In The News

The Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) offers the latest example with its study of fire ant towers—structures that resemble the Eiffel Tower and are seemingly built without a leader or coordinated effort. "If you watched ants for 30 seconds, you could have no idea that something miraculous would be created in 20 minutes," says David Hu, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering in a statement. "With no planning, and using trial-and-error, they create a bell-shaped structure that helps them survive."

Georgia Tech engineers Glaucio Paulino and Jerry Qi wanted to apply tensional advantages to objects that could be used for more than just bridges and antennae, such as space habitats or heart stents. Paulino and Qi devised a method to create 3D printable, lightweight, foldable versions of these designs, with tubes made of a plastic-like material called a shape memory polymer connected with printed elastic tendons.

The meniscus-assisted solution printing (MASP) technique boosts power conversion efficiencies to nearly 20 percent by controlling crystal size and orientation.The process, which uses parallel plates to create a meniscus of ink containing the metal halide perovskite precursors, could be scaled up to rapidly generate large areas of dense crystalline film on a variety of substrates, including flexible polymers.“We used a meniscus-assisted solution printing technique at low temperature to craft high quality perovskite films with much improved optoelectronic performance,” said Zhiqun Lin, a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Uranus’ magnetosphere swivels, switching its invisible armor on-and-off, according to new work from the Georgia Institute of Technology. While “quirky” barely begins to describe these magnetic forces, Uranus’ situation may signify the norm across the cosmos and be key to refining our search for habitable worlds.“The scientific community wants to go back to Uranus, in light of all these exoplanet discoveries,” Carol Paty, a Georgia Tech planetary scientist who led the project, told NewsHour. “A large fraction of these exoplanets are Uranus, Neptune in size.”

Researchers at Georgia Tech and the Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta are using new 3D printing technologies to help cardiologists predict whether paravalvular leakages could occur after valve replacement surgery. Leakages are a common complication when the valve doesn’t precisely fit, and researchers hope to avoid it with this new medical innovation.The team creates 3D-printed models from CT scans of patients’ hearts, which yield patient-specific heart valve models that mimic the physiological qualities of the real valves. Cardiologists can then evaluate how well a prosthetic valve fits a patient before the start of a surgery.

Researchers at Georgia Tech developed a flu-vaccine patch. Instead of one big needle, it has lots of microscopic needles. Patients just press it onto their skin and wait a few minutes for it deliver the medication, during which they reportedly don’t feel a thing.

In the wake of a transnational cyberattack that was initially reported in Ukraine and quickly spread across the world on June 27, the second of its kind in as many months, the security of personal information stored in cyberspace is increasingly cause for concern. “It’s especially a problem given the ubiquitous nature of devices collecting data,” Erica Briscoe, a chief scientist in the ATAS Laboratory at Georgia Tech Research Institute and one of the authors of the Big Data report, said in opening remarks. Schukai said that while “we’ve been in this amazing technology change over the last twenty years… everything tech can do sits about ten to fifteen years beyond where law and policy sits.”  

Currently, farmers can use precision ag to construct 2-D images or even 3-D reconstructions of their fields. But a collaborative research project from three Georgia institutions wants to take these monitoring tools into the fourth dimension. Researchers from Georgia Tech Research Institute, the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology equipped a standard tractor with sensors to track color imaging, GPS, inertial measurement and other data from a peanut field in Tifton, Ga. Researchers ran 23 sessions in 89 days collecting a total of 36 million data points during the 2016 growing season.

The Georgia Institute of Technology has been approved to offer a new advanced degree program for the emerging field of machine learning.In a unanimous vote, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia approved Georgia Tech’s request to establish a Doctor of Philosophy in Machine Learning.The machine learning (ML) Ph.D. program is a collaborative venture between the colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences. An inaugural class of approximately 15 students is scheduled to convene for the Fall 2017 semester. The class is expected to comprise incoming Ph.D. students and some who may have recently begun other programs at Georgia Tech.

Kimberly-Clark has joined Georgia Tech’s Center for the Development and Application of Internet-of-Things Technologies. As a member of this global, non-profit research and development center with a seat on the Executive Advisory Board, Kimberly-Clark will help guide research into the rapidly evolving Internet-of-Things marketplace that addresses critical societal issues including privacy, trust, ethics, regulation and policy.