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.

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.

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.”