Georgia Tech alum Miriam Guthrie (EAS 2025) answers a reader question about her experiences as a meteorologist intern at The Weather Channel and shares advice on how to prepare for a career in meteorology. Here is an excerpt of her response: 

“A passion for weather is important [and] I would suggest really focusing on your math and science classes to prepare for the right school. When you're taking those hard math classes and you feel like you want to give up, remembering why you're passionate about this is really gonna help.

“I decided to go to Georgia Tech because it's a really good school for math and science, and I knew that that was something that I wanted to pursue. 

“My time at the Weather Channel so far has been awesome. I love teaching people about the weather, and it's been exciting the past few days with the first hurricane of the year, Hurricane Erick, just with the chaos of it all. It's a fun job, but it is a chaotic kind of fun.”

The Weather Channel

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

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

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

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