Experts in the News

Alex Robel, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, said pumping sand onshore is far from a perfect solution to stabilize a beach, but it’s “one of the best tools we have in our arsenal.”

“It’s been done in the United States for almost a century in different places and we know how to do it,” Robel said. “We’re good at it.”

But nourishment is only a Band-Aid for erosion. Once cities start replenishing sand, Robel said they have to keep doing it regularly. 

A team of researchers including David Hu, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, have visualized mosquito flight behavior for the first time.

Based on their data, the researchers said they don’t think mosquitoes swarm because they’re following the pack. Each appeared to pick up on the cues independently, then found themselves at the same place at the same time.

“It’s like a crowded bar,” said Hu. “Customers aren’t there because they followed each other into the bar. They’re attracted by the same cues: drinks, music, and the atmosphere. The same is true of mosquitoes. Rather than following the leader, the insect follows the signals and happens to arrive at the same spot as the others. They’re good copies of each other.”

A similar story was published by The Economic Times.

A special issue of Pure and Applied Functional Analysis honors mathematician School of Mathematics Regents' Professor Leonid Bunimovich on his 75th birthday. 

Bunimovich's pioneering contributions have shaped modern dynamical systems. He is best known for discovering a fundamental mechanism of chaos in dynamical systems, including systems of chaotic billiards such as the Bunimovich stadium, Bunimovich flowers, and elliptic flowers. Learn about his research in this 2023 news story: Bringing Understanding to Chaotic Dynamics with Billiards, Flowers, and ... Mushrooms?

If you’ve walked the aisles of a grocery store, scrolled through social media, watched television, or set foot in a fast-casual restaurant chain in recent months, you know that protein is having its moment.

So, why are brands pushing protein? An International Food Information Council study found that 70% of adults are looking to increase their protein intake. But as it makes its way into more products than ever before, is it too much of a good thing?

Lesley Baradel is a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and lecturer in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. In this episode of "Generating Buzz", she digs into the protein-packed trend, with implications ranging from health and wellness to marketing and how the rise of GLP-1s factors into the increased focus on the macronutrient.

Research led by Georgia Tech physicist Itamar Kolvin has found that the presence of small imperfections or heterogeneities in materials can have a dual effect on their strength and resilience. While heterogeneities were historically believed to make materials stronger by creating an obstacle course for cracks, the new study shows that in some complex materials, heterogeneities can actually accelerate crack propagation and weaken the overall structure. The findings have implications for how engineers design and reinforce materials to optimize their toughness.

Assistant Professor Zhu-Xi Luo and Ph.D. student Yi-Lin Tsao from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics have demonstrated a novel mechanism for stabilising physical phases vulnerable to topological defects. Their work addresses a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics: the destabilisation of phases like superfluids by thermally-induced defects such as anyons and vortices. 

Ratan Murty, assistant professor in the School of Psychology, discusses a new functional MRI study published in Nature Neuroscience which found that at two months old, babies’ visual systems appear ready to distinguish among a variety of common objects. 

Murty says the study’s findings should prompt researchers to reconsider how infants learn to process the world. Cognitive development is often regarded as a bottom-up process, in which “the early visual regions that encode simpler features develop first, and higher-level regions that encode more complex features emerge later.” Instead, brain maturation is “non-hierarchical,” he says, with the more complex visual ventral cortex developing before the lateral occipitotemporal cortex. 

Can Alzheimer’s disease be slowed by flickering lights and sound?

That is the question that drives Annabelle Singer, a McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. In her lab on Tech’s campus in Atlanta, Singer is trying to better understand patterns of neural activity in the brain and what goes wrong with Alzheimer’s patients. Building on that knowledge, she hopes to develop new ways to treat the disease.

“We are taking a really different approach to Alzheimer’s,” she said. “We’ve determined how neural activity that is essential for memory fails in Alzheimer’s disease. We’re then using that information to develop brain stimulation that could improve brain health.”

Until now, no one had built a synthetic material that could simultaneously absorb chemical building blocks, polymerize them into its own network, relieve the mechanical stresses that accumulate during the process, and reverse the whole sequence on demand. A new study published in Advanced Materials ("Rewriting Polymer Fate via Chemomechanical Coupling") reports a polymer platform that accomplishes exactly that. A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology including Associate Professor Will Gutekunst of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with collaborators at North Carolina State University, created what they call a "living" polymer: a material that can grow, shrink, heal, change its stiffness by roughly 100-fold, and be recycled back to raw monomers, all post-fabrication.

The rate at which artificial intelligence is able to replicate human behavior has increased in recent years. Does that mean it's thinking like us? The third episode of "Brainwaves" explores what artificial intelligence teaches us about our own capacity for thought. The episode includes expert commentary from Anna Ivanova, assistant professor in the School of Psychology.

In an article published by Eos, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, comments on a new study published in Nature which found that a major part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was warmer during the peak of Earth’s last ice age than previously thought.

According to Lynch-Stieglitz, the findings give scientists an additional benchmark with which to test the accuracy of climate models. “Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) circulation is a good target, and the more that we can refine the benchmarks…that’s a really good thing,” she said. “This is another really nice dataset that can be used to better assess what the Last Glacial Maximum circulation was really doing.”

The Conversation U.S. compiled a set of five stories from its archives to help readers gauge both practical considerations around vaccination and the bigger picture of what the return of measles might mean for public health. The compilation includes an article by School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Peter Kasson that reviews the near- and long-term risks associated with a measles infection.