Acclaimed by her peers in the United States as “possibly the greatest woman scientist of the 20th century” and known in her native New Zealand as a “world leader in modern cosmology and one of the most creative and significant theoreticians in modern astronomy,” the late Yale astronomer Beatrice Tinsley has certainly earned a place in the annals of history.
Now she’s earned a place in the World Atlas as well. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, a University of Michigan astronomer and her colleagues have found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.
By pointing Chandra at a patch of sky for over six weeks, astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). When combined with very deep optical and infrared images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the new Chandra data allowed astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from when the universe was between about 800 million and 950 million years old. (more…)
Yale University researchers have identified four unique host defense proteins among thousands that seem to play a crucial role in mobilizing the immune system’s response to bacterial infections, they report in the May 6 issue of the journal Science.
The findings suggest it may be possible to find new ways to assist immune-compromised patients to fight off a variety of pathogens, the authors say.
“We can start to think about how to mimic these chemical processes and deliver them in drug form,” said John D. MacMicking, associate professor of microbial pathogenesis at Yale School of Medicine and senior author the study. (more…)
In a room in the basement of Hillhouse Avenue, 18 Yale students have spent the past 12 weeks transforming gears, wing nuts and sprockets into energy solutions for farmers working thousands of miles away in sub-Saharan Africa.
The class, called “Appropriate Technology for the Developing World,” was inspired by a trip that faculty member John Morrell took to Africa in 2009 with an international team of scientists, after learning that African farmers often earn just $1 to $2 a day. (more…)
More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world’s first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology.
Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called “gain medium,” usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light-light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another. (more…)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Bob Woodward ’65 discussed “Secrets: Uncovering Mysteries in the 21st Century” during a conversation with Steven Brill ’72, LAW ’75, founder of the Yale Journalism Initiative, and Paul Needham ’11, journalism scholar and former editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. (more…)
A new study on gaming and health in adolescents, conducted by researchers at Yale School of Medicine, found some significant gender differences linked to gaming as well as important health risks associated with problematic gaming. Published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics, the study is among the first and largest to examine possible health links to gaming and problematic gaming in a community sample of adolescents.
Rani Desai, associate professor of psychiatry and epidemiology and public health at Yale, and colleagues anonymously surveyed 4,028 adolescents about their gaming, problems associated with gaming and other health behaviors. They found that 51.2% of the teens played video games (76.3% of boys and 29.2% of girls). The study not only revealed that, overall, there were no negative health consequences of gaming in boys, but that gaming was linked to lower odds of smoking regularly. Among girls, however, gaming was associated with getting into serious fights and carrying a weapon to school. (more…)
