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When a bird extends its wings in flight, microscopic fasteners stick to each other to prevent gaps between the feathers and improve the bird’s macroscopic maneuverability. “This fastener mechanism is showing the deeper physics understanding underneath the interesting biological structure that we’ve appreciated,” says Simon Sponberg, a biophysicist at Georgia Tech.

A curious life-form that lives in the park’s thermal pools makes a protein that changed the course of biomedical history. “There’s just this whole host of diversity that is otherwise unknown and uncategorized,” says Justin Lawrence, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies microbial diversity in Antarctica.

When American whiskey evaporates, it leaves behind webs, or fingerprints of sorts, that could help sleuths identify counterfeit swill. The beauty of this work, says physicist Peter Yunker of the Georgia Institute of Technology, is that it both visualizes the whiskey web phenomenon and describes why the phenomenon happens.