Small bypass vessels which act as a ‘back-up system’ for the heart’s main arteries play a significant role in reducing the mortality of patients with coronary artery disease, according to new research. (more…)
A new study puts an end to the longstanding debate about how archaic birds went extinct, suggesting they were virtually wiped out by the same meteorite impact that put an end to dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
For decades, scientists have debated whether birds from the Cretaceous period — which are very different from today’s modern bird species — died out slowly or were killed suddenly by the Chicxulub meteorite. The uncertainty was due in part to the fact that very few fossil birds from the end of this era have been discovered. (more…)
If the brain goes hungry, Twinkies look a lot better, a study led by researchers at Yale University and the University of Southern California has found.
Brain imaging scans show that when glucose levels drop, an area of the brain known to regulate emotions and impulses loses the ability to dampen desire for high-calorie food, according to the study published online September 19 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. (more…)
Max Webster, an undergraduate who founded and directs Climate Voices, a Yale-based NGO working to publicize the human rights impacts of climate change, recently attended the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany. He shared his experiences, frustrations and insights about the meeting and his own mission with the Yale Daily Bulletin.
Bonn, Germany is not a typical tourist destination. Unless you are paying a visit to the birthplace of Beethoven, you are likely to be there only to attend a meeting of one of the 17 United Nations’ institutions housed in the city’s official U.N. campus. (more…)
A team of scientists has discovered the youngest dinosaur preserved in the fossil record before the catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago. The finding indicates that dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to the impact and provides further evidence as to whether the impact was in fact the cause of their extinction.
Researchers from Yale University discovered the fossilized horn of a ceratopsian — likely a Triceratops, which are common to the area — in the Hell Creek formation in Montana last year. They found the fossil buried just five inches below the K-T boundary, the geological layer that marks the transition from the Cretaceous period to the Tertiary period at the time of the mass extinction that took place 65 million years ago. (more…)
The earliest known image of an Egyptian ruler wearing the “White Crown” associated with Egyptian dynastic power has been brought to light by an international team of archaeologists led by Egyptologists from Yale University.
Carved around 3200 BCE, this unique record of a royal celebration at the dawn of the Egyptian dynastic period was found at a site discovered almost a half-century ago by Egyptologist Labib Habachi at Nag el-Hamdulab, on the West Bank of the Nile to the north of Aswan. (more…)
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…)
