Yale

Have you had your daily serving of vegetables? This seemingly simple question is in fact very difficult to answer, for children and adults alike. Luckily, a new handheld laser scanner devised by researchers at Yale University and the University of Utah promises to put a swift end to veggie dodging, while also helping scientists to measure exactly how our diet affects our health.  Read More

Ever wondered if a certain species of animal can be found where you live? The Map of Life website aims to answer this question. A Yale University-led project built on a Google Maps platform, it lists virtually all of the vertebrate animals that can be found at any one point in the world.  Read More

Doctors and scientists wishing to decode a human genome can now do so in a day for US$1,000 a pop using the recently-released Ion Proton sequencer. With a price tag of $149,000, though, the machine isn’t cheap – nor is it the be-all and end-all of desktop gene sequencing. For one thing, the tiny $900 MinION sequencer should be available soon. Also, a team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Yale University have now developed a concept of their own, which could end up providing an even less expensive high-speed sequencer.  Read More

Unless you're a rodent, it's probably too early to get excited about the possibility of being able to eat all you want, be a couch potato and still not gain weight, but new research using a strain of specially-modified mice indicates that just such an unlikely scenario might one day be possible. Recently, a team of scientists from UC Irvine (UCI), Yale and Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy discovered they could bring this metabolic miracle about in the lab by blocking the actions of a marijuana-like compound that regulates energy metabolism.  Read More

Circadian rhythms are a roughly 24-hour cycle governing biochemical, physiological, or behavioral processes that have been widely observed not only in humans, but other animals, fungi, cyanobacteria and plants. In plants, circadian rhythms help synchronize biological processes with day and night to control photosynthesis, tell the plant what season it is, and the best time to flower to attract insects. Yale University researchers have now identified a key genetic gear that keeps the circadian clock in plants ticking, offering the prospect of engineering plants that can grow all year round and in locations where that's is not currently possible.  Read More

In news that offers hope to millions of chrome-domes everywhere – yours truly included – Yale researchers have made a discovery that could lead to new treatments for baldness. While men with male pattern baldness still have stem cells in follicle roots, they need signals from within the skin to grow hair. Until now, the source of those signals that trigger hair growth has been unclear, but the Yale researchers claim to have now discovered it.  Read More

Scientists at Yale University have done what materials scientists have been trying to do for decades – create a material that boasts the look, strength and durability of metal that can be molded into complex shapes as simply and cheaply as plastic. The scientists say the development could have the same impact on society as the development of synthetic plastics last century and they have already used the novel metals to create complex shapes, such as metallic bottles, watch cases, miniature resonators and biomedical implants, that are twice as strong as typical steel and can be molded in less than a minute.  Read More

Much to the distaste of James Bond villains everywhere, scientists from Yale University recently demonstrated not a new, more powerful type of laser, but actually its opposite – the world’s first anti-laser. The device receives incoming beams of light, which interfere with one another in such a way as to cancel each other out. It could apparently have valuable applications in a number of technologies, such as optical computing and radiology.  Read More

In order for quantum computers to become a reality, it would be hugely helpful if scientists were able to supercool molecules. If a temperature of near absolute zero (-273C/-460F) could be achieved, then the oscillations associated with the molecules’ low energies could be used in the creation of quantum bits for use in quantum processors. Recently, researchers at Yale University got a step closer to that goal, by using laser light to cool molecules.  Read More