Aerial dogfighting began more than a century ago in the skies over Europe with propeller-driven fighter aircraft carried aloft on wings of fabric and wood. An event held recently in southern California could mark the beginning of a new chapter in this form of aerial combat.

Alkaloid-based pharmaceuticals derived from plants can be potent treatments for a variety of illnesses. But getting these powerful therapeutic agents from plants can take a long time and cost plenty of money, because it often takes a lot of plants to make a small amount of drug product. Yet advances in metabolic engineering of microbes could lead to cheaper, faster production of drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA...

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have found a material used for decades to colour food items ranging from corn chips to ice creams could potentially have uses far beyond food dyes. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers described how a class of water soluble liquid crystals, called lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals, exhibited unexpected characteristics that co...

The years Ryan Williams spent working as a lifeguard and CPR instructor in Las Vegas taught him that it’s important for people to know how to perform the life-saving procedure. But few people have the time or money to take a class. Williams wanted to find a way to bring the training to more people. He teamed up with two friends, and together the three Georgia Tech students invented a device that walks a person through all the step...

A medical device used in more than 80% of all procedures is getting a much-needed make-over from four biomedical engineering majors. Doctors, veterinarians and other other medical personnel use electrocautery devices to remove unwanted tissue and to prevent or stop bleeding. The tool heats to 1200 degrees at the touch of a button and because it remains hot after use, the tip can accidently burn patients or the doctors, said Dev Mandavia, a s...

  The appearance of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe has puzzled astronomers since their discovery more than a decade ago. A supermassive black hole is thought to form over billions of years, but more than two dozen of these behemoths have been sighted within 800 million years of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

Researchers working as part of the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center have developed a new way to identify and sort stem cells that may one day allow clinicians to restore vision to people with damaged corneas using the patient’s own eye tissue. They published their findings in Biophysical Journal. The cornea is a transparent layer of tissue covering the front of the eye, and its health is maintained by a...

When Richard Bruce and Gary Wendt, both professedly “geeks at heart,” assessed the medical imaging landscape in the early 2000s, they were astonished to find that nearly all medical images were being transferred between hospitals on compact discs rather than through the internet. That was old-school, and not in a good way, says Bruce, who had previously worked at the network giant Cisco Systems.

For most people, the drip, drip, drip of a leaking faucet would be an annoyance. But for Georgia Institute of Technology Ph.D. candidate Alexandros Fragkopoulos, what happens inside droplets is the stuff of serious science. In the laboratory of Alberto Fernandez-Nieves in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics, Fragkopoulos is studying how toroidal droplets – which initially take the shape of a donut – evolve into spherical dropl...

In regenerative medicine, the ideal repair material would offer properties that seem impossibly contradictory. It must be rigid and robust enough to be manipulated surgically, yet soft and porous enough to allow healing cells to pass through it to launch repair and regeneration processes. Now, researchers have taken an important step toward creating such a material by combining water-filled particles known as microgels with robust polymer ne...

Chemical separation processes account for as much as 15% of the world’s total energy consumption. Development of next-generation molecularly-selective synthetic membranes will be among the drivers for more efficient, large-scale separation processes that could dramatically reduce that number. In a paper published in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology identified the opportunities they...

  Smartwatches aren’t the easiest things to control, with their small screens and owners’ bulky fingers. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have invented new ways to interact that provide a little more control. Among their enhancements using LG and Sony watches:

A simple technique for producing oxide nanowires directly from bulk materials could dramatically lower the cost of producing the 1D nanostructures. That could open the door for a broad range of uses in lightweight structural composites, advanced sensors, electronic devices – and thermally-stable and strong battery membranes able to withstand temperatures of more than 1,000ºC.

Tens of thousands of patients each year are diagnosed with heart valve disease, with many in need of lifesaving surgery to treat the condition. Now, researchers at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute are working on a tool that could help cardiologists care for patients with the disease. Using highly detailed imaging from CT scans, mechanical engineers are using 3D printers to make an exact model of an individual patient’s hea...

Using massive data sets, machine learning, and high-performance computing, health analytics and informatics is drawing us closer to the holy grail of health care: precision medicine, which promises diagnosis and treatment tailored to individual patients. The information, including findings from the latest peer-reviewed studies, will arrive on the desktops and mobile devices of clinicians in health care facilities large and small through a new gen...

Doctors knew long before Owen Webb was born that they were racing against the clock to save his life. Tests had confirmed the developing child suffered from Krabbe disease, a genetic disorder that causes toxins to build up in the nervous system, progressively damaging the brain. Just days after he was delivered, a medical team at Duke University began Owen on nine days of chemotherapy. His body was then infused with stem cell-rich donor...

A simple solution-based electrical doping technique could help reduce the cost of polymer solar cells and organic electronic devices, potentially expanding the applications for these technologies. By enabling production of efficient single-layer solar cells, the new process could help move organic photovoltaics into a new generation of wearable devices and enable small-scale distributed power generation.

Inside an exotic crystal, physicist Martin Mourigal has observed strong indications of “spooky” action, and lots of it. The results of his experiments would mean that the type of crystal is a rare material that can produce a quantum spin liquid. Currently, only a small handful of materials are believed to possibly have these properties. This crystal was synthesised for the first time only a year ago. Corroboration by other physic...

  The Georgia Institute of Technology has been awarded a $17.3 million cyber security research contract to help establish new science around the ability to quickly, objectively and positively identify the virtual actors responsible for cyberattacks, a technique known as "attribution."

A combined theoretical and experimental approach has allowed researchers to predict and verify the full structure of a monolayer-coated molecular metal nanoparticle. The methodology was tested on silver-thiolate nanoparticles, expanding on earlier knowledge about gold nanoparticles, and is expected to be applicable to a broad range of sizes of nanoparticles made of different elements.