Rain or shine, it’s always monsoon season for William Boos.
From his meteorological lair on Science Hill, Boos calmly monitors fluid dynamics and atmospheric depressions thousands of miles away. Volatile forces of nature in far-off places are his specialty. (more…)
Health interventions can contribute to academic achievement
There is a strong relationship between a student’s personal health and their academic achievement in school, new research by Yale University suggests. The study found that school, home and community environments that promote good personal health contribute to higher levels of achievement.
The study examines the relationship between a variety of health factors and students’ standardized test scores. The most important predictors of academic achievement were having no television in the bedroom, maintaining a healthy weight, being physically fit, having a secure source of healthy food, and rarely eating at fast-food restaurants. Other significant factors were not drinking soda or other sweetened drinks and getting enough sleep. (more…)
Two new views from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, showcase the telescope’s talent for spying objects near and far. One image shows the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed the “Hand of God” after its resemblance to a hand. Another image shows distant black holes buried in blankets of dust.
“NuSTAR’s unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light,” said Fiona Harrison, the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. (more…)
Toni Nathaniel Harp ’78 M.Env.D., first came to New Haven — a place known as America’s first planned city — in 1976, to study environmental and physical planning at the Yale School of Architecture. She remained in the city after graduation, making a career in community services and serving as a New Haven alderman and Connecticut state senator.
She won election to the ultimate New Haven planning job — mayor — on Nov. 5, 2013, and was sworn in as the city’s 50th mayor on Jan. 1, becoming the first woman to be the city’s chief executive and the first Yale graduate in the mayor’s office in 33 years. (more…)
Award-winning journalist, activist, and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault told a packed audience at Yale that lessons learned from the civil rights movement still have relevance for current and future generations.
Hunter-Gault delivered a lecture titled “Social Justice, Equity, and Public Health” during a Branford College master’s tea on Feb. 5. (more…)
In awarding Yale’s George Daniel Mostow its 2013 Wolf Foundation Prize in mathematics — one of the field’s premier global awards — the foundation offered this crisp assessment: “Few mathematicians,” it said, “can compete with the breadth, depth, and originality of his works.”
Here Mostow, an emeritus professor since 1998, talks about the English teacher who led him to a life in math, the pleasure of family, high-definition opera, and the Nth dimension — as well as the “eureka!” moment at a New Haven stoplight that secured him a place in the history of geometry.
When did it dawn on you that you wanted to be a professional mathematician?
In high school, mathematics was my favorite subject. I especially enjoyed challenging problems. But I did not know that mathematics was a profession. I am indebted to my high school English teacher who, in my senior year, called me up to his desk to ask about my career plans, and told me that his brother was a mathematician. I decided then and there that mathematics was for me. (more…)
Michelle Bayefsky hopes that London’s future will be filled with elm trees.
The Yale junior spent part of her summer in that city helping to ensure that will be the case.
An International Bulldogs Internship allowed Bayefsky the opportunity to work for an environmental charity called The Conservation Foundation, which among other initiatives is engaged in a project to re-establish elm tree populations in the United Kingdom (U.K.). For Bayefsky, the experience was not only an introduction to environmental work, but also confirmed that small actions can sometimes have a big impact. (more…)
Donating part of his liver and a kidney to two different recipients was not enough for Harry Kiernan. The Vietnam veteran and firefighter is now taking his efforts to raise awareness about organ donation many steps further by walking across the United States.
Kiernan’s 3,300-mile journey began on March 19 at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where a kick off ceremony for “Walk of 2012,” took place under the Donate Life flag near the hospital’s entrance. (more…)
