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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
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
Can you upload a human mind into a computer? A neuroscientist ponders what’s possible
As part of The Conversation’s Curious Kids series, Dobromir Rahnev, associate professor in the School of Psychology, answered a question regarding the the possibility of uploading the consciousness of the mind into a computer: "As a brain scientist who studies perception, I fully expect mind uploading to one day be a reality. But as of today, we’re nowhere close". Read Rahnev's full response.
The Conversation
Neuroscientists discover music’s hidden power to reshape memory
A neuroimaging study examining episodic memory found that individuals exposed to music during memory recollection were more likely to incorporate emotions associated with the music into their memories. One day later, these memories exhibited a stronger emotional tone than the original recollections. The study was published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience by a research team that included Ph.D. student Yiren Ren and Associate Professor Thackery Brown of the School of Psychology.
Psy Post