Experts in the News

Elephants use their trunks for various tasks by exploiting a remarkable range of motions. A research team has now shown that much of this dexterity can be achieved using just a small number of muscle-like actuators. Using both theoretical calculations and experiments with a simple physical model of a trunk, the researchers found that their minimal model can reproduce the complex bending and torsional motions seen in real trunks. The results might be useful in the design of “soft robotics” devices.

David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Mechanical Engineering, calls the work “a triumph of mathematics and an important step in reverse engineering the elephant trunk.” He says that the important result is in “reducing the biological complexity to three degrees of freedom.” 

Hu adds that “the big question left in my mind is this: If elephants can achieve all these 3D trunk positions with just three actuators, why does it have to have so many other muscles, and when are those used?”

A series of four earthquakes in a week around Lake Lanier have had residents wondering two questions -- why are they happening, and when will they stop?

On Friday, researchers from several Georgia universities began placing special earthquake sensors below ground. The seismic nodes will sit about one foot deep and will be placed in several locations surrounding the epicenters. The first seismic sensor was installed at Sugar Hill Elementary School in Gwinnett County. R. Scott Harris, University of Georgia adjunct researcher and STEM educator with Gwinnett County Public Schools, and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Zhigang Peng, dug through the Georgia Clay to reach the right depth and placed the sensor and battery system below ground, to be later retrieved later this year.

"There are probably many smaller ones that are happening right now as we speak, but it's always hard to tell when it's going to stop. That's the Million-Dollar question. That's what we're trying to figure out," Dr. Peng explained.

The Peach State is not typically a hotbed of seismic activity, but residents in pockets of North Georgia have been feeling some unexpected vibrations lately after the area has been jolted by five small earthquakes over the last 10 days. 

Georgia is located in the middle of the North American Plate, the vast tectonic plate that sits beneath almost all of North America, parts of the Caribbean, Greenland and much of the Atlantic Ocean. Earthquakes — particularly strong ones — are much more likely in places like California, which sit along major plate boundaries.

Still, small earthquakes are fairly common in Georgia, experts say. The state typically experiences between 10 and 20 earthquakes above magnitude 2.0 each year, said Andy Newman, professor and associate chair for Undergraduate Studies in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

The three earthquakes at Lake Lanier’s southern end represent a “swarm” of seismic activity, but scientists say such clusters are also common.

“Generally, if you have one earthquake, the best place to guess where the next earthquake is going to occur is right near the same location,” Newman said.

(This also appeared at Macon Telegraph and Phys.org.)

Learning more about how microorganisms operate in space has long been a critical part of avoiding contamination of all NASA experiments conducted in space and on the moon.

"NASA has a responsibility to ensure that science measurements made on Mars are not impacted by microbes brought from Earth. When humans go to Mars we will bring trillions of microbes with us, carried in our gut and on our skin," said Christopher Carr, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Aerospace Engineering.

In a monograph published in npj Microgravity, researchers including School of Biological Sciences Ph.D. student Iris Irby, reviewed a growing body of experimental evidence indicating that monocytes and macrophages are altered by the spaceflight environment. These findings have implications for a wide range of physiological processes, including innate immunity, acquired immunity, host defense, and tissue remodeling.

Sea cucumbers, scavengers of the seafloor that resemble the cylindrical vegetable, have been consumed as a delicacy in Asia for centuries. But in recent decades, they’ve been severely overharvested to a point that they are now quite rare. New research that Mark E. Hay, Regents Chair and the Harry and Anna Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology, helped conduct suggests their repopulation could play an important role in protecting and revitalizing another type of endangered marine organism: corals. (This also appeared at Statesville Record and Landmark.)

As they seep and calve into the sea, melting glaciers and ice sheets are raising global water levels at unprecedented rates. To predict and prepare for future sea-level rise, scientists need a better understanding of how fast glaciers melt and what influences their flow.  Now, a study by MIT scientists offers a new picture of glacier flow, based on microscopic deformation in the ice. The results show that a glacier’s flow depends strongly on how microscopic defects move through the ice.

“This study really shows the effect of microscale processes on macroscale behavior,” says Meghana Ranganathan who led the study as a MIT graduate student and is now a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “These mechanisms happen at the scale of water molecules and ultimately can affect the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.” (This also appeared at Mirage News and Phys.org.)

It has been almost a quarter-century since M.G. Finn, K. Barry Sharpless, and Hartmuth C. Kolb published the paper that some refer to as the click manifesto. In it, the researchers presented a vision for synthetic chemistry that prioritizes quick and easy access to functional molecules. Today, click reactions can be found nearly everywhere organic bonds come in handy. They even garnered Sharpless, Carolyn Bertozzi, and Morten Meldal the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022. The authors of the manifesto envisioned a future in which the grand challenge of synthetic chemistry would be figuring out not how to make a molecule but what molecule to make and what it would be good for, says M.G. Finn, professor and chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The key to achieving that future: reactions of exceptional speed, ease, selectivity, and reliability.

A new paper published in the journal Science argues that traits that are highly variable and evolve quickly, over short time scales, are often the same ones that shape the direction of long-term evolution of new species. School of Biological Sciences Assistant Professor James Stroud, who was not involved in the research, says the study provides a fascinating insight: “As selection changes through time to chase new optima, the genetic variation of traits under selection may increase from this evolutionary back and forth,” he says. “This additive genetic variance, termed evolvability, is a window into evolution’s past.”

The Taklamakan and Gobi Desert (TGD) region has experienced a pronounced increase in summer precipitation, including high-impact extreme events, over recent decades. Despite identifying large-scale circulation changes as a key driver of the wetting trend, understanding the relative contributions of internal variability and external forcings remains limited. Researchers, including School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Yi Deng, approached this problem by using a hierarchy of numerical simulations, complemented by diverse statistical analysis tools. The results offer strong evidence that the atmospheric internal variations primarily drive this observed trend. Specifically, recent changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation have redirected the storm track, leading to increased extratropical storms entering TGD and subsequently more precipitation. A clustering analysis further demonstrates that these linkages predominantly operate at the synoptic scale, with larger contributions from large precipitation events.

Control of electrical doping is indispensable in any semiconductor device, and both efficient hole and electron doping are required for many devices. In organic semiconductors, however, electron doping has been essentially more problematic compared to hole doping because in general organic semiconductors have low electron affinities and require dopants with low ionization potentials that are often air-sensitive. In a recent study, a team of researchers, including Stephen Barlow of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics, adapted an efficient molecular doping method, so-called ion-exchange doping, to dope electrons in a polymeric semiconductor.

Weather forecasters talk about wind shear a lot during hurricane season, but what exactly is it?  School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Senior Academic Professional Zachary Handlos teaches meteorology in a part of the country that pays close attention to the Atlantic hurricane season. In this article, Handlos provides a quick look at wind shear, one of the key forces that can determine whether a storm will become a destructive hurricane. (This story also appeared at Scientific American, Down to Earth, and The Weather Network.)