All posts tagged: Yale University

Inside JD Vance’s Little-Known Years at Yale Law

Inside JD Vance’s Little-Known Years at Yale Law

Published by Sam Flores

In June, just after my conversation with Heilbrunn, Vance visited the Richard M. Nixon Library and spoke favorably of the disgraced ex-president. In today’s social media world, Vance said, the Watergate scandal wouldn’t last more than 12 hours. In fact, the two politicians share other traits: their anger toward elites and their belief in a so-called deep state. And one other thing: Nixon believed in conspiracies. As a California senator, an ally of the virulently anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy, Nixon had peddled the myth that the US government was riddled with Soviet spies. Vance, for his part, is a self-avowed conspiracy theorist. This was evident on September 10, 2025, when the Trump White House got word that Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, had been assassinated as he spoke at Utah Valley University. Vance and a few of his team had been texting with Kirk, the VP’s close friend, just before the shots were fired. “I walked into Susie [Wiles]’s office and she was crying,” Vance had told me last year. “Usha happened …

Tiny DNA fragments reveal two extinct Galápagos tortoise lineages

Tiny DNA fragments reveal two extinct Galápagos tortoise lineages

Published by Jenni Sidey

DNA from museum tortoise bones with as little as 0.008× genome coverage was enough to recover evolutionary relationships that conventional analyses could miss. The analysis supports distinct extinct giant tortoise lineages on San Cristóbal and Santa Fe, while also connecting uncertain museum specimens to the lost San Cristóbal population. The approach could make degraded museum DNA more useful for conservation, including efforts to identify living hybrids carrying genetic ancestry from extinct Galápagos tortoises. Less than 1% of a genome might look like too little to reconstruct an animal’s past. In old Galápagos giant tortoise bones, however, those scattered fragments were enough to place two extinct lineages back onto the islands’ evolutionary family tree. A Yale-led team combined several computational tools to analyze ultra-low-coverage genomes from historical museum specimens. The approach identified distinct extinct tortoise lineages from San Cristóbal and Santa Fe, even when sequencing recovered only a tiny fraction of their nuclear DNA. The work shows how specimens once considered too degraded for conventional genomic analysis can still preserve useful evolutionary information. It may also …

Air conditioning cuts heat-related deaths by more than half, but its protection has limits

Air conditioning cuts heat-related deaths by more than half, but its protection has limits

Published by Jenni Sidey

Air conditioning prevented an estimated 5,267 heat-related deaths each year across the contiguous United States, cutting heat-attributable mortality by 57%. The strongest gains occurred as AC use rose from low to moderate levels. Beyond median usage, additional cooling produced little extra reduction in mortality. Affordability remains a major obstacle. More than a quarter of U.S. households report difficulty paying for energy, limiting their ability to use AC when temperatures become dangerous. Air conditioning can make the difference between surviving dangerous heat and becoming another heat-related death, but simply turning the thermostat lower does not keep adding protection. A nationwide analysis from Yale University estimates that household air conditioning prevented 5,267 heat-related deaths each year across the contiguous United States. That amounts to a 57% reduction in heat-attributable mortality, offering one of the clearest measurements yet of how much residential cooling protects people as temperatures rise. The study, published in Nature Health, examined nearly 30 million death records from 3,108 counties between 2010 and 2020. Unlike previous research that largely measured whether households owned air conditioners, …

Tunas became large, warm-blooded predators long after the dinosaur extinction

Tunas became large, warm-blooded predators long after the dinosaur extinction

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tunas did not become large, fast and warm-blooded simply because an asteroid cleared the oceans of competing predators. Their defining traits appeared separately over tens of millions of years, complicating a familiar story about life after mass extinction. The asteroid impact 66 million years ago erased non-avian dinosaurs and many large marine predators. One long-held explanation proposed that tunas and other powerful fishes quickly expanded into the empty ecological roles. A new analysis from Yale University challenges that idea. By combining genetic evidence with fossils, researchers built the most complete time-calibrated evolutionary tree yet for Scombridae, the family that includes tunas, mackerels, bonitos and related fishes. The tree places the family’s origin near the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. Yet the traits that make modern tunas exceptional did not appear together or immediately afterward. Three independent origins of endothermy in Scombridae. Time-calibrated phylogeny of Scombridae estimated using a Bayesian node-dating approach, with branches coloured according to an ancestral state reconstruction of endothermy. (CREDIT: Proceedings of the Royal Society B) “Our results demonstrate the K-Pg extinction did not trigger …

Scientists discover a new monkey species (Likweli) hidden in the Congo rainforest

Scientists discover a new monkey species (Likweli) hidden in the Congo rainforest

Published by Jenni Sidey

Likweli is easy to miss, even for people who know central Africa’s forests well. The small black monkey lives high in dense canopy, moves quietly, and occupies a narrow corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo. An international research team has now identified it as a new species, Colobus congoensis. It is only the fifth African monkey species discovered from a population previously unknown to science in the past 75 years. The recommended common name, Likweli, comes from communities living near its range. Its black coat is broken by orange-cream skin around the mouth and nose, along with a white patch beneath the tail. Colobus congoensis and C. satanas in life. (CREDIT: PLOS One) “Our team evaluated multiple datasets that all reached the same conclusion: Likweli is a distinct species of Colobus monkey we haven’t seen before,” said Julia Arenson, a Yale postdoctoral fellow and study coauthor. “Discovering a primate species is exceptionally rare, especially from populations previously unknown to science.” A decade of uncertain sightings The first clue appeared in 2008, when a field …

Yale stops David Gelernter from teaching classes

Yale stops David Gelernter from teaching classes

Published by Sam Flores

Professor David Gelernter sits in his office at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on Aug. 28, 1997. Brad Clift | Hartford Courant | AP Yale University said Wednesday that it has barred professor David Gelernter from teaching computer science classes, for now, as the university conducts a review of his contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, which included mentioning a Yale student for a potential project. Gelernter’s extensive email correspondence with Epstein came to light after the release of files related to Epstein by the Department of Justice in late January. Among those files is an October 2011 email to Epstein, in which Gelernter mentions a software project to be built. “I have a perfect editoress in mind: Yale sr, worked at Vogue last summer, runs her own campus mag, art major, completely connected, v small goodlooking blonde,” Gelernter wrote. The email was sent three years after Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. Epstein served 13 months in jail in that case. The Yale Daily News reported Tuesday …