Bhamla Lab @ Georgia Tech
@bhamlalab.bsky.social
Curiosity driven science in physics of life and frugal innovations for planetary scale challenges https://bhamla.gatech.edu/
You're watching a Crested Coua chick (Coua cristata) being fed at the Miami Zoo. The chick's outside appearance is ... unfortunate, but I want to focus on the weird 'targets' in the mouth. That's the coua's response to the problem of brood parasitism. Let's talk about it.
'The danger for the research enterprise is that if participation in the review process declines, the remaining contributors may realize they are being exploited by free-riders and will then withdraw their contributions, exacerbating the problem.'
A transparent universal credit system to incentivize peer review | PNAS
A transparent universal credit system to incentivize peer review
pnas.org
These protists make a cameo in another @bhamlalab.bsky.social comic I made with @rikworth.bsky.social and the invaluable clarity of @statedclearly.bsky.social all about how these babies have the fastest fiber twitch in nature - without any muscles. #sciart
Smart Alyk@smartalyk.bsky.social · 3mo agoDAY 327 SPECIES 327 - Stentor polymorphus STAGE: Protists MEDIUM: Arches Paper. Chromatek & HWC watercolor NOTES: Tried painting without any penwork S. polymorphus is a large trumpet shaped freshwater ciliate often found in clusters #sciart #painting #paint #protist #eukaryotic #protistsonsky
The science of these little critters is pretty nuts. Here's a comic I did with @rikworth.bsky.social @owenwattsdraws.bsky.social for @bhamlalab.bsky.social #InverteFest #Sciart
Get To Know Nature@gettoknownature.bsky.social · 3mo agoA water strider for #InverteFest. I have spent an absurd amount of time watching them skate around on the water at my local streams. They move so effortlessly #InverteFest #invertebrates 🌿
The deep dive on the cocaine salmon paper you didn't know you needed, with the one and only @tomlumperson.bsky.social
📢Preprint: Positional information (PI) and information flows in dynamic tissues. Our mathematical framework quantifies, from data, how the coupled stochastic dynamics of cell positions and properties preserve, degrade and generate PI. @alex-plum.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Springtails use aggregation pheromones to find each other. Because they are too small to break the water surface tension, their mutual attraction can result in large black floats. Woodstock, NY.
This is sooo cool! Ripple bugs propel themselves using collapsible fans that extend only when their legs touch water (in an ingenious way) - So glad I landed on this post. Amazing (and talented) way to communicate research
Bhamla Lab @ Georgia Tech@bhamlalab.bsky.social · 12mo agoCheck out our comic illustrated by @jordancollver.bsky.social and @rikworth.bsky.social , colors by @owenwattsdraws.bsky.social . -- find the full comic and more here bhamla.gatech.edu/project-blog...
Read a breakdown of the research (with lots of visuals) AND the whole comic here: bhamla.gatech.edu/project-blog... The new publication: doi.org/10.1126/scia...
Controlling Noisy Herds — The Bhamla Lab
A centuries old farming practice informs our understanding of control theory
bhamla.gatech.edu
New comic! Small groups of animals can be unpredictable, yet sheepdogs and their handlers direct them with style. The study just came out in Science Advances with a beautiful, mid-stride sheepdog on the cover! Congrats to the authors, Tuhin Chakrabortty (featured in the comic) and Saad Bhamla.
Our recent paper made it to the cover of Science Advances. In this paper, Tuhin Chakrabortty and I studied sheepdog trials, where skilled dog-handler teams control small flocks of sheep, and showed that trained dogs exploit indecisiveness to herd and divide the flock.
Tiny worms, big surprises! When placed in sand-filled Petri dishes, centimeter-long aquatic worms like T. tubifex spontaneously sweep up particles and reorganize their environment — all without a brain. Research team co-led by Saad Bhamla (@bhamlalab.bsky.social, ChbE@GT). bit.ly/4bzXFao
Non-motile microbes are not prisoners of diffusive transport. Just their metabolic activity can be sufficient to stir up the ambient fluid and cause explosive long-range dispersal -- a "metabolic firework". Our latest work -- arxiv.org/abs/2512.16288
Amazing research and such a fantastic scicomm video. I'd like to show it to my kids, but I'm afraid that it'll backfire and they'll use it to explain why all the clothes in their cupboards are unfolded despite the fact they were folded when they went in....
Prakash Lab at Stanford@prakashlab.bsky.social · 8mo ago(1/n) What if you never had to make your bed? What if your laundry could fold itself? Folding is everywhere around us - but did you know that folding flat sheets are at the ❤️ of diversity of shapes in the animal world - since 500 million years ago. Our latest work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nudC...
(1/n) What if you never had to make your bed? What if your laundry could fold itself? Folding is everywhere around us - but did you know that folding flat sheets are at the ❤️ of diversity of shapes in the animal world - since 500 million years ago. Our latest work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nudC...
Self-folding laundry
YouTube video by PrakashLab
youtube.com
These microrobots can execute digitally defined algorithms and autonomously change behavior in response to their surroundings. It paves the way for general-purpose microrobots that work together to carry out tasks without supervision in uncertain environments. 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Microscopic robots that sense, think, act, and compute
Autonomous submillimeter robots are built with onboard sensing, computation, memory, communication, and locomotion.
science.org
I am pleased to announce that from Jan 1 2026 I take over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. My first act, with the support of the editorial team, is to bring the journal to BlueSky from X. Please follow us @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. We will be posting about all our articles.
New York Times article on science funding with some depressing but familiar curves with interactive graphics. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article)
A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.
nytimes.com
PSA for people with NIH grant periods starting January 1st (including most NIGMS MIRAs): your RPPR is due Saturday, but they haven’t sent out the usual automated reminders, presumably due to the shutdown
Are you a scientist? Is your research cool? Do people not adequately appreciate how cool your research is? I'm looking for researchers to feature in Q&A-style interviews on my blog and would love to hear from (or about — embarrass your friends!) scientists interested in sharing their work. 🧪
How much stress would a wood beetle get if the wood beetle was filled with worms? Horned passalus beetles can have dozens to thousands of worms squirming inside them - and these worms can affect how their host responds to stress #invertebrate 🧪 dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2023/06/chon...
<i>Chondronema passali</i>
The horned passalus beetle ( Odontotaenius disjunctus ) is an insect that is commonly found in rotting logs. These beetles do more than jus...
dailyparasite.blogspot.com
Domesticated animals have pulled our heavy carts and turned our large mills for centuries. But what about the opposite end of the spectrum—what if the wheel you want to turn is so small you can’t see it? Turns out we can harness the power of bacteria to power the world’s smallest machines. 1/7 ⚛️🧪
Ingenious concept - light sheet on serial sections by photo-etching the expanded hydrogel, layer by layer. Photo-sectioning is quite slow, and the volumetric images are insanely large and complex, but the data look wonderful. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Welcome to all the new Packard Fellows- this is an incredible community. I look forward to meeting you at the reunion! Also, huge congrats to my colleague @jameststroud.bsky.social! Can't wait to see what you discover in your long-term eco/evo experiment, Lizard Island!
Packard Foundation@packardfdn.bsky.social · 10mo agoWe’re thrilled to announce the 2025 class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering — 20 innovative early-career scientists who will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. Meet the 2025 Packard Fellows ⬇ www.packard.org/2025fellows
This is my 1st time catching my pet archer fish, Legolas, spitting on camera. Archerfish use modified jaw and tongue bones to fire a jet of water to knock down bugs from over hanging vegetation. Here Legolas is shooting down a fruit fly 🪰 🐠🧪
🦑🧪 Job doing fieldwork (on ships) with Viking Cruises. Full-time position = ? Salary = ? I usually don't post without more detail, but the job market is weird right now! And this would be a fun fit for someone, and I'm not sure if it'll hit the usual job feeds www.vikingcareers.com/global/en/jo...
EXPEDITION - Field Scientist in Ocean & Expedition (Global) | Expedition at Viking Cruises
Apply for EXPEDITION - Field Scientist job with Viking Cruises in Ocean & Expedition (Global). Expedition at Viking Cruises
vikingcareers.com
In another exciting development our new preprint is online: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... This is the work of my brilliant graduate student Katerina Kourkoulou in collaboration with Maggie Liu and Arnold Mathijssen. Here is a video of the subject of our study:
Here's an interesting look into the Nobel Physics Prize nominating process up to the early 1970's. It's a reminder that it's never only been about the science. And that the human factors in science arise especially in recognition of work. 🧪 pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...
How Nobel favorites have fared
Over the first six and a half decades, the leading vote-getters received the award that same year less than half the time.
pubs.aip.org
New short paper from our lab @currentbiology.bsky.social, in which we discover of a new mode of cell motility for choanoflagellates: flagellar gliding. www.cell.com/current-biol... - A 🧵
Flagellar gliding in choanoflagellates
Freire-Delgado and Brunet discover a new mode of cell motility in choanoflagellates, the closest relatives of animals. Under mild confinement, choanoflagellate move over surfaces without cell deformat...
cell.com
