Yale Scientific Magazine

Tropical forests are often prized for their incredible biodiversity. But the true value of tropical forestsalso rests in their ability to act as environmental buffers. Tropical forests are extremely useful carbon sinks, or stores of carbon. Because of the high abundance of photosynthesizers such as trees, forests ultimately remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere […]

Everyday life is filled with invisible hazards—dust, pollen, and stray food proteins—that can push the immune system into overdrive. Even tiny exposures, like a crumb from a peanut or a speck of dust, can trigger severe, sometimes life-threatening allergic reactions. Allergies occur when the immune system mounts an exaggerated response, driven by an antibody known […]

In the microscopic world, chemical signals are everywhere. As organisms seek out nutrients and flee from predators, they rely on invisible chemical gradients that ripple throughout their environments. For the single-celled prokaryote, Escherichia coli, survival depends on navigating this information-rich chemical landscape. However, new research suggests that E. coli can access ...

A particle accelerator is like a bizarre ice cream shop where new flavors are created by smashing together existing ones. You take a sample of an ice cream you haven’t tried before, and before you can taste it, the swirl melts into the classic familiar flavors in less than a trillionth of a second. Physicists […]

For decades, the fight against malaria has targeted its chief carrier: the mosquito. Throughout the twentieth century, epidemiologists advocated ambitious public health campaigns against mosquitoes, leading to the widespread use of powerful insecticides. The most popular was dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). However, DDT was eventually discovered to have devastating environ...