Last Friday, the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab (SEPL), led by School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor Jenny McGuire, hosted its weekly Fossil Friday event. This hands-on outreach program invites participants to uncover ancient history, explore real fossils, and learn about the discoveries made by scientists beneath the approximately 80-foot drop of Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming.

The goal of Fossil Friday is straightforward: to build a community centered on science outreach and enable people to interact directly with fossils. The event is open to students, faculty, and Atlanta locals alike, offering a relaxed space to learn, discover, and have fun.

Technique

Until now, no one had built a synthetic material that could simultaneously absorb chemical building blocks, polymerize them into its own network, relieve the mechanical stresses that accumulate during the process, and reverse the whole sequence on demand. A new study published in Advanced Materials ("Rewriting Polymer Fate via Chemomechanical Coupling") reports a polymer platform that accomplishes exactly that. A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology including Associate Professor Will Gutekunst of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with collaborators at North Carolina State University, created what they call a "living" polymer: a material that can grow, shrink, heal, change its stiffness by roughly 100-fold, and be recycled back to raw monomers, all post-fabrication.

Nanowerk News

Ratan Murty, assistant professor in the School of Psychology, discusses a new functional MRI study published in Nature Neuroscience which found that at two months old, babies’ visual systems appear ready to distinguish among a variety of common objects. 

Murty says the study’s findings should prompt researchers to reconsider how infants learn to process the world. Cognitive development is often regarded as a bottom-up process, in which “the early visual regions that encode simpler features develop first, and higher-level regions that encode more complex features emerge later.” Instead, brain maturation is “non-hierarchical,” he says, with the more complex visual ventral cortex developing before the lateral occipitotemporal cortex. 

The Transmitter

In an article published by Eos, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, comments on a new study published in Nature which found that a major part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was warmer during the peak of Earth’s last ice age than previously thought.

According to Lynch-Stieglitz, the findings give scientists an additional benchmark with which to test the accuracy of climate models. “Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) circulation is a good target, and the more that we can refine the benchmarks…that’s a really good thing,” she said. “This is another really nice dataset that can be used to better assess what the Last Glacial Maximum circulation was really doing.”

Eos

A volcano seems to have been identified near the rim of Jezero crater on Mars, which is being explored by NASA’s Perseverance rover. The rover has been collecting samples that were intended to be returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return mission in the 2030s.

Some of the material in the samples was thought to have been volcanic, including signs of lava flows. Now, James Wray, professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and his colleagues have found a possible source – a dormant volcano on the south-eastern rim of Jezero named Jezero Mons.

High-resolution imagery from Mars orbiters have revealed fine-grained material on the mountain, consistent with ash from a volcano. The size and shape of Jezero Mons – 21 kilometres wide and two kilometres tall – also matches similar volcanoes on Earth.

“An igneous volcano interpretation seems most consistent with the observations,” says Wray, one fuelled by magma from below the surface. “It’s the strongest case we can make without actually walking across it.”

By counting craters near the volcano, Wray and his team estimate that Jezero Mons may have last erupted as recently as 1 billion years ago, possibly flinging ash, lava and rocks into Jezero crater, even as far as Perseverance’s landing site.

Similar stories appeared at 11 Alive, Science Alert, Earth Sky, ZME Science, and Gizmodo. 

New Scientist