According to new research published in the journal Nature, lava flows possibly originating from the Jezero Mons on Mars could have shaped the geology of the Jezero crater’s floor. According to the findings, the analysis of NASA's Perseverance rover samples could also reveal clues about ancient Mars when it was still geologically active.

The study was led by Sara C. Cuevas-Quiñones, a Ph.D. Planetary Science student from Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) and Brown University. The research team also included EAS Professor James Wray and EAS Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández. 

As Cuevas-Quiñones and her colleagues note in their paper, the detection of clay and carbonate minerals on Jezero crater's floor supports the conclusion that the sedimentary deposits on the crater's western edge are the result of aqueous activity that took place roughly 3.8 to 3.5 billion years ago. In addition, satellite observations have revealed a set of non-sedimentary geologic materials that cover most of the Jezero crater's floor.

Universe Today

This week could be a jackpot for birders in Georgia, as an estimated 10 million will fly every night over the state. When they aren't flying, they'll be on the ground feasting. In an 11Alive interview, Benjamin Freeman, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, discusses the “river of migrating birds” over Georgia skies:

"So most of these small birds, they're actually... flying at night. So when they're flying, they're spending so much energy they're heating up, so they like to fly when it's cool at night. And they're flying a couple thousand feet up. They're flying all night and then sometime in the morning they'll land and they'll spend the day looking for food. And then the next night, they'll often rise up again and keep flying north, so they're flying a couple 100 miles a night.”

Discover the full interview here.

A similar story also appeared at The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

11 Alive

A new study from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control is showing a rise in the number of U.S. kids being diagnosed with autism. The logic behind the rise in diagnoses of autism, the cause of which still mystifies researchers, has been polarizing. 

Professor M.G. Finn, a biochemist and researcher in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said countless studies have ruled out a connection between vaccinations and autism. 

“Vaccines engage the immune system, and autism is not a disease of the immune system,” said Finn. “That has absolutely nothing to do, proven by study after study, with vaccines and immunizations. The fact that autism diagnosis may be increasing as a percent of the population is probably because there are numerous new and better ways to detect autism.”

Atlanta News First

Brain imaging research may be grappling with a fresh challenge. Scanning the brain of a single person can reveal the areas they use to complete a task, although the exact pattern differs from person to person. But averaging the results across many people—as scientists often do—fails to capture some important nuances, a new functional MRI (fMRI) study suggests.

The brain tackles decision-making tasks in particular through several different categories of brain activity, rather than a single one, according to the study, published in Nature Communications in February by a team that includes School of Psychology researchers. Across three decision-making tasks, participants’ brains differentially activated and suppressed various regions and networks in ways that could be grouped into distinct categories, or subtypes, highlighting the variability of neural signatures during behavior.

The Transmitter

Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm

Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.

The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.

Quanta Magazine