Experts in the News

Isabella Muratore at the New Jersey Institute of Technology says studying army ants comes with certain occupational hazards, like their very aggressive nature. But what's truly remarkable is when the ants encounter obstacles — such as a gap between leaves or branches — they build living bridges out of their bodies, hooking themselves together like a barrel of monkeys. This story includes comments from 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. Hu has studied how fire ants use their bodies to build rafts. He says this type of work reveals how ants make collective decisions, which could have implications for controlling swarms of robots. (This story was also covered on Houston Public Media, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and National Public Radio.)

Who will achieve high marks in school, flourish in their career or become an Olympian? Current theories of achievement provide answers that are intuitively appealing but scientifically flawed. Consequently, most of what people believe about how to achieve success is likely to be incorrect. Alexander Burgoyne, research scientist in the School of Psychology, is one of the co-authors of this study in Nature Reviews Psychology. 

The transferability and clinical value of genetic risk scores (GRSs) across populations remain limited due to an imbalance in genetic studies across ancestrally diverse populations. The researchers here conducted a multi-ancestry genome-wide association study of 156,319 prostate cancer cases and 788,443 controls of European, African, Asian and Hispanic men, reflecting a 57% increase in the number of non-European cases over previous prostate cancer genome-wide association studies. School of Biological Sciences researchers involved in the study include Joe Lachance, associate professor, and Rohini Janivara, Ph.D. Bioinformatics student.

In certain areas of mathematics, a sphere attached to a sphere is still a sphere, though perhaps a bigger or lumpier one. And if a sphere gets glued onto a doughnut, you still have a doughnut — with a blister. But if two doughnuts merge together, they form a two-holed shape. To mathematicians, that’s something else completely. That quality makes spheres a crucial test case for geometers. Mathematicians can often transfer lessons learned on spheres to more complex shapes by looking at what happens when you sew the two together. Included in this all-around look at spheres is a comment from John Etnyre, professor in the School of Mathematics. 

Two researchers from Georgia Tech are part of a multi-university team collaborating on a $4.5 million project to better understand cislunar space — the area between Earth and the moon — which is critical for future space exploration. The Characterizing Highways and Automated Navigation in Cislunar Environment (CHANCE) project is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and involves scientists from Purdue University, Penn State University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Texas at Austin. With the moon’s gravity being one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, significantly less propulsion is required to navigate within cislunar space and the costs to explore the solar system using the moon as a launching platform are much cheaper. John Christian, associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, is a co-principal investigator, and Anton Leykin, professor in the School of Mathematics, is a collaborator.

The average American commute is about 27 minutes. While people in many industries were able to start working from home during the pandemic, recouping their travel time, nearly half of U.S. workers kept devoting a good chunk of their day — sometimes an hour or more — to being in transit. Pandemic-era commuting has widened several divides: between those who can work remotely and those who can’t, and between those who drive and those who use public transportation. The decrease in travel by those able to work remotely has changed the nature of commutes for everyone else — streamlining rush-hour traffic, for example, but making trains run less often. This examination of how commutes have changed over the last three years includes comments from Christopher Wiese, assistant professor in the School of Psychology.

On a mid-October Monday, shortly before 9 a.m., 179 elite puzzlers made their way into the ballroom of a Toronto hotel and found their allocated seats for the World Sudoku and Puzzle Championships. The annual championship event comprises two days of Sudoku, followed by three days of other types of pencil-and-paper logic puzzles. Although puzzlers qualify for the event on a national level, most attend just for fun and for the community — to revel with people who share in the same nerdy delight. The top solvers are also there to win. (The glory comes with a trophy, but no prize money.) For the Sudoku event, the leading contenders this year included Tantan Dai, 23, who grew up in Beijing and is pursuing a Ph.D. in the School of Mathematics. 

A team of infectious disease researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, working with colleagues from the Georgia Institute of Technology, has found via clinical trial that fecal transplants after kidney transplantation reduce the susceptibility of patients to infections by multi-drug-resistant organisms (MDROs). In their study, reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the group tested the impact of fecal microbiota transfer (FMT) on kidney transplant patients receiving care at Emory Transplant Center, in Atlanta. One of the researchers involved in the study is Roth E. Conrad, an Ocean Science and Engineering Ph.D. scholar in the School of Biological Sciences. 

Crevasses, as discovered through groundbreaking research led by Cornell, are not just fissures in the ice; they serve a crucial function in the circulation of seawater beneath Antarctic ice shelves. This unique study, carried out with the assistance of an innovative underwater robot, suggests that crevasses may have a significant impact on the stability of these ice shelves. The Icefin robot, operated remotely, made an ascent and descent within a crevasse located at the base of the Ross Ice Shelf. This operation marked a significant milestone by providing the first 3D measurements of ocean conditions at the vital intersection where the ice shelf meets the coastline, commonly referred to as the grounding zone. Georgia Tech scientists included in this research include Benjamin Hurwitz, an Ocean Science and Engineering Ph.D. scholar, and Justin Lawrence, Ph.D. scholar in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. (This story was also covered at India Education Diary.) 

Bacteria form colonies on many natural surfaces, from tree bark to our own teeth. Now, a team of evolutionary biologists in Switzerland has identified genetic mutations that enable some bacterial colonies to expand rapidly. The findings, recently reported in PLoS Biology, suggest that mutations in just a few key genes can have widespread impacts on gene expression as bacteria replicate and move into new territory. “It’s really creative work,” says evolutionary biologist William Ratcliff, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences in the School of Biological Sciences, who was not involved in the study. “Understanding the way that [bacteria] might evolve in nature, the complex life cycles that they possess, and how they respond to different kinds of environments can be really hard.”

More than merely cracks in the ice, crevasses play an important role in circulating seawater beneath Antarctic ice shelves, potentially influencing their stability, finds Cornell-led research based on first-of-its-kind exploration by an underwater robot. The remotely operated Icefin robot’s climb up and down a crevasse in the base of the Ross Ice Shelf produced the first 3D measurements of ocean conditions near where it meets the coastline, a critical juncture known as the grounding zone. The robotic survey revealed a new circulation pattern – a jet funneling water sideways through the crevasse – in addition to rising and sinking currents, and diverse ice formations shaped by shifting flows and temperatures. Included in the Cornell research team is Justin Lawrence, a visiting Ph.D. scholar from the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. 

A new computer simulation of the early universe has been built by researchers, and it closely matches data obtained with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results, which were presented in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, were obtained by Maynooth University and Georgia Tech researchers. They demonstrate that the data obtained with JWST are consistent with theoretical expectations. The team’s “Renaissance simulations” are a set of extremely complex computer models of galaxy formation in the early universe. The School of Physics researchers are John Wise, Professor and Director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA), and Samantha Hardin, graduate student. (This study was also covered at CityLife, Silicon Republic, SciTechDaily, Phys.org and List23.)