’ve appreciated,” says Simon Sponberg, a biophysicist at Georgia Tech.

A curious life-form that lives in the park’s thermal pools makes a protein that changed the course of biomedical history. “There’s just this whole host of diversity that is otherwise unknown and uncategorized,” says Justin Lawrence, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies microbial diversity in Antarctica.

When American whiskey evaporates, it leaves behind webs, or fingerprints of sorts, that could help sleuths identify counterfeit swill. The beauty of this work, says physicist Peter Yunker of the Georgia Institute of Technology, is that it both visualizes the whiskey web phenomenon and describes why the phenomenon happens.

At Georgia Tech, Jenny L. McGuire, an expert in spatial ecology, worked with colleagues to develop a model that divvied up the American landscape into cool and hot habitats.

This virus is the “Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2”, that causes the disease called COVID19, and that everyone simply calls Coronavirus. What actually happens when it infects a human and what should we all do? Georgia Tech Doctor of Microbiology James Gurney and Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Quantitative Biosciences Joshua Weitz contributed significantly to the video.

Although the concept of HTE, has been around for a while, chemists are increasingly using its microplates and robots to rapidly run myriad experiments simultaneously. Stereo Chemistry explores what’s behind the surge in popularity. Featuring M.G. Finn, a Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

A new report from across the pond finds that airborne particulate pollution from tire wear and tear can be more than 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a tailpipe, depending on what substances are being measured. In 2017, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including Rodney Weber and Hongyu Guo, found that fine metals emitted from brakes and tires combine with acidic sulfate in the atmosphere to produce a toxic, soluble aerosol.

Forecasts for the largest living structure on Earth have become "devastating," scientists say, and the coral carnage will be even more widespread than the last mass bleaching in 2016-2017. “It’s a sobering reality we’re in,” Kim Cobb said. “We’re looking at a wholesale reorganization of global reef ecosystems, right under our eyes.”

At this time of heightened awareness around germ and virus transmission, it's good to remember a few simple things you can do to keep your personal space on an aircraft germ-free. Research conducted by Howard Weiss and Emory University Researchers found that droplet-spread infections usually only travel as far as two seats either side and one row behind and in-front of an infected passenger.

China’s far-reaching efforts to control the spread of the new coronavirus have resulted in a steep drop in carbon emissions and other pollutants. “We obviously don’t want a global pandemic to be the driver of people’s choices in how they live and work – people are suffering and dying,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta.