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

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

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

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

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