Grand Challenges: Gates Foundation Grant Supports Tissue Engineered Model of Lymphatic System
Georgia Tech has won a Grand Challenges Explorations award to develop a tissue-engineered model of the human lymphatic system that will support laboratory research into lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease known to cause elephantiasis. According to the World Health Organization, the mosquito-borne disease affects more than 120 million persons in tropical areas of the world, and can cause severe disfigurement.
Liquid Doughnuts: Soft Matter Offers New Approaches to Studying How Ordered Materials Arrange Themselves Inside Non-spherical Spaces
A fried breakfast food popular in Spain provided the inspiration for the development of doughnut-shaped droplets that may provide scientists with a new approach for studying fundamental issues in physics, mathematics and materials. The droplets, in a shape known as toroidal, are formed from two dissimilar liquids using a simple rotating stage and an injection needle.
Learning from Ants: Principles of Locomotion in Confined Spaces Could Help Future Robot Teams Work Underground
Future teams of subterranean search and rescue robots may owe their success to the lowly fire ant, a much despised insect whose painful bites and extensive networks of underground tunnels are all-too-familiar to people living in the southern United States.
Drug Targeting: Protein Study Suggests Drug Side Effects are Inevitable – and that Basic Physics Enabled Early Biochemistry
A new study of computer-created and natural proteins suggests that the number of unique pockets – sites where small molecule pharmaceutical compounds can bind to proteins – is surprisingly small. This means that drug side effects may be impossible to avoid.
Oxygen-Free: RNA Was Capable of Catalyzing Electron Transfer on Early Earth with Iron’s Help, Study Suggests
A new study shows how complex biochemical transformations may have been possible under conditions that existed when life began on the early Earth. The study shows that RNA is capable of catalyzing electron transfer under conditions similar to those of the early Earth.
Biology of the Brain: Georgia Tech Researchers Seek a Better Understanding of the Brain
Researchers at Georgia Tech are applying their expertise, tools and techniques to understand on a fundamental level how the brain works. Because the human brain is immensely complex, the researchers are pursuing many levels of inquiry – from molecules to cells to circuits to the mystery of the mind itself – and also studying brain disorders and development, along with daily feats of brain activity, such as vision, speech, movement and memory.
April 16, 2013 — Researchers are developing a novel technology that would facilitate close monitoring of bridges, parking decks and other structures for early signs of strain, stress and formation of cracks. Their approach uses wireless sensors that are low cost, require no power, and can be implemented on tough yet flexible polymer substrates.
April 12, 2013 — Physicists have examined how Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) might be used to provide communication among the nodes of a distributed quantum computer. The researchers determined the amount of time needed for quantum information to propagate across their BEC.
April 10, 2013 — The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is developing integrated hardware devices that simulate sensors potentially present on enemy unmanned aerial vehicles. The technology is expected to be used to gauge the effectiveness of U.S. countermeasures against enemy drones.
April 9, 2013 — Controlling the shapes of nanometer-sized catalytic and electrocatalytic particles made from noble metals such as platinum and palladium may be more complicated than previously thought. Using systematic experiments, researchers have investigated how surface diffusion – a process in which atoms move from one site to another on nanoscale surfaces – affects the final shape of the particles.
April 7, 2013 — A new separation process that depends on an easily-distinguished physical difference in adhesive forces among cells could help expand production of stem cells generated through cell reprogramming. By facilitating new research, the separation process could also lead to improvements in the reprogramming technique itself and help scientists model certain disease processes.
April 2, 2013 — Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have won a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract to develop three-dimensional chip-cooling technology able to handle heat loads as much as ten times greater than systems commonly used today.
March 29, 2013 — Researchers have developed an ultra-compact passive true time delay device that could help reduce the size, complexity, power requirements and cost of phased array designs. The device uses the difference in speed between light and sound to create nanosecond signal delays.
March 21, 2013 — Using a combination of theory and experiment, researchers have developed a new approach for understanding and predicting how small legged robots – and potentially also animals – move on and interact with complex granular materials such as sand.
March 20, 2013 — Researchers have for the first time demonstrated that mechanical forces can control the depolymerization of actin, a critical protein that provides the major force-bearing structure in the cytoskeletons of cells. The research suggests that forces applied both externally and internally may play a much larger role than previously believed in regulating a range of processes inside cells.
March 19, 2013 — A team of researchers at Georgia Tech has developed a new type of interface between cochlear implant devices and the brain that could dramatically improve the sound quality of the next generation of implants. Cochlear implants help deaf individuals perceive sound.
