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. 

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.

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.