Experts in the News

When traveling on rough and unpredictable roads, the more legs the better — at least for robots. Balancing on two legs is somewhat hard; on four legs, it’s slightly easier. But what if you had many many legs, like a centipede? Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have found that by giving a robot multiple, connected legs, it allows the machine to easily clamber over landscapes with cracks, hills, and uneven surfaces without the need for extensive sensor systems. Their results are published in a study this week in the journal Science. The researchers from the School of Physics include Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor, and Baxi Chong, postdoctoral scholar and a Ph.D. graduate student in the Quantitative Biosciences program. Two scientists from the School of Mathematics involved in the study are Grigoriy Blekherman, professor, and Daniel Irvine, postdoctoral scholar. And three members of Goldman's Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab are study co-authors: Ph.D. graduate students Juntao He and Tianyu Wang, and Daniel Soto, postgraduate research assistant. (This story is also covered in QHubo News, CBC Radio, Tech Briefs, New Atlas, the BBC, and ScienceDaily. Popular Science also mentions the Georgia Tech research in its story on a separate multi-legged robot developed by researchers in Japan. And Baxi Chong wrote about the research in The Conversation which was reprinted in RoboHub.)

Blinking is crucial for the eye. It's how animals clean their eyes, protect them, and even communicate. But how and why did blinking originate? Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Seton Hill University, and Pennsylvania State University studied the mudskipper, an amphibious fish that spends most of its day on land, to better understand why blinking is a fundamental behavior for life on land. By comparing the anatomy and behavior of mudskippers to the fossil record of early tetrapods, the researchers argue that blinking emerged in both groups as an adaptation to life on land. One  of the researchers, Brett Aiello, an assistant professor of biology at Seton Hill University, is a former postdoctoral fellow in the Agile Systems Lab at Georgia Tech. Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is a co-author of the study.  (This story is also covered in Earth.com, SciTechDaily and the Latrobe Bulletin.) 

The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry — or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a "fuzzy orange donut." Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole — a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy — mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations. The use of machine learning to improve the photo is detailed in a study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Two professors in the School of Physics who are EHT founding members — Feryal Ozel, who is also school chair, and Dimitrios Psaltis — are co-authors of the study. (This story was also covered in Space Daily, ScienceDaily and the Calgary Herald.)

Scientists believe the Milankovitch cycles have influenced Earth's climate for millions of years, causing climate shifts such as ice ages and warmer periods. These cycles are the periodic variations that influence a planet's orbital properties. This, in turn, controls how much sunlight the planet receives over time and thus plays an important role in determining the planet's climate and habitability. A new study, inspired by Milankovitch cycles, has attempted to investigate how orbital changes may affect the climate of exoplanets. They investigated orbit variations in compact multiplanet systems for this purpose. Gongjie Li, assistant professor in the School of Physics, was a co-author of the study. (This story was also covered at Phys.org.)

Toad tongues are ready for their closeup — extremely close closeups — in this video from San Francisco PBS station KQED. The closeups and slow-motion photography are necessary to show the role toad saliva plays in snatching crickets, worms, and other prey in the blink of an eye. Thanks to research from the team of David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics, science learned that a toad’s saliva starts off thick and sticky. But when the saliva hits prey at a high speed, it thins out dramatically, pouring into every nook and cranny the tongue touches. And then, it becomes sticky again, drawing that meal down the hatch.