Experts in the News

James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little in all that time. Logic told Stroud that if evolution had favored the same traits over millions of years, then he should expect to see little to no change over a single generation. Except that’s not what he found. Instead of stability, Stroud saw variability. One season, shorter-legged anoles survived better than the others. The next season, those with larger heads might have an advantage. This story builds on Stroud's recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, joined Fox Weather to talk about the "falling iguana alerts" now issued by the National Weather Service in Miami when temperatures dip unseasonably lower during the winter, causing the large lizards to fall out of Florida trees. Stroud, an evolutionary ecologist, spoke of his lab's studies to find out whether iguanas are adapting to colder temperatures brought on by climate change, or whether genetic factors are involved. Iguanas, normally found in hotter Central and South American climates, are considered an invasive species for Florida. 

Thomasville native Jacques Gay, a Ph.D. scholar in physical chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been selected for the National Science Foundation's International SuperComputing collaborative NSF IRES ASSURE Program. As a US graduate student, Gay will get to collaborate with supercomputing centers in China, Japan and Germany through the program. He has been selected to work with Dr. Paolo Carloni of Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany. There, Gay said he will help develop molecular mechanic-based drug design computations with quantum accuracy. According to the NSF, only 20-25 students throughout the United States are chosen for this prestigious program.

Global forest fires emitted 33.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2001 and 2022, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This makes the CO2 emissions generated by forest fires each year higher than those from burning fossil fuels in Japan — the world’s sixth-largest CO2 emitter. Driving the emissions spike was the growing frequency of “extreme forest-fire events”. Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, tells Nature the report complements his work, which “indicates a roughly 20 percent rise in global burnt area by the 2050s compared to the 2000s”.

Terry Maple, emeritus professor in the School of Psychology who is credited with transforming Zoo Atlanta from one of the worst in America to one of the best in the world, has died at 77. Atlantans of a certain age will recall that Zoo Atlanta was in a dismal state in the 1970s and 1980s before Maple took over as director in 1984. But Maple believed Zoo Atlanta had promise, and his first mission was to free Willie B, a western lowland gorilla, from the concrete bunker he lived in with a tire swing and television to keep him company. Maple, who had grown up in San Diego and frequented its world-famous zoo, envisioned a large outdoor habitat where Willie B. and other gorillas could live naturally rather than in confinement. (This story was also covered in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) 

India was the world’s third-most-prolific publisher of research papers in 2022, but it was ranked only 153rd for the number of citations it received per paper. Indeed, in 2020, about 30 percent of papers from India were not cited at all, compared with 20 percent in both the United States and China. These trends are mirrored in many other low- and middle-income countries whose researchers struggle to get published in high-impact journals. But despite this challenging publishing environment, some Indian scientists have produced influential, highly cited studies in a number of fields in the past few years. One of those researchers, Sachin Gunthe, who studies aerosols at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, teamed with Pengfei Liu, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, to study the origins of air pollution in Delhi. 

Systems consisting of spheres rolling on elastic membranes have been used to introduce a core conceptual idea of general relativity: how curvature guides the movement of matter. However, such schemes cannot accurately represent relativistic dynamics in the laboratory because of the dominance of dissipation and external gravitational fields. A new study from School of Physics researchers demonstrates that an “active” object (a wheeled robot), which moves in a straight line on level ground and can alter its speed depending on the curvature of the deformable terrain it moves on, can exactly capture dynamics in curved relativistic spacetimes. The researchers' mapping and framework facilitate creation of a robophysical analog to a general relativistic system in the laboratory at low cost that can provide insights into active matter in deformable environments and robot exploration in complex landscapes. Researchers includes Hussain Gynai and Steven Tarr, graduate students; Emily Alicea-Muñoz, academic professional; Gongjie Li, assistant professor; and Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor. 

Diverse and full of sea life, the Earth’s Devonian era — taking place more than 370 million years ago — saw the emergence of the first seed-bearing plants, which spread as large forests across the continents of Gondwana and Laurussia. However, a mass extinction event near the end of this era has long been the subject of debate. Some scientists argue the Late Devonian mass extinction was caused by large-scale volcanic eruptions, causing global cooling. Others argue a mass deoxygenation event caused by the expansion of land plants was to blame. 
A recently published study in the journal Communications Earth and Environment now posits that both factors played a role — and draws attention to the environmental tipping points the planet faces today. Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, contributed to the study. (This story also appears in SciTechDaily and ScienceDaily.) 

The sudden buzz of a fly has most people flapping their hands wildly as if attempting to ward off an evil spirit. Seeing a wall or ceiling-hugger has others running quickly past or under, as if their mere shadow might prompt the insect to launch an aerial attack. Still others pick the fight response, choosing to squash the danger. But here’s the bug-zillion dollar question: Why do creepy-crawlies cause us to react this way? A 2018 Georgia Tech study that included Eric Schumacher, professor in the School of Psychology, found that the strongest neurological reaction elicited by bugs is disgust. It’s a result borne of a mix of things, from social conditioning and negative connotations to understanding their disease-carrying potential and, unfortunately, judging the book by its spindly, slimy, antennaed cover.

The United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, or USAFSAM, part of the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, is collaborating with Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, or GTRI, on a new research project to design strains of probiotic bacteria that can provide health benefits to stimulate immune recognition of influenza. Developing more effective methods to combat influenza could reduce impacts on military readiness and training from outbreaks and augment vaccine efforts to increase force health protection capabilities. Brian Hammer, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, co-wrote a proposal that met Air Force requirements, and he will work with other researchers to develop the proof-of-concept project. 

This roundup of some of the most unique excrement in the animal kingdom, showcasing the fascinating diversity of animal waste, includes a 2018 Georgia Tech study of how wombats manage to produce square-shaped feces. The study's authors include David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics. As it turns out, the elastic nature of the marsupial's intestinal walls is a key factor.

Blimps are indeed part of this "Innovations" roundup, but it's the collaborative abilities of army ants that have led engineers from Northwestern University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology to speculate that the insects' behavioral principles and brains could one day be used to program swarms of robots. David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics), is quoted regarding his research on fire ant raft constructions during flooding, comparing the insects to neurons in one large brain.