In a finding that’s great news for fans of Luke Skywalker’s fictional home planet Tatooine, scientists say planets in multiple-star systems may be habitable – though in keeping with Tatooine’s hardscrabble image, it may be an uphill battle. Astronomers have long known that multiple-star systems are common. “Most stars are members of binaries [other than the coolest dwarf stars],” Manfred Cuntz, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Fire ants in Louisiana were caught on camera saving themselves from Tropical Storm Barry's floodwaters by banding together to form a raft. Jonathan Petralama, a weather reporter for Accuweather.com, was monitoring floodwaters from an overtopped levee in Plaquemines Parish when he captured video of "fire ant balls" floating in the water. ... Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology said in a 2013 study that fire ants use their jaws, small claws and adhesive pads on their legs to form into floating structures.
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of mathematical physics known as chaos, died on June 30 in Manhattan. He was 74. ... During a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell, Dr. Feigenbaum was already allowing his focus to wander. “He was not very happy with the physics he was doing at that time,” said Predrag Cvitanovic, a theoretical physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics, who was a graduate student at Cornell at the time. “The main thing he did is he solved the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning,” Dr. Cvitanovic said.
More and more self-driving and internet-connected vehicles are making its way to the market, which is endlessly exciting to autophiles. However, new research demonstrates how the rise of connected cars could make entire cities vulnerable to hackers. In a new study published in the journal Physical Review E, physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Peter Yunker, and from Multiscale Systems, Inc. used physics to analyze the future of automative cybersecurity. The team focused on potential hacks on vehicles, including potential mass destruction.
Jump, little maggot, jump! Show the world that not only the finely muscled and strong-boned can defy gravity, but also the soft-bodied and wormy.... David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech who often studies animal movements but was not involved in this research, said the paper was “full of surprises,” such as the latch: “It’s a soft latch, composed of thousands of microscopic parts, that can shoot a soft larva like its being shot out of a cannon.” Hu also has appointments in the Georgia Tech Schools of Physics and of Biological Sciences.
Cockroaches don't look like the most elegant of runners as they scurry out from under the refrigerator, but they could be a model for how to make robots move really fast without tripping or falling over, according to a new paper. In their research, Georgia Tech researchers Izaak Neveln, Amoolya Tirumalai and Simon Sponberg studied 17 cockroaches and 2,982 of their strides to come up with mathematical equations and principles for how they manage to scurry as they do.
The most important part of one of the most precise clocks in the world is a paper-thin, staple-size piece of lutetium. ... Murray Barrett didn’t aspire to be a clockmaker. After completing his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2002, where he studied atomic physics, he did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NIST in the quantum computing and information program. Barrett did his Ph.D. under the direction of Michael Chapman.
Good news for small, helpless robots who long to be a part of something bigger: Researchers have found a way to create “robots made of robots” that can move around, even though the individual parts can’t travel on their own. To create this robot horde, researchers designed several roughly iPhone-size machines called “smarticles”—short for smart particles—that could flap their small arms up and down but could not move from place to place by themselves. They then put five of the smarticles in a plastic ring.
