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

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

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

Christopher E. Carr, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Aerospace Engineering, reacted to the identification of niallia tiangongensis, a new variant of a terrestrial bacteria that was discovered in the Tiangong space station.

"This finding shows that there is a lot of microbial diversity yet to be discovered, and that space stations are excellent laboratories for studying how our human-built environments select for survival or persistence of different organisms. If we understand that better, we can reduce the risks on Earth in the built environment, such as reducing infections acquired in hospitals, schools or nursing homes. Even though this microbe is not likely to be a threat, we should continue studying microbes in space to ensure we understand and address any risks, because when we are far from home, our options will be much more limited. This will help us be successful in exploring the Moon and Mars."

Newsweek