Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm

Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.

The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.

Quanta Magazine

James T. Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, coauthored an article published in The Conversation detailing research which documents exceptional cases of lizards — survivors of limb damage or loss — that defy expectations about how natural selection works.

The Conversation

Climate change is altering the conditions that lead to hurricane development. That’s made some meteorologists reconsider how we measure those storms.

Experts have used the Saffir-Simpson scale since 1969 to classify hurricanes by their wind speeds, ranging from Category 1 to Category 5.

Zachary Handlos, the director of Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies at Georgia Tech which is examining how forecasters currently classify and communicate storm threats, says each storm is different and could result in a range of consequences.

"There's storm surge […] there's inland flooding from the significant rainfall — that was the big thing with Helene last year in our area," he said, noting that previously, Hurricane Irma only brought sustained winds to the region.

"You can also get tornadoes within hurricanes too, so not only are you dealing with flooding, storm surge, you also have to deal with tornadoes in the area at the same time," Handlos said.

He said any new scale should be complementary to the Saffir-Simpson scale, not replace it, as researchers still rely on it for historical study and communication with the public.

Georgia Public Broadcasting

A NASA-funded research team at Georgia Tech that includes Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando and Senior Research Scientist Brant Jones has developed a method for extracting water from the Moon to generate the hydrogen and oxygen needed for propulsion fuels for solar system exploration. They describe their experimental work in Thermal extraction of H2O(s) from lunar regolith simulant with concentrated solar irradiation: Experimental analysis, published at Acta Astronautica.

The researchers propose an interesting way to extract water from the potentially water-rich icy regions at the Moon’s pole. These regions are of interest to space agencies because the presence of water, which can be extracted or retrieved, is required for human exploration.

SolarPACES

Scientists have long thought that a lizard losing a leg should be a death sentence. New evidence seems to overturn this assumption, showing that some lizards can not only survive, but even thrive after losing one or more limbs.

James Stroud, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has spent years catching lizards in the wild to study how they evolve. He and his colleagues long thought that even the smallest difference in the length of a lizard’s leg could affect its ability to run from predators and chase their prey. Losing an entire limb seemed much more severe.

However, every now and then he and his colleagues would observe something odd. “We’ll find a lizard completely missing its leg, and it seems fine,” Dr. Stroud said. He casually calls them “three-legged pirate lizards.”

The New York Times