In the News

Bacteria and their different forms, movements and influences offer a seemingly unending number of research possibilities. In a recent study, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that it is not true that bacterial collaborations within microbiomes, like in the mouth, have evolved to be generous and exclusive. In an interview with Dental Tribune International, Dr. Gina Lewin explains this in more detail and discusses other areas of the study.

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. Army and associates, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University with their work published their findings in the technical journal Science Robotics....“These are very rudimentary robots whose behavior is dominated by mechanics and the laws of physics,” said Dan Goldman, a Dunn Family professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the project’s principal investigator.

The particles 3D printers emit can negatively affect indoor air quality and have the potential to harm respiratory health, according to a new study. For the study, the researchers collected particles 3D printers emitted and conducted several tests to gauge their impact on respiratory cell cultures. “All of these tests, which were done at high doses, showed that there is a toxic response to the particles from various types of filaments used by these 3D printers,” says Rodney Weber, a professor in School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The work was also covered at airqualitynews.com.

In a study published on Wednesday, researchers found that fish seem to be the key ingredient to maintaining healthy, unbleached coral....Previous research has shown that the activity of the corals’ microbiome is a major factor that helps protect it against diseases, writes the team, led by senior author Mark Hay, Ph.D., professor of marine ecology at Georgia Tech....Now the team shows that pathogen-protective chemicals are likely responsible for warding off the bleaching bacteria — and that healthy communities of fish help the corals keep producing such chemicals.

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.

In the transition from mathematical billiards to physical billiards, where a ball goes from being a point particle to having a positive radius, it may seem intuitive to assume that no categorical difference exists between the two. A new proof-of-concept paper by Leonid Bunimovich says otherwise. Bunimovich discovered as the radius of a physical billiard ball increases, the change in the behavior of the entire system is equivalent to modeling mathematical billiards with a smaller table. With increasing radius, the geometry of the system evolves. For instance, some parts of the table may become inaccessible to the ball. This results in a progression in the dynamics of the system between mathematical and physical cases, and it may become more or less chaotic with changing radius.

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. This group of robots—which the researchers call a “supersmarticle”—could move by itself in random directions as the individual smarticles collided with each other. Among the researchers is Dan Goldman, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. Other coverage of the work may be found at Institution of Mechanical Engineers, The Engineer, IEEE Spectrum, Futurity.org, Science Times, Popular Mechanics, and The NewStack.

Molecules that combine elements of RNA and DNA, so-called chimeric molecules, may have been an important step in the emergence of life on Earth from the primordial soup that existed billions of years ago, according to a study published yesterday (September 16) in Nature Chemistry. The work came out of research exploring the transition from RNA-based lifeforms to the DNA-based life that is ubiquitous today. Chimeric RNA-DNA molecules have some advantages that might make them better candidates than pure RNA for the first reproducing molecules. “There are times when we have mixtures, rather than just the isolated reactants that people typically use, and we get better results,” Nicholas Hud, a chemist at Georgia Tech who was not involved in the new study, tells Quanta. When mixtures are taken into consideration, the emergence of life on Earth in some ways “is not as hard as we might think it is.”

A recent study shows that cyanide and urea-based solvents could have played a role in making phosphate available for the origins of life on the early Earth. Phosphate is essential for life, and is used in the backbones of molecules like DNA. However, the availability of phosphate early in Earth’s history is thought to have been low because it would have been sequestered in insoluble calcium and iron minerals. Published in Angewandte Chemie, the work was carried out by Bradley Burcar, Alma Castañeda, Jennifer Lago, Mischael Daniels, Matthew Pasek, Nicholas Hud, Thomas Orlando, and Cesar Menor-Salvan in the NASA/NSF Center for Chemical Evolution and the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Frankenstein in alternative genres, freshly redesigned periodic tables, poetry and digital archives, feminist editorial interventions in Wikipedia, sustainable futures, pop culture, and crisis—these are the Writing and Communication course topics that Brittain Fellows experimented with in the 2019 summer semester at Georgia Tech....These seven reflections on our recent summer teaching serve as examples of the Brittain Fellowship’s use of tools and assignments that innovate on humanities-based pedagogies in a range of transdisciplinary contexts. Courtney Hoffman, 3rd Year Brittain Fellow and Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, reflects on her summer 2019 class, which was inspired by the periodic table.