The communication between the nervous, immune, and metabolic systems changes as people age. A team led by Christina Camell and Vishwa Deep Dixit of the Yale School of Medicine discovered a subset of macrophages at this intersection that could open the door for new strategies to keep people healthier longer.
If cancer cells can’t find the highways of the body, they can’t spread and become more lethal. A mathematical model developed by Andre Levchenko and JinSeok Park of the Yale Systems Biology Institute provides a framework to explain cell migration behavior that can be implemented down the line to keep cells searching longer.
Broken DNA can put us on the path towards fixing cancer. Research by Peter Glazer and Ranjit Bindra of the Yale Cancer Center suggests that carcinogenic mutations most current therapies aim to repair can instead serve as selecting agents for better drug targeting with DNA repair inhibitors.
Deceptively flimsy, sea sponges may just be the key to stronger and more effective material design. Michael Monn and Haneesh Kesari investigated the structure properties of the rod-like spicules that give the sponges their shape and found that their tapered shape makes them 33% less likely to buckle under pressure.
Over on West Campus is Yale’s Landscape Lab, a new home base for the Urban Farm. Director and recent graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Justin Freiberg hopes to create a space in which environmental research can flourish.
One of the oldest cold cases in history is the death of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old hominin. John Kappelman, who completed his undergraduate training at Yale, did some detective work on Lucy’s skeleton; an analysis of her bone fractures revealed that she may have died from falling out of a tree.