Almost all star systems are out of kilter. Take our Solar System, for example. All the planets from fiery Mercury out to distant Neptune orbit in roughly the same direction around the Sun. But the Sun is spinning too, and its spin axis is offset by just over seven degrees from the planets’ orbital plane. […]

Anyone who has gone for a walk in the woods can tell you that forests are impossibly dense with life. From groundhogs and squirrels scampering over rocks, to birds flitting through the canopy, to trees sprawling across the soil, every part of a forest seems to exist in a state of constant growth and motion. […]

For decades, scientists have observed the intimate connection between mental health and digestive disease. Stress can trigger flare-ups of irritable bowel symptoms, and depression often coincides with gut inflammation. Yet how the immune system bridges these organs at the cellular level long remained an open question. A new paper in Nature, led by Yale rheumatologist […]

It’s 1993, and dinosaurs are having a moment—and it’s not the release of Jurassic Park. Deep in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, an expedition by paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History is reshaping our understanding of the prehistoric past. The expedition was led by Mark Norell (GSAS ’88), who at the time was a freshly […]

Editor’s note: On October 7, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” Michel Devoret is the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics […]

Art by Melody Jiang Neurodegenerative disease is the ultimate scourge—it steals our loved ones away by eroding both their minds and bodies. As the global population grows older, complex age-related disorders like neurodegenerative disease are becoming more prevalent, posing a formidable challenge to modern medicine. For most of human history, a diagnosis like Alzheimer’s or […]