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Large yeast clusters generate natural circulatory flows through metabolic activity to bypass diffusion limits
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and India's National Center for Biological Sciences have found that yeast clusters, when grown beyond a certain size, spontaneously generate fluid flows powerful enough to ferry nutrients deep into their interior.
In the study, "Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast," published in Science Advances, the research team — which included Georgia Tech Ph.D. scholar Emma Bingham, Research Scientist G. Ozan Bozdag, Associate Professor William C. Ratcliff, and Associate Professor Peter Yunker — used experimental evolution to determine whether non-genetic physical processes can enable nutrient transport in multicellular yeast lacking evolved transport adaptations.
A similar story also appeared at The Hindu.
Phys.org
The ocean is changing colors, researchers say. Here's what it means.
Warming waters are causing the colors of the ocean to change — a trend that could impact humans if it were to continue, according to new research.
Satellite data shows that ocean waters are getting greener at the poles and bluer toward the equator, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science by a research team that included Haipeng Zhao, postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), and Susan Lozier, College of Sciences Dean, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, and EAS professor.
The change in hue is being caused by shifting concentrations of a green pigment called chlorophyll, which is produced by phytoplankton
The presence of chlorophyll in open ocean is a proxy for concentrations of phytoplankton biomass. The colors indicate how chlorophyll concentration is changing at specific latitudes, in which the subtropics are generally losing chlorophyll, and the polar regions — the high-latitude regions — are greening, the researchers said.
Similar stories appeared at San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, Oceanographic Magazine, Earth.com, and Good Morning America.
ABC News
Hold the syrup: Weirdly perfect 'pancakes' on Venus may prove the planet is buckling
Venus is famous for its "pancake domes" — steep-sided volcanoes that rise from the planet's surface like circular welts. In a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, a research team that included School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences postdoctoral fellow Madison Borrelli suggested that these unusual dome-shaped structures are at least partly sculpted by the planet's upper crust, which seems more flexible in certain regions.
To determine how a bendy crust could affect the formation of a pancake dome, Borrelli and her colleagues at universities in France and the U.S. focused on the only dome for which they had high resolution data: the Narina Tholus, an 88.5-mile-wide (55 kilometers) dome located on the circumference of the Aramaiti Corona, one of the many giant oval structures that pockmark Venus' surface.
Borrelli hopes that upcoming missions to Venus — like NASA's VERITAS program — will provide higher resolution topography of the planet's surface, allowing the researchers to test their model with more data.
Similar stories appeared at Daily Galaxy, Extreme Tech, and Newsbytes.
Live Science
First evidence of ‘living towers’ made of worms discovered in nature
David Hu, professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering, drew on ant behavior in his commentary of a study that examined towering behavior in nematodes.
Ants, which assemble to form buoyant rafts to survive floodwaters, are among the few creatures known to team up like nematodes, said Hu.
“Ants are incredibly sacrificial for one another, and they do not generally fight within the colony,” Hu said. “That’s because of their genetics. They all come from the same queen, so they are like siblings.”
Notably, there has been a lot of interest in studying cooperative animal behaviors among the robotics community, Hu said. It’s possible that one day, he added, information about the complex sociality of creatures like nematodes could be used to inform how technology, such as computer servers or drone systems, communicates.
CNN
These triplets who graduated from Georgia Tech with neuroscience degrees head to medical school
Three years after the Kashlan triplets graduated from Georgia Tech together at 18 years old with B.S. in Neuroscience degrees, they are now entering medical school.
Zane, Rommi and Adam Kashlan spoke with 11Alive on Friday, giving an update on what's next after sharing the graduation stage in high school as valedictorians and earning neuroscience degrees with minors in health and medical sciences in college.
11 Alive