In 2002, Ronald Breaker, incoming department chair of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, discovered riboswitches, and his lab continues to identify new classes of these small functional RNAs.
Dark matter, an important component of most cosmological theories, is being investigated by several new experiments, including the Free Electron Laser, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, and Project LUX.
The insulin pump, developed at Yale in the 1970s, revolutionized the management of Type 1 Diabetes, but manual pump adjustment can be inexact. Now, researchers are designing an artificial pancreas that aims to imitate the natural organ’s function of keeping blood sugar levels in a safe range.