YSM Issue 96.3

Yale Scientific 

THE NATION’S OLDEST COLLEGE SCIENCE PUBLICATION • ESTABLISHED IN 1894 

SEPTEMBER 2023 

VOL. 96 NO. 3 • $6.99 

KEEP AN EYE 

ON IT 16 

MEET MOIRÉ MATERIALS 12 

THAT MAGNETIC TOUCH 14 

COVID-19 NASAL SPRAY 

19 

VENUS’ SKINCARE ROUTINE 22

TABLE OF 

VOL. 96 ISSUE NO. 3 

COVER 

16 

A R T 

I C L E 

Keep An Eye On It 

Johnny Yue & Risha Chakraborty 

Yale scientists have uncovered more about the mechanisms of age-related macular degeneration 

(AMD), one of the leading causes of vision loss worldwide. From discovering possible therapeutic 

targets for AMD and other neurodegenerative diseases to uncovering a quantum chemistry 

reaction in the retina, their findings could not only inform potential AMD treatments, but also 

offer applications beyond the eye. 

12 Meet Moiré Materials 

William Archacki 

The newly fabricated ‘moiré materials’ are poised to overhaul light-sensing electronics at an atomic 

level. But how do they work? Yale researchers dove into the quantum world and put their own 

twist on the classic moiré effect recipe. 

14 That Magnetic Touch 

Elizabeth Watson 

The reason why certain meteorites can generate magnetic fields has puzzled the scientific 

community for years. Two Yale researchers propose an answer: collisions between asteroids give 

way to magnetic meteorites. Their new study advances our understanding of asteroids and the 

formation of magnetic dynamos at planetary cores, with potential implications for the upcoming 

NASA mission dubbed ‘Psyche.’ 

19 COVID-19 Nasal Spray 

Evelyn Jiang 

Current mRNA vaccines, injected into the upper arm, excel at activating immune defenses in the 

bloodstream, but are not as effective at rallying protective responses in the upper airway and lungs. A 

team of Yale scientists made major advancements towards developing an mRNA nasal spray vaccine 

using nanoparticles that would offer a geographical advantage when it comes to targeting viral 

respiratory illnesses like COVID-19. 

21 Venus' Skincare Routine 

Cindy Mei & David Gaetano 

The surface of Venus has been observed to be less than a billion years old, which is much younger than 

its known age of 4.5 billion years. Scientists from Yale and the Southwest Research Institute showed that 

high-velocity collision events that happened in the early period of planet formation caused prolonged 

volcanic activity on Venus, leading to resurfacing that gives the planet its youthful appearance. 

2 Yale Scientific Magazine September 2023 www.yalescientific.org

CONTENTS 

More articles online at www.yalescientific.org & https://medium.com/the-scope-yale-scientific-magazines-online-blog 

4 

6 

25 

34 

Q&A 

NEWS 

FEATURES 

SPECIALS 

Can AI Determine the Scent of a Compound Based On Its 

Chemical Structure? • Ximena Leyva Peralta 

Modern-Day Trephination • Andrea Ortega 

Strange Metals • Proud Ua-arak 

Promising New Drug to Combat Resistant HIV • Sofia Arbelaez 

It's All In The Stones • Patrick Wahlig 

Happy Spouse, Happy House • Sunny Vuong 

Deep Learning • Sophia Burick 

Cancer: Not Just Bad Luck? • Sebastian Reyes 

Capturing the Physics of Afro-Textured Hair • Abigail Jolteus 

Super-Sizing Life's Smallest Secrets • Kara Tao 

Teeny Tiny Droplet Batteries • Sharna Saha 

The Brick of Life • Ilora Roy 

Scent-sational Memory Boost • Kenny Cheng 

Harnessing Atomic Breaths • Annli Zhu & Lea Papa 

Barnacle Breadcrumbs • Madeleine Popofsky 

Twinkle, Twinkle, Giant Star • Diya Naik & Robin Tsai 

Undergraduate Profile: Harper Lowrey (YC '24) • Nyla Marcott 

Alumni Profile: Ilana Yurkiewicz (YC '10) • Himani Pattisami 

Science in the Spotlight: Writing For Their Lives • Keya Bajaj 

Science in the Spotlight: Racism in Health • Samuel Obiama 

Counterpoint: The Heaviest Air in the World • Ian Gill 

Perimeter • Isaiah Asbed 

www.yalescientific.org 

September 2023 Yale Scientific Magazine 3

& 

By Ximena Leyva Peralta 

MODERN-DAY TREPHINATION: 

HOW DO YOU SAFELY 

INSERT AN ELECTRODE 

INTO THE BRAIN? 

By Andrea Ortega 

In 6,000 B.C.E., North African physicians treated head ailments 

with trephination—the practice of drilling holes into patients’ 

skulls without anesthesia. Luckily, modern-day trepanning is much 

less invasive. A research team in Geneva, Switzerland is employing 

flexible, biocompatible materials in electrocorticography (ECoG), the 

monitoring of electrical activity associated with the brain. Normally, to 

detect the brain’s signals, neurosurgeons must carve out a ten-squarecentimeter 

section of the skull and insert electrodes through the hole, 

positioning them on the surface of the cerebral cortex. By creating a 

new soft, deployable ECoG system, the team has revolutionized neural 

recording by minimizing risks of infection and brain damage that 

accompany the removal of a large section of the skull. 

The novel soft ECoG system is composed of six spiral-shaped, folded 

arms that form a cylindrical “electrode array,” which extends through 

a one-square-centimeter incision in the skull. The system works by 

administering fluidic pressure into each arm, causing the arms to slowly 

expand within the one-millimeter space between the skull and the 

brain’s surface. Each component of the array is embedded with strain 

sensors, which monitor the deployment of the soft arms and tell the user 

when to stop applying pressure. 

In an in vivo experiment performed on a miniature pig, the soft 

robotic electrodes yielded successful readings of sensory activity 

and did not cause any structural damage. Thus, ECoG could play a 

large role in mapping regions of the brain associated with epilepsy, 

recording the brain’s functions, and controlling the movement of 

prosthetic limbs. Further advances are still necessary, but soft robotics 

demonstrate extraordinary capabilities in laying the groundwork for 

these advancements. ■ 

CAN AI DETERMINE THE 

SCENT OF A COMPOUND 

BASED ON ITS CHEMICAL 

STRUCTURE? 

Scientists have long known that the chemical structure of a 

molecule influences its smell. However, it’s still unclear how 

tiny structural changes in a molecule’s structure can turn a 

sweet, delicate scent into a fishy stench. 

Enter artificial intelligence (AI). Researchers from the startup 

Osmo based in Cambridge, Massachusetts trained a type 

of AI system called a neural network to predict a compound’s 

odor based on its structure. The scientists instructed the system 

to assign descriptors from a list of fifty-five, such as “grassy” or 

“fruity,” to a scent. The AI system then generated an odor map by 

screening roughly five thousand well-studied molecules. 

To test the validity of this map, a panel of fifteen trained study 

participants sniffed a set of compounds with undocumented 

scents. Their answers were averaged to account for genetic 

differences, personal experiences, and preferences. The 

researchers found that the AI system achieved results comparable 

to the human assessments for fifty-three percent of the molecules. 

This new odor map could be a helpful reference tool when 

designing new scents in the food or perfume industries. But 

it doesn’t seem to reveal much about how humans interpret 

smell. Odor descriptors are quite subjective, and it’s unclear if 

averaging the answers of a group of people is the best way to 

obtain Aa “correct” description of a smell. 

Most smells in the real world come from a mixture of 

compounds. The next frontier for the AI system may be to 

chemically describe the complex smoky smell of freshly brewed 

coffee or the aromatic sweetness of a new perfume. ■ 


The Editor-in-Chief Speaks 

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE 

Often, scientific advances don’t involve the creation of never-before-seen 

technologies or completely novel theories; instead, scientists apply previous 

research in unconventional ways, bringing together disparate fields in search 

of new discoveries. What “innovation” or “advancement” means to each team of 

researchers will vary, but if you look closely, most are the product of collaboration 

across disciplines. 

In this issue, we highlight several of these developments made possible by 

interdisciplinary inspiration, and explore how they may propel their respective 

fields into the future. Our cover story features two groups at the Yale School of 

Medicine who have uncovered more about the mechanisms of age-related macular 

degeneration—one of the leading causes of blindness in the world—through the 

seemingly unrelated lenses of neurodegeneration and quantum chemistry (pg. 16). 

In another article, we recount a geochemist’s resourceful use of barnacle shells to 

decode the ocean path of lost Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, whose final resting 

place has not been uncovered since the plane vanished in 2014 (pg. 30). 

Just as important as looking to the future is carefully studying the past—whether 

for inspiration, for wisdom, or for guidance. This issue’s alumni profile features Dr. 

Ilana Yurkiewicz (YC ’10), who, thirteen years ago, was in my very position writing 

to you as the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Scientific. She has since gone on to become 

an incredibly successful physician-writer, and continues to serve as a role model 

not just for myself, but for everyone at YSM (pg. 35). One of our Science in the 

Spotlight articles takes us back even further—nearly a century back—to highlight 

the untold stories of Jane Stafford and other pioneering female science journalists 

who overcame all odds in the male-dominated industry to leave an enduring legacy 

that is still felt today (pg. 36). 

Speaking of the present, the Yale Scientific itself has been undergoing a few 

changes. The YSM offices in Welch Hall and 305 Crown St. were, despite our best 

efforts, repurposed by the Yale College Dean’s Office this past summer, so we have 

worked tirelessly to find new storage spaces for our collection of magazines dating 

back to the 19 th century. In September, I established a permanent installation of 

our YSM archives in the Benjamin Franklin college library, which presents a nearcomprehensive 

display of our historical issues that is accessible to any interested 

students, staff, faculty, and alumni. I would like to extend a special thanks to 

Professor Jordan Peccia, Head of Benjamin Franklin College, and Maria Bouffard 

for their time and generosity in making this timeless installation possible. 

Finally, I would like to thank our contributors, masthead, advisors, and readers 

who have continued to support our mission of accessible science communication 

throughout the years. Here’s to the generations of those who came before us, and to 

those who have yet to come. 

About the Art 

Alex Dong, Editor-in-Chief 

This cover illustration depicts researchers 

zooming into the retina and investigating the 

macula through machine learning methods. 

Catherine Kwon, Cover Artist 

MASTHEAD 

September 2023 VOL. 96 NO. 3 

EDITORIAL BOARD 

Editor-in-Chief 

Managing Editors 

News Editor 

Features Editor 

Special Sections Editor 

Articles Editor 

Online Editors 

Copy Editors 

Scope Editors 

PRODUCTION & DESIGN 

Production Manager 

Layout Editors 

Art Editor 

Cover Artist 

Photography Editor 

BUSINESS 

Co-Publishers 

Operations Manager 

Subscriptions Manager 

Outreach Manager 

OUTREACH 

Synapse Presidents 

Synapse Vice President 

Synapse Outreach Coordinators 

Synapse Events Coordinator 

WEB 

Web Managers 

Head of Social Media 

Social Media Coordinators 

STAFF 

Sanya Abbasey 

Luna Aguilar 

Ricardo Ahumada 


Dinesh Bojja 

Risha Chakraborty 

Kelly Chen 

Leah Dayan 

Steven Dong 

Chris Esneault 

Erin Foley 

Mia Gawith 

Simona Hausleitner 

Tamasen Hayward 

Katherine He 

Miriam Huerta 

Sofia Jacobson 

Jenna Kim 

Catherine Kwon 

Charlotte Leakey 

Ximena Levya Peralta 

Yurou Liu 

Samantha Liu 

Helena Lyng-Olsen 

Kaley Mafong 

Georgio Maroun 

Cindy Mei 

Lee Ngatia Muita 

Lea Papa 

Hiren Parekh 

Himani Pattisam 

Emily Poag 

Madeleine Popofsky 

Tony Potchernikov 

Zara Ranglin 

Yusuf Rasheed 

Alex Roseman 

Ilora Roy 

Ignacio Ruiz-Sanchez 

Noora Said 

Alex Dong 

Madison Houck 

Sophia Li 

Sophia Burick 

Anavi Uppal 

Hannah Han 

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Mia Gawith 


Matthew Blair 

Jamie Seu 

Samantha Liu 

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Malia Kuo 

Madeleine Popofsky 

Sydney Scott 

Kara Tao 

Catherine Kwon 

Jenny Wong 

Lucas Loman 

Dinara Bolat 

Tori Sodeinde 

Georgio Maroun 

Yusuf Rasheed 

Hannah Barsouk 

Sofia Jacobson 

Jessica Le 

Kaley Mafong 

Lawrence Zhao 

Anjali Dhanekula 

Abigail Jolteus 

Emily Shang 

Elizabeth Watson 

Keya Bajaj 

Eunsoo Hyun 

Jamie Seu 

Kiera Suh 

Yamato Takabe 

Joey Tan 

Kara Tao 

Connie Tian 

Van Anh Tran 

Sheel Trivedi 

Robin Tsai 

Sherry Wang 

Elise Wilkins 

Aiden Wright 

Elizabeth Wu 

Nathan Wu 

Johnny Yue 

Iffat Zarif 

Hanwen Zhang 

Lawrence Zhao 

Celina Zhao 

Matthew Zoerb 

The Yale Scientific Magazine (YSM) is published four times a year by Yale 

Scientific Publications, Inc. Third class postage paid in New Haven, CT 

06520. Non-profit postage permit number 01106 paid for May 19, 1927 

under the act of August 1912. ISN:0091-287. We reserve the right to edit 

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yale.edu. Special thanks to the Yale Science and Engineering Association.

NEWS 

Physics / Medicine 

TOO STRANGE 

TO BE TRUE? 

A RACE AGAINST 

RESISTANCE 

THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF 

STRANGE METALS 

PROMISING NEW DRUG TO 

COMBAT RESISTANT HIV 

BY PROUD UA-ARAK 

BY SOFIA ARBELAEZ 

IMAGE COURTESY OF MARTIN DE ARRIBA 

IMAGE COURTESY OF KAROLINA GRABOWSKA 

The concept of electrons may have first been 

introduced in our chemistry classes with neat, easyto-follow 

Bohr models. But what happens when they 

don’t act the way scientists anticipate? Graduate student 

Kirsty Scott and Professor Eduardo H. da Silva Neto from 

the Yale Department of Physics set out to discover the 

nature of these so-called “strange metals.” 

According to basic quantum mechanics, an electron can 

be described as a quantum mechanical wave. “But in the 

strange metal phase, the wave description seems to not be 

applicable, which leaves us in a position where even the 

most advanced theories don’t seem able to explain what’s 

going on,” da Silva Neto said. 

The researchers were determined to uncover what 

happens at the electron level within these metals. Using 

a method called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, they 

found a ‘quasi-circular’ pattern in the way electrons scatter 

at low energies. This means that when an electron changes 

direction while moving, it is free to change to any direction. 

‘Quasi-circular’ patterns have typically been assumed to be 

necessary for strange metals, but have not, until now, been 

directly measured. 

Matter matters. Scott, the leader of this study, believes that 

knowledge of the materials we use shapes our technology 

and therefore the society around us, as evidenced by 

historical periods like the “Stone Age” and the “Bronze 

Age” being defined by the materials of their time. Scott 

is enthusiastic about being part of a scientific endeavor 

where the study of novel material behaviors could usher in 

society’s next epoch. ■ 

Yale physician Onyema Ogbuagu has been involved in 

clinical trials for HIV for more than a decade. Trained 

as a medical student in Nigeria during the peak of 

the HIV epidemic there, Ogbuagu has seen HIV treatment 

evolve considerably over the course of his career. “At the time 

[I was trained], reversing immune deficiency was a dream,” 

Ogbuagu said. Nowadays, directly managing HIV is a real 

option. However, multidrug resistance and therapeutic regimen 

complexity remain important barriers to treatment. 

Ogbuagu published a landmark phase-three clinical trial testing 

the effectiveness of Lenacapavir, a recently FDA-approved HIV 

treatment. Administered as a biannual injection, Lenacapavir is 

the longest-acting antiviral agent that has been approved for HIV 

treatment. As an antiretroviral therapy, Lenacapavir interrupts 

viral replication of HIV in the body, slowing the progression of 

the disease, improving immune function, and reducing the risk 

of HIV transmission. The treatment is of particular interest for 

patients demonstrating multidrug resistance. 

Lenacapavir contributed to a virologic suppression rate of over 

eighty percent, much higher than the average virologic suppression 

rates observed in other multidrug-resistant trials. “[The trial] 

holds promise that we’re able to reach certain people that wouldn’t 

be successfully treated with [other] regimens,” Ogbuagu said. 

As this medication is being tested to treat HIV, Ogbuagu 

is also hopeful that HIV treatment options may evolve into a 

wide range of different methods and frequencies of delivery. 

“People could have the luxury of choosing a method that’s 

effective and that fits their lifestyle and their preferences,” he 

said. Ogbuagu’s study certainly brings his hopes of creating 

simpler, more effective therapeutic regimens to improve 

quality of life closer to reality. ■ 


Ecology / Public Health 

NEWS 

IT’S ALL IN 

THE STONES 

HAPPY SPOUSE, 

HAPPY HOUSE 

RIVER EROSION KEY TO 

FISH BIODIVERSITY 

BY PATRICK WAHLIG 

MARITAL STRESS ASSOCIATED 

WITH WORSE HEART 

ATTACK RECOVERY 

BY SUNNY VUONG 

IMAGE COURTESY OF ISAAC SZABO 

IMAGE COURTESY OF TIMUR WEBER 

A 

tiny, three-inch fish might hold the key to unlocking 

an ancient secret of evolution. 

Tucked away in the southern Appalachian Mountains 

is the Greenfin Darter (Nothonotus chlorobranchius), a hardy fish 

that exhibits tremendous genetic diversity. Until recently, the 

driver of this diversity was unknown. Researcher Maya Stokes, 

along with Yale Professor Thomas Near and a team of dedicated 

scientists, set out to discover the mechanism behind what appears 

to be real-time allopatric speciation, or speciation prompted by 

geographic isolation, in the Appalachian Mountains. 

Near puts the overall research question simply. “Why are 

we seeing species richness within the rivers themselves?” he 

said. The answer lies in the stones—erosion, to be exact. 

The Greenfin Darter is selective of its habitat, preferring 

hard metamorphic rock over soft sedimentary rock. 

Erosional processes in the Tennessee River, however, have 

exposed areas of sedimentary rock, separating regions 

of metamorphic rock. This has forced Greenfin Darter 

populations into isolation. The team’s research displays that 

erosion of metamorphic rock has severely reduced gene flow 

between populations of N. chlorobranchius, driving genetic 

divergence up. This research—an intersection between the 

fields of ichthyology (the study of fishes) and geoscience— 

has allowed a novel explanation of species divergence in what 

Near calls “geologically quiet” areas without tectonic influence. 

Stokes is thrilled with the recent work. “We tried to 

quantitatively combine data sets across disciplines,” she said. 

“We were able to integrate these datasets fairly seamlessly, 

which allowed us to highlight a novel geologic mechanism.” 

As research endeavors become increasingly integrative, this 

study is an inspiring example of interdisciplinary success. ■ 

Heartbreak is purely figurative, referring to the sadness 

over a loved one wounding our emotional state, not 

our biological heart. However, a new study from 

researchers at the Yale School of Public Health indicates that 

the concept can become literal—at least, for those married 

or in a committed relationship. The study found that among 

1,593 adults who were treated for a heart attack, there was 

an independent association between severe marital stress 

and worse recovery through their first year after hospital 

discharge. This association was strong even after adjusting 

for patient demographics. 

The authors of the study, doctoral graduate Cenjing Zhu 

and Professor of Epidemiology Judith Lichtman, found that 

when following up after a year on symptoms reported by 

patients such as depression, chest pain, and overall quality of 

life, a strong association with marital stress still appeared in 

every aspect of their recovery. 

To the researchers, this calls attention to a need for 

better awareness that marital stress and other factors in the 

psychosocial domain could be important factors during the 

recovery process. “We absolutely have to think about all of 

the acute care, but we also have to broaden our perspective 

to think about other aspects that may be contributing to how 

well somebody recovers,” Lichtman said. 

“From a care provider perspective, there should be more 

prompting during their day-to-day communications with 

their patients about how they’re doing.” Zhu said. “It’s not 

only about numbers in the clinical factors, but also their 

overall well-being.” The study emphasizes the overlooked 

importance of overall social and mental well-being on 

physical recovery. ■ 



FOCUS 

Artificial Intelligence 

DEEP 

LEARNING 

An Unexpected 

Tool To Fight 

Heart Valve Disease 

BY SOPHIA BURICK 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CAROLINE BUCKY 

Severe aortic stenosis (AS) is a common form of valvular heart 

disease that involves the aortic valve becoming unusually 

narrow, affecting five percent of people above the age of 

sixty-five. Early diagnosis is essential to successful intervention. 

Usually, AS is detected through Doppler echocardiography, or 

ultrasound imaging of the heart. However, performing Doppler 

echocardiography requires access to specialized equipment as well 

as professionals who know how to operate the equipment and 

interpret the results. This discrepancy between the large population 

of individuals at risk for AS and the small amount of resources 

available for its diagnosis makes it difficult to achieve early diagnosis 

of AS, negatively impacting patient outcomes. 

Researchers at the Cardiovascular Data Science (CarDS) Lab at 

Yale recently published in European Heart Journal a creative new 

approach to making AS diagnostic tools more accessible—combining 

deep learning with simple ultrasound scans. Handheld devices that 

use ultrasound imaging to visualize the heart are much more widely 

available than the equipment necessary for Doppler echocardiography, 

but the images and videos alone produced by these ultrasound scans 

are difficult to use to diagnose AS. “Patients are often not seen by a 

cardiologist until they are very late in their disease stage,” Evangelos 

Oikonomou, a postdoctoral fellow in the CarDS Lab, said. “There’s a big 

opportunity to diagnose the disease earlier in this patient population.” 

The researchers at the CarDS Lab developed a novel deep learning 

model that is capable of using 2D echocardiograms, which are produced 

by simple ultrasound imaging, to identify AS without specialized 

Doppler equipment. Deep learning is a kind of machine learning 

that employs computer networks built to resemble human neural 

networks—in short, it teaches computers how to learn like humans. 

“You train the algorithm by showing it multiple different images 

and giving feedback to the algorithm as to whether its prediction 

[about what the image is] is correct or wrong,” Oikonomou said. 

“What the algorithm does is every time it gets [its prediction] wrong, 

it tries to adjust its approach and learn something from its errors.” 

These deep learning algorithms are often more perceptive to patterns 

than humans, allowing them to reach conclusions that might not be 

apparent to a doctor trying to interpret ultrasound images. “That’s 

where the performance of an AI algorithm may actually exceed that of 

a human operator,” Oikonomou said. 

To develop their algorithm, the researchers needed to train it to be 

able to recognize severe AS. To do this, they sourced a massive amount 

of 2D cardiac ultrasound videos from patients in the Yale New Haven 

Health system with no AS, non-severe AS, and severe AS. Using this 

dataset, the algorithm learned how to identify specific phenomena 

in the videos associated with each class of AS diagnosis. Once the 

researchers trained the algorithm to learn what to look for, they had 

to validate that the algorithm was truly capable of differentiating 

non-AS, non-severe AS, and severe AS ultrasound videos. To prove 

the algorithm’s success, they had it sort a new dataset from different 

patients in New England and California. The deep learning algorithm 

proved highly accurate in sorting the videos across all patient datasets. 

The researchers’ vision is that their algorithm can be used by any 

medical provider with a simple ultrasound scanner to catch AS early. 

This removes the existing barriers to AS diagnosis, like specialized 

Doppler echocardiography equipment and the training of medical 

providers to accurately interpret results, making AS diagnoses more 

accessible to patients and simpler for providers. If the algorithm 

is widely used, it could be a major step forward for successful AS 

intervention. “Hopefully, we can make this as cost-efficient as possible,” 

Oikonomou said. “It’s very easy to do—it takes two or three minutes, 

and people can probably be screened once in their lifetime.” 

Beyond its immediate impact in improving outcomes for AS patients, 

this deep learning algorithm reveals the broader potential of applying 

cutting-edge computer science to healthcare. “I think this could be 

applied to other things such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which 

is a genetic heart condition that is very common but most people don’t 

ever get diagnosed,” Oikonomou said. 

With increasingly high patient burdens and medical staff stretched 

thin, it’s inevitable that some patients will slip through the cracks of 

the healthcare system. Machine and deep learning models could be 

used across a variety of applications to identify diagnoses that are 

sometimes missed by medical staff. The CarDS Lab’s algorithm is 

proof of the great positive impact that computer science and artificial 

intelligence stand to have on patient care and outcomes. ■ 


Biology 

FOCUS 

CANCER: NOT 

JUST BAD LUCK? 

How Cancer May Be 

More Than Just 

Random Mutations 

BY SEBASTIAN REYES 

IMAGE COURTESY OF NIH IMAGE GALLERY 

It is well known that our risk for cancer increases as we age, but we still 

don’t understand why. How might the wrinkles marking the corners 

of our eyes relate to cancerous cells suddenly forming inside us? 

Previous research established a high correlation between cancer risk and 

the number of replications a cell undergoes throughout our life, leading to 

the hypothesis that random, unlucky mutations during cellular division 

are a notable driver of tumor formation. This aptly named “bad luck” 

hypothesis has been widely debated, with scientists questioning how the 

theory accounts for the impact of environmental factors. Now, researchers 

at Yale University are proposing an answer: an age-related chemical 

signature hiding in our genomes. 

The study, conducted by recent PhD graduate Christopher Minteer and 

former Yale Assistant Professor Morgan Levine explores a set of epigenetic 

alterations called DNA methylation—that is, chemical attachments to the 

genome rather than changes within the DNA sequence itself—associated 

with aging and risk of diseases like cancer. Through the repeated replication 

of astrocytes, a type of cell found in the central nervous system ideal for 

this type of manipulation, Minteer’s team was able to mimic the rapid, 

unconstrained replication of tumorous cells. Having achieved tumor-like 

growth, the team then designed an algorithm to quantify the epigenetic 

signals in the cells. They eventually identified a progressive methylation 

signature that they called CellDRIFT, the strength of which increased with 

age across multiple tissues and differentiated tumors from normal tissue. 

Through additional examination, Minteer’s team found that the 

CellDRIFT signature was elevated not only in cancerous cells, but also in 

healthy tissues that were predisposed to tumor formation. They examined 

healthy breast tissue from breast cancer patients prior to treatment and 

found that even the tumor-free tissues displayed an elevated CellDRIFT 

signature compared to non-cancerous controls, suggesting that 

CellDRIFT could predate the formation of tumors and serve as a warning 

sign. They also found that its presence was strongly correlated with poor 

patient survival, meaning that CellDRIFT, along with related measures, 

may help researchers and clinicians predict cancer aggression. 

“We provided further context to the ‘bad luck’ hypothesis and created 

a tool to better study it,” Minteer said. While the “bad luck” hypothesis 

links the majority of cancer risk to random, sudden mutations in the 


genome, the CellDRIFT signature appears gradually. It slowly increases 

over time, meaning that CellDRIFT increments can vary depending on 

environmental factors, such as exposure to carcinogens. Thus, CellDRIFT 

can help provide a more thorough and unified understanding of the 

previously known underlying causes of tumor formation. 

The researchers also explored whether they could reverse or otherwise 

reset the CellDRIFT signature. Namely, they manipulated stem cells to 

“reset” through a process known as Yamanaka factor reprogramming—a 

process in which special genes are introduced to cells to transform them 

back into an unspecialized state, thus allowing them to re-develop into new 

types of cells. Each instance of Yamanaka factor reprogramming consists 

of three phases: initiation, in which the cell begins to show genetic signs 

of resetting, maturation, in which the bulk of the reprogramming process 

occurs, and stabilization, in which the cells settle into their new form. 

Minteer’s team observed a dramatic decrease in CellDRIFT during the 

maturation phase, but the signature increased again once the cells entered 

the stabilization phase. In other words, they found promising evidence to 

suggest that although CellDRIFT cannot be stopped completely, it can be 

impeded, thus providing a new approach to preventive cancer treatments. 

Minteer’s team also recognized that while CellDRIFT presence can be 

used to predict many aspects of cancer risk and aggression, calculating 

the signature is a difficult task in itself. Thus, they constructed a package 

to help clinicians and researchers quickly and efficiently quantify the 

signature, making their discovery more accessible to others unfamiliar 

with this field. “[The package] is uniquely suited to serve as a resource in 

the lab,” Minteer said. Although it still requires additional validation and 

experimentation, Minteer expressed excitement about the potential future 

uses of this package in both experimental and clinical settings. 

While the use of epigenetic tools in clinics is still in its infancy, the 

findings of Minteer’s team are promising. CellDRIFT is unique in that it 

considers the myriad of factors that trigger the formation of an individual’s 

specific tumor, rather than reducing these factors to “just bad luck.” This 

provision of tailored cancer diagnoses makes CellDRIFT a compelling tool 

for clinicians to understand the full cancer narrative, and its contribution 

to the debate about cancer’s origin suggests a new, encouraging role for 

cancer prevention. ■ 


FOCUS 

Computer Science 

REPRESENTATION 

IN ANIMATION 

Computer Science 

Captures The Physics 

of Afro-Textured Hair 

BY ABIGAIL JOLTEUS 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF FAREED SALMON 

In the past, in computer animation, many Black characters would 

have poorly animated braids, or more frequently, just have 

straight hair. For years, computer animations would use these 

inaccurate representations of tightly coiled hair, also known as afrotextured 

hair. Recently, as more people of color have been hired and 

cast for animation roles, the animation industry has moved towards 

becoming more diverse and inclusive than ever before. 

However, this increase in diversity did not translate into more 

accurate animation of afro-textured hair. “The way that hair 

has been simulated, at least since the ‘90s, has been many line 

segments chained together, and making them small enough gives 

a smooth appearance,” said Theodore Kim, an associate professor 

of computer science at Yale. Animating hair is achieved through 

various mathematical equations where the twists of each strand 

must be carefully simulated for accurate hair motion. “Therefore, 

when a character shakes their head, you can see realistic movement,” 

Kim said. However, this process only works for the overwhelming 

majority of animated characters who are white and have straight 

hair. “The trouble appears with the physics equations selected for 

simulation,” he said. 

A team of computer scientists at Yale have created a novel 

physical model that allows for more accurate animation of tightly 

coiled hair, more realistically capturing the way it looks and moves. 

“We were concerned with three different types of elastic energy 

for hair: stretching, bending, and twisting energies,” said Haomiao 

Wu, one of the lead researchers on the project. “These energies 

constrain how the strands behave in an elastic way. We proposed 

a different set of those three energies for a model so that it is more 

stable.” In other words, they wanted to capture the true essence of 

afro-textured hair using sophisticated mathematical modeling. 

Their isotropic, hyperelastic model was specifically designed for 

better simulation of tightly coiled hair. “Isotropic means that no 

matter the direction, the restorative force is the same,” said Alvin 

Shi, another one of the lead researchers on the study. Restorative 

force is the force needed for an object to return to its initial size 

and shape. In this case, it enables a hair strand to return to its initial 

coiled state, which better captures afro-textured hair. This model is 

also faster, simpler, and more robust than previous models. 

The researchers devised this model by discarding the previous 

assumption for mathematical equations to simulate the curling 

pattern of each strand and instead consider large bends and 

torsions, as well as assuming, to a certain extent, that the hair is 

non-straight. While this model was designed for kinky, curly, or 

coily hair, the researchers discovered that it is also effective for 

straight hair. 

As with all simulations, there are flaws. Some of these limitations 

include the scaling behavior of tight, coily hair and lack of variation 

in how the hair can look. Currently, the model can account for only 

two different appearances of afro-textured hair: a clumped look, 

well-defined curls, and a more picked-out look, or fluffed-out 

afro-textured hair. By decreasing the radius of a wisp—a clump of 

hair strands common in afro-textured hair—but keeping the same 

total number of hair strands, a more picked-out look is obtained. 

However, these looks are not incredibly realistic compared to reallife 

individuals with the same hair type. “We are looking to improve 

on the realistic aspect of our model,” Shi said. 

For the next steps, the researchers plan to conduct further 

experiments with the realism of the simulated hair and possibly test 

an anisotropic model, meaning the pattern is different in various 

directions, which could lead to better animations of different 

hairstyles with afro-textured hair. 

While no animated content or games are perfect, it is important 

that Black individuals see themselves adequately represented in 

the media that they consume. As the creators of one of the first 

models specifically for tight, coily hair, the team also hopes that 

other researchers will be inspired to conduct similar research. “We 

are looking forward to seeing more and more research in this field, 

not just from us but other researchers as well,” Wu said. Ultimately, 

they want their model to lead to greater and better racial and ethnic 

representation in animated games and movies. “It might take 

longer than we wish for these techniques to be implemented, but 

we are hoping as soon as possible,” Wu said. ■ 


Molecular Biology 

FOCUS 

SUPER-SIZING 

LIFE’S SMALLEST 

SECRETS 

Pushing The Boundaries 

of Microscopy 

BY KARA TAO 

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF EMILY POAG 

Let’s turn the clock way back to when you consisted of only a 

small clump of cells. How does this tiny clump of cells know to 

transform into various cell types throughout your body, from hair 

and eyes to lips and legs? It turns out that these instructions are encoded 

in our genome. However, our genome is initially “silent.” It needs to be 

activated and reprogrammed through a process called zygotic genome 

activation so that our cells can properly differentiate into specific cell 

types in our body. 

The Giraldez lab at Yale specifically investigates the cellular 

mechanisms of this process, which involve a variety of interactions 

between protein ‘factors’ and DNA that work together to transform 

the “silent” state of the genome into the activated state. “It’s kind of like 

erasing the blackboard and writing new instructions,” said Antonio 

Giraldez, the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Genetics. “We’re trying 

to understand the factors that erase the previous instructions and the 

factors that instruct the genome to employ the first cascade of events 

that will lead to development.” 

Traditionally, researchers have relied on indirect biochemical methods 

to unravel the intricacies of this process, as the existing visualization 

techniques have presented considerable limitations. “We wondered if 

we could actually come up with a new way to visualize what happens 

inside of these clusters,” said Mark Pownall, a member of the Giraldez 

lab who first looked into this research direction. In collaboration with 

the Bewersdorf lab at Yale, Pownall adapted their already-established 

technique of pan-expansion microscopy (pan-ExM), incorporating 

labeling of protein, RNA, and DNA to create Chromatin Expansion 

Microscopy (ChromExM). Pan-expansion microscopy involves fixing 

cells to an expandable gel called a hydrogel that swells via addition 

of certain functional groups. By layering multiple hydrogels on top of 

each other, the cells take on a larger size that can be better resolved 

under a microscope. 

The cell, and specifically the chromatin that makes up our 

chromosomes, expands to become four thousand times larger, allowing 

for a never-before-seen look into the small-scale interactions that 

thus far, researchers have only been able to theorize about. “This has 

allowed us to start measuring distances that are ten times higher in 


resolution than what we have ever captured before,” Giraldez said. “This 

has revealed how the models and the cartoons we are drawing from 

biochemical experiments can be visualized for the first time.” 

One of the main concerns of expansion microscopy was whether the 

cell’s proportions could be maintained during the expansion process. To 

ensure that the cell expanded proportionally, the Giraldez lab developed 

a technique where the initial cell was marked with parallel stripes, and 

if the stripes remained parallel after expansion, it would have exhibited 

proportional growth. “This showed us that we preserved these stripes 

really well after they were cleaved, which was one hint that we actually 

preserved chromatin structure,” Pownall said. 

With this novel technique in hand, the Giraldez lab could finally 

visualize the specific factors involved in activating the genome. Using 

ChromExM, they were able to study the function of Nanog, a protein 

that binds to a “gene enhancer” region of DNA that stimulates the 

activation of genes involved in development. Although Nanog had 

been shown to interact with RNA polymerase, located at the promoter 

region of the gene where the polymerase would initially bind to initiate 

transcription of DNA to mRNA, it was unclear whether these structures 

actually required transcription to form. By using ChromExM, they 

found that the Nanog protein was initially in close contact with RNA 

polymerase, but once transcription was initiated, the protein separated 

itself from the growing strand of mRNA. The Giraldez lab termed this 

interaction the “kiss-and-kick model,” where transcription acts as the 

“kick” to separate the enhancer and promoter regions. 

The development of the human body is an incredibly complex 

process directed by genetic codes regulated by countless factors that 

interact with chromatin and different organelles in our cells. The novel 

technique of ChromExM not only allows us to visualize these processes, 

but is also accessible and applicable to other fields of study, as it only 

requires a confocal microscope that can be found in biological research 

labs. “I think that this could add a fundamental tool to the global toolbox 

to really understand how different molecules interact in the nucleus by 

visualizing these fundamental processes of life,” Giraldez said. “The 

accessibility is great, and the possibilities to apply ChromExM to other 

approaches is very large.” ■ 


FOCUS 

Electrical Engineering 

WHY TINY PATTERNS MEAN BIG THINGS 

FOR THE FUTURE OF SEMICONDUCTORS 

BY WILLIAM ARCHACKI 

The moiré effect is a phenomenon 

you can witness with just a marker 

and paper. First, take your marker 

and draw a honeycomb pattern of 

hexagons on two sheets of paper. Now lay 

them atop one another askew, rotating the 

top sheet slightly. By combining these two 

lattices, you should see regular, repeating 

patterns much larger than any individual 

hexagon. This is the moiré effect in action: 

from a distance, the overlapping hexagons 

make a larger tessellation that seems to 

alternate between light and dark regions. 

Now imagine if atoms stood at the 

vertices of every hexagon on the paper, 

connected to their neighbors by chemical 

bonds. That’s the structure of a moiré 

material. At an atomic scale, the repeated 

patterns of the moiré effect change how 

light interacts with a material and, in 

turn, how the material transmits electrical 

signals resulting from light. 

In a recent Nature Materials publication 

led by Fengnian Xia, professor of electrical 

engineering at Yale, the team innovated 

upon moiré materials. By finding a 

more controllable way to produce the 

moiré effect at an atomic scale, they have 

made a material that has a wide range 

of useful physical properties that may 

pave the way for a new generation of 

optical sensors. 

Scientists vs. Thermodynamics 

The new moiré material recipe by Xia 

and his colleagues starts with three simple 

ingredients: tungsten, sulfur, and selenium. 

When heated in a furnace through a 

process referred to as chemical vapor 

deposition, these three elements combine 

into flat, hexagonal lattices. The vertices 

are occupied by atoms of tungsten, sulfur, 

and selenium. After heating for a second 

time with a supply of the same elements in 

different ratios, an additional layer forms 

on top of the existing hexagonal lattice, 

this time with a slightly different spacing 

between its atoms—a different lattice 

constant. The alignment of differentlyspaced 

layers signals success: the moiré 

effect is present. Now, it’s a matter of lattice 

size rather than rotation. 

It has historically been a challenge for 

researchers to fabricate moiré materials 

because of the natural way that layers 

form. The most stable way for two 

identical layers to stack results in a 

perfect alignment that never produces 

the moiré effect. So, rather than using 

the conventional ‘twistronics’ approach 

to moiré material fabrication, which 

fights against thermodynamics to force 

the layers to rotate, this new approach 

from Xia’s group relies on variations in 

the spacing of atoms. In their recipe, 

the moiré effect is created by stacking 

hexagons of different sizes, rather than 

different orientations. 

“Twisting two layers at a specific twist 

angle is not the most stable form of 

matter,” said Matthieu Fortin-Deschênes, a 

postdoctoral fellow in Xia’s research group 

and first author on the paper. “Basically, 

we came up with an approach to directly 

grow these moiré patterns with tunable 

spacing. Instead of twisting, we grow them 

with different lattice parameters to tune 

the moiré periodicity.” 

By precisely varying the concentrations 

of sulfur and selenium relative to tungsten, 

the researchers saw that the pattern they 

form has a “tunable period”. In other words, 

they can control how large the patterns 

appear. With a tunable period, there is a 

new world of possibilities. “If you’re able 

to tune the periodicity, you’re able to tune 

the properties of the material,” Fortin- 

Deschênes said. Tuning properties is a big 

deal for electrical engineers. The next step 

is figuring out how to leverage these tunable 

properties for use in real technologies. 

Tiny Materials, Big Implications 

Working on these materials has gotten 

Xia and his colleagues thinking a lot 

about light. What kind of information 

can we glean from light? For one answer, 

look to the astronomers. When studying 

exoplanets, they often examine the spectra 

of light that passes through the planets’ 

atmospheres. By using spectroscopy, a 

crucial analytical technique that works 

like forensics for light, they deduce which 

gases are floating around in a breath’s 

worth of air many millions of miles away. 

And waves of light have more parameters 

than just their spectra. Measuring light’s 

polarization can give insights into what 

substances the light has interacted with. 

For example, light that reflects off water is 


Electrical Engineering 

FOCUS 

Matthieu Fortin-Deschênes operating machinery in the lab. 

polarized because the process of reflection 

forces all the light waves to oscillate 

within the same plane. Other parameters 

of interest like intensity or coherence can 

each be measured with dedicated pieces of 

lab equipment. For Xia, these parameters 

of light pose an exciting question: What if 

it were possible to pick up on the wealth of 

information provided by light using just a 

single sensor? 

The new moiré material has a special way 

of interacting with light and transmitting 

electric current. Just as bumps on a hill 

change the way water flows, moiré-induced 

variations in the invisible landscape of the 

material’s electric potential change how 

electrons move from one point to another. 

Incoming light gets absorbed by the 

material and starts a flow of electrons, and 

when that flow of electrons is recorded 

as a current or its corresponding voltage 

drop, information about the light’s source 

is conveyed somewhere within the data. 

The challenge, then, is to decode the data 

and reveal the secrets hidden within the 

material’s electric signals. 

“This material is highly tunable, and 

it interacts with light very strongly. 

That would allow us to combine this 

reconfigurable material with the latest 

deep learning algorithms,” Xia said. “In 

another 2022 paper, we used deep learning 

to realize the detection of many parameters 

of light simultaneously.” Their approach— 

referred to as deep sensing—could change 

how scientists use light. Rather than just 

spectroscopy, scientists could tap into new 


Photography by Paul-Alexander Lejas 

information carried by light if they watch 

how all the parameters change together. 

“We can relate this to image recognition,” 

Xia said. “This high-dimensional 

photoresponse contains all the information 

we want to know, but we don't know how to 

extract this information.” In the same way 

that a deep learning algorithm figures out 

to differentiate images of cats from images 

of dogs, an algorithm might learn to 

correlate the complex electric signals from 

the sensor to any kind of data a scientist 

might be examining. “Let’s assume you 

want to know the concentration of a certain 

gas. You can do that by measuring the 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

absorption spectrum. But you don't have 

to do that. You can skip that process. You 

can go directly from the photoresponse 

to the concentration of the gas if you do 

enough training correctly,” Xia said. 

Not Just Tungsten 

Although the recent paper only covers 

one moiré material, the researchers 

behind it are hopeful that the fabrication 

process can be applied in other ways. 

“The intention of studying the growth 

mechanisms is to understand the 

fundamentals of the growth processes and 

then try to extrapolate to other systems,” 

Fortin-Deschênes said. Of special interest 

is graphene, a substance made of twodimensional 

sheets of carbon atoms, which 

could be mixed with silicon in the same 

way that sulfur was mixed with selenium. 

The hope is that each new system may 

have its own set of unique properties that 

can be applied to electrical engineering 

challenges of the future. 

“Since we have so many properties that 

emerge and that can be easily tuned, we 

can expect that we will find something that 

is very useful using these moiré materials,” 

Fortin-Deschênes said. Novel fabrication 

methods, such as this one, are creating 

possibilities for new atomic arrangements 

of materials. By changing the way energy 

and electrons dance at the quantum scale, 

researchers may reshape the future of 

semiconductor devices. ■ 

A R T B Y S T E V E B L A N C O 

WILLIAM ARCHACKI 

WILLIAM ARCHACKI is a sophomore Chemistry major in Pierson College. Aside from YSM, Will writes 

and edits for Cortex Magazine. He conducts research on superconductivity in the Pfefferle lab group and 

goes on ecological adventures with the Yale Birding Club. 

THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK Fengnian Xia and Matthieu Fortin-Deschênes for sharing their 

expertise and enthusiasm in their field. 

REFERENCES: 

Brennan, P. “Hubble Probes Atmospheres of Exoplanets in TRAPPIST-1 Habitable Zone.” Exoplanet 

Exploration: Planets Beyond Our Solar System, 24 Sept. 2020, NASA Space Telescope Institute. https:// 

exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1483/hubble-probes-atmospheres-of-exoplanets-in-trappist-1-habitablezone. 

Cronin, T. W., & Marshall, J. (2011). Patterns and properties of polarized light in air and water. Philosophical 

transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 366(1565), 619–626. https://doi. 

org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0201 

Fortin-Deschênes, Matthieu, et al. “Van Der Waals Epitaxy of Tunable Moirés Enabled by 

Alloying.” Nature Materials, Nature Portfolio, Aug. 2023. https://10.1038/s41563-023-01596-z. doi. 

org/10.1111/j.1475-2743.2002.tb00266.x 


FOCUS 

Planetary Sciences 

THAT MAGNETIC TOUCH 

ASTEROIDS HITTING ASTEROIDS 

SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF ASTEROIDS’ MAGNETIC FIELDS 

BY ELIZABETH WATSON | ART BY ANNLI ZHU 

In 2017, scientists unearthed a magnetic 

puzzle in our own solar neighborhood, 

beginning with samples taken from a 

series of iron-rich meteorites that had fallen 

to Earth. Upon analyzing the samples, the 

team detected evidence of magnetism. This 

discovery was important because it meant 

that the parent asteroid of these meteorites 

was somehow capable of internally generating 

its own magnetic field—a phenomenon that 

was difficult to explain. 

The same year this discovery was made, 

planetary scientist Zhongtian Zhang, now at 

the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth 

and Planets Laboratory, began his graduate 

studies at Yale. Zhang was intrigued by the 

results of the meteorite analysis, but like 

the rest of the scientific community, he was 

confused as to how an asteroid like this one 

could feasibly generate a magnetic field. “The 

community had been puzzled with this as 

well, and I hadn’t been able to come up with a 

solution for a long time,” Zhang said. 

Six years later, in a paper published in 

the Proceedings of the National Academy of 

Sciences this July, Zhang and David Bercovici, 

Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Earth 

and Planetary Sciences, may have figured out 

the origin of these magnetic meteorites. The 

secret may lie in asteroids, and what happens 

when they collide with one another. 

The Paradox of Magnetism 

Planetary bodies generate magnetic fields 

through mechanisms known as ‘dynamos.’ In 

general, dynamos rely on convective motion, 

in which less dense material rises up as more 

dense material sinks down. Take Earth, for 

example: the iron-nickel core at the heart of 

our planet solidifies from the inside out in a 

process called outward solidification, causing 

the convective motion necessary to generate 

a magnetic field. Understanding dynamos 

can provide insights into a planetary body’s 

internal structures and evolutionary histories. 

The cores of asteroids, however, are a different 

matter altogether. Meteorites originate from 

asteroids, which are fragments of rocks in 

space that date back nearly 4.5 billion years. 

Meteorites that are rich in iron, specifically, 

come from the cores of asteroids. There are 

approximately 1.3 million asteroids in our 

solar system, most of which reside in the 

Asteroid Belt between Jupiter and Mars. Of 

these, only eight percent are made of metal. 

The liquid cores of these metal asteroids are 

known to cool from the outside in through 

a process called inward solidification. This is 

why these metal asteroids were not thought to 


Planetary Sciences 

FOCUS 

be capable of generating their own magnetic 

fields—inward solidification directly inhibits 

convection and suppresses the traditional 

magnetic field dynamo. 

When Asteroids Collide 

When thinking about this paradox, Zhang 

turned to a previous project of his on rubblepile 

asteroids, which are formed when asteroid 

fragments coalesce into new objects due to 

gravitational forces. “I started to think of 

things in terms of collisions and formation of 

rubble piles,” Zhang said. “I was thinking that 

this may be the solution to the problem that’s 

been on my mind for quite a while.” 

Zhang deduced that in order for the 

metallic core of an asteroid to become 

exposed in the first place, a collision must 

have taken place in a process termed ‘mantle 

unstripping’ by means of another asteroid. 

The force of an asteroid hitting another 

asteroid would cause the mantle of the 

original asteroid to be broken down, exposing 

the resulting asteroid fragments, alongside 

the core, directly to the environment of space. 

In the aftermath of a collision, an asteroid’s 

molten core would have broken apart and 

reformed, and if a small portion of metal 

fragments were able to cool down sufficiently 

before falling back into the molten core, they 

would sink downwards. Bercovici compared 

the process to dropping ice cubes in hot tea, 

except the ice cubes sink. These cold fragments 

that sink to the center would then extract 

heat from the overlying liquid and cause the 

outward solidification capable of driving 

a magnetic field. Meanwhile, the inward 

solidification that occurred from the surface 

would produce cold material to preserve this 

field. “It provides an implication about how 

asteroids work, [how they were] formed and 

disrupted,” Zhang said. “It provides a new 

scenario for people studying magnetic fields.” 

Initially, Zhang set out to determine the size 

of the asteroid fragments necessary to power 

a dynamo in this fashion. The ideal fragment 

would be small enough to cool efficiently in 

the vacuum of space, but also large enough to 

remain sufficiently cold after sinking through 

the hot liquid region of the core, according 

to the two researchers. Zhang modeled the 

thermal regulation of the fragments and 

determined that the ideal fragment size is 

approximately ten meters, which coincided 

with his calculations for the average fragment 

size created by these collisions. “It turns 

out that fragmentation size is right in the 


Goldilocks regime for having the "right" ice 

cubes,” Bercovici said. “Bottom line—that was 

cool, pun not really intended.” 

To Psyche And Beyond 

Zhang performed additional modeling and 

determined that the convection generated 

from this theory would be adequate to power a 

magnetic field for at least one million years. This 

research could have important implications for 

what we understand about asteroids, including 

NASA’s future Psyche Mission. 

Psyche is an asteroid that has long been a 

subject of fascination for some members of 

the scientific community, as it may be the ironnickel 

core of a planet that formed billions of 

years ago. The mission recently launched on 

October 13, 2023, and is anticipated to reach 

Psyche in 2029. Once in orbit, the hope is that 

the mission will allow scientists to develop a 

deeper understanding of our solar system’s 

history, as well as that of our own planet, 

through the information collected from 

Psyche. Zhang and Bercovici’s research could 

be crucial to understanding Psyche’s origin, 

as well as planetary evolution as a whole. 

Bercovici is also a principal investigator on 

the Psyche Mission, which was the source of 

funding for this project. 

“I decided to be part of the mission because 

of my interest in planetary sciences in the first 

place,” Zhang said. “It was also a personal 

interest in these kinds of things and being 

part of the Psyche mission bolstered me to 

look at this as a problem of magnetic fields 

and meteorite observations.” Zhang hopes 


IMAGE COURTESY OF NASA 

An illustration of the Psyche Spacecraft. 

to expand this work in new directions in the 

future, hopefully involving information about 

metal asteroids obtained from the Psyche 

Mission to understand the asteroid’s history. 

Bercovici enjoyed working with Zhang 

over the course of the project, citing Zhang’s 

tenacity after having published several ‘hardwon’ 

papers. “Zhongtian is one of the most 

creative, deep-thinking, and versatile students 

or colleagues I’ve had the pleasure of working 

for,” Bercovici said. “Sometimes he was like a 

mustang bolting into the hills with new ideas, 

and my job was to help him close the loop and 

explain his ideas clearly. Having students and 

postdocs much smarter than me is always fun, 

and my job is to make sure they communicate 

well with mere mortals, like myself.” 

To understand the universe, one must 

acknowledge its mysteries—including the 

ones that exist in our own solar neighborhood. 

After six years of mystery, this magnetic 

meteorite puzzle may finally have been solved, 

and its lessons applied forward, thanks to the 

work of these two Yale researchers. ■ 

ELIZABETH WATSON 

ELIZABETH WATSON is a junior in Pauli Murray College double majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary 

Biology and the Humanities. In addition to writing for YSM, she is the head of the magazine’s social 

media team. Outside of YSM, she conducts neuroscience research at the Yale School of Medicine, serves 

the editor-in-chief of Hippo Literary and Arts Magazine, and enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons. 

THE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Zhongtian Zhang and David Bercovici for their time and 

enthusiasm in sharing their research. 

REFERENCES: 

Zhang, Z., & Bercovici, D. (2023). Generation of a measurable magnetic field in a metal asteroid with a 

rubble-pile core. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(32). 

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221696120. 

Psyche. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: California Institute of Technology. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ 

missions/psyche. 

Missions: Psyche. NASA Solar System Exploration. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/psyche/ 

overview/. 

Bryson, J.F., Weiss, B.P., Harrison, R.J., Herrero-Albillos, J., & Kronast, F. (2017). Paleomagnetic evidence 

for dynamo activity driven by inward crystallisation of a metallic asteroid. Earth and Planetary Science 

Letters, 472, 152-163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.05.026. 


FOCUS 

Ophthalmology 

KEEP AN EYE ON IT 

BREAKTHROUGHS IN THE RETINA 

BY RISHA CHAKRABORTY AND JOHNNY YUE 


Ophthalmology 

FOCUS 

What if you suddenly had blurry 

vision, couldn't recognize familiar 

faces, or had difficulty adapting 

to dimly lit places? This is the reality 

for people with age-related macular 

degeneration, also known as AMD, one 

of the most prevalent causes of vision loss 

that affects around 200 million people in 

the world. 

In AMD, damage occurs in the macula, an 

oval-shaped area at the center of the retina. 

The retina consists of a layer of cells known 

as photoreceptors, which are crucial for 

converting light entering the eye into signals 

sent to the brain. The macula is specifically 

responsible for sharp and central vision. 

Thus, someone with AMD usually has 

difficulty deciphering fine details. There are 

limited effective therapies for the disease— 

current treatments such as vitamins and 

minerals only slow disease progression, but 

do not stop or reverse it. 

Yale scientists are among those who have 

joined the cause to find out more about AMD 

disease pathology. From discovering possible 

therapeutic targets for AMD and other 

neurodegenerative diseases to uncovering 

a quantum chemistry reaction in the retina, 

their findings could not only inform potential 

AMD treatments, but also offer applications 

far beyond the eye. 

A Window Into Neurodegeneration 

In a recent study published in Nature 

Communications, Yale Assistant Professor 

Brian Hafler and a team of Yale researchers 

found that AMD, which is itself a 

neurodegenerative disease of the retina, 

could serve as a system for understanding 

other neurodegenerative diseases such as 

Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. 

To arrive at this finding, they developed a 

novel approach to understanding AMD 

and its cellular pathology. 

Hafler and his team utilized single-cell 

data and machine learning techniques to 

pinpoint the populations of cells in the 

retina that play a prominent role in the 

disease progression of AMD. This study built 

upon previous research in the retina which 

highlighted the overall role of inflammation 

in the pathology of macular degeneration. 

The team isolated 70,973 individual retinal 

cells from seventeen different human retinas 

with different stages of disease and healthy 

controls. “This allowed us to build a unique 

When medical research is applied to patient 

care, we can uniquely translate novel 

therapeutic approaches for diseases like AMD. 

road map into the genetic networks driving 

inflammation in macular degeneration 

and hopefully to develop new therapeutic 

targets,” Hafler said. 

To analyze these cells, the team designed 

a novel collection of machine learning tools 

which they termed “Cellular Analysis with 

Topology and Condensation Homology,” or 

CATCH. At the core of CATCH is a method 

known as diffusion condensation, which 

identifies similar groups of cells based on 

how they are pulled toward the weighted 

average of neighboring cells in space. This 

method enabled the team to pinpoint two 

populations of activated glial cells (cells 

whose primary role is to support neurons): 

astrocytes and microglia. Astrocytes provide 

neuroprotective, structural, and metabolic 

nourishment to nerve cells, while microglia 

are the immune cells of the brain and mount 

responses to pathogens. Both were found to 

be activated in the early phase of AMD. 

Surprisingly, similar activation profiles 

were found to dominate the early phases of 

other neurodegenerative diseases, such as 

Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. 

This association led the researchers to believe 

that early stages of neurodegenerative disease 

progression generally utilize a common 

mechanism involving the activation of 

glial cells. It also suggests that the retina 

can potentially be a unique system for 

developing new therapeutic strategies to treat 

neurodegenerative diseases. 

Then, using single-cell data from Alzheimer’s 

and multiple sclerosis studies, Hafler 

and his team were able to characterize 

specific cellular interactions that induce 

inflammation, which may be a common 

characteristic of neurodegenerative disease 

progression. They first identified interleukin- 

1β, a protein that signals immune cells to 

mount and induce a response, that was 

derived from the microglial cells activated 

in AMD. Using a computational technique, 

they found that interleukin-1β signals for 

astrocyte activation are pro-angiogenic, 

meaning that they enhance blood vessel 

formation. This observation lined up with 

the typical symptoms observed in wet 

AMD, an advanced stage 

of AMD. In late stages of 

AMD, blood vessels can 

abnormally form, grow, and leak beneath the 

macula. This bleeding can distort the retina 

and impair one’s central vision. 

Hafler’s study suggests that targeting 

astrocytes and microglia should be further 

considered when attempting to treat 

neurodegenerative diseases. Anti-angiogenic 

medications are currently the primary 

treatment, but they are only effective in 

advanced stages of the disease. To fill in 

the gap, interleukin-1β may be an effective 

target. With Hafler’s deep understanding of 

AMD both in a clinical and research setting, 

his results show promise towards moving 

forward in the fight against AMD. “My clinical 

practice is what drives my benchwork in the 

lab,” Hafler said. “When medical research 

is applied to patient care, we can uniquely 

translate novel therapeutic approaches for 

diseases like AMD.” 

How Does Melanin Protect The Retina? 

A second study, published in PNAS, found 

a quantum chemistry reaction that could 

explain how melanin protects the retina 

from age-related macular degeneration. 

Yale scientist Douglas Brash, a physicist by 

training and co-author of the study, did not 

expect to investigate AMD. But one day, he 

performed an experiment on melanocytes, 

which are special melanin-producing cells. 

Melanin is a natural pigment that shows up 

across the body, from the eyes to the skin. 

In the skin, melanin accumulates with UVlight 

exposure. In the retina, melanin exists 

in tiny granules at the photoreceptor layer; 

however, its function is almost completely 

unknown. Brash wanted to see what would 



FOCUS 

Ophthalmology 

happen when melanocytes were UVirradiated. 

Cells that are UV-irradiated 

develop a specific type of DNA damage 

called cyclobutane dimers. 

Brash eventually showed that, when 

exposed to UV radiation, melanin was 

oxidized by free radicals—meaning that 

its chemical structure lost electrons—to 

produce dioxetane, a chemical compound 

on melanin that then splits to give a 

molecule with a similar high-energy state 

to ultraviolet light in sunlight. The radicals 

and dioxetanes continued long after the UV 

light was turned off. Dioxetane’s high-energy 

state was a specific kind called a triplet state, 

which is capable of initiating reactions that 

ordinary chemistry cannot. He also knew 

that melanin was found in many places 

in the body, such as the eye and the ear, 

and the two radicals behind its oxidation, 

superoxide and nitric oxide, were found in 

many conditions such as inflammation. 

“These [are] events that can’t not happen. 

Why aren’t we dead?” Brash recalled thinking. 

Could the high-energy reaction cause 

deafness and blindness? A surprising clue 

to the exact opposite conclusion came from 

Ulrich Schraermeyer, an ophthalmologist at 

the University of Tubingen in Germany, who 

had heard about Brash’s work with melanin 

chemistry. Schraermeyer had an idea that 

completely opposed the norm 

ten years ago. He suggested that 

perhaps melanin actually had a 

protective role in the retina. 

For years, he had been 

working on studies to show 

that when melanin was 

associated with another 

molecule called 

lipofuscin, the retina 

was less susceptible 

to macular 

degeneration. 

Lipofuscin, a 

pigment that 

accumulates in the 

retina with age, is associated 

with neurodegeneration in AMD, 

but its exact composition is unclear. 

While Schraermeyer was convinced of the 

critical involvement of melanin in AMD 

prevention, he could not figure out the 

chemistry. And while Brash was intrigued 

by melanin having a protective role, the 

mechanism would need to be proven. 

In Schraermeyer’s initial experiments, he 

proved many drugs could actually slow or 

prevent macular degeneration in mice and 

monkeys. Brash noticed that these drugs were 

all chemicals that could create triplet states, 

the unique high-energy chemical state that 

Brash had previously created in melanin after 

it was treated with radicals. This led to their 

theory that the dioxetane in melanin that led 

to the triplet state was the step responsible for 

melanin’s protective role in the retina. 

In his initial experiments, Schraermeyer 

showed that under electron microscopy, a 

type of imaging technique used to visualize 

subcellular structures, melanin was often 

seen together with lipofuscin in the retina 

in what is called melanin-lipofuscin (MLF) 

granules. He observed that MLF granules 

accumulated in the eyes of humans above 

the age of sixty. Building on this observation, 

the group showed that the toxic lipofuscin 

component of MLF granules could be 

degraded by treating mice with a nonmelanin 

molecule that was in a triplet state. 

The degradation was blocked if mice also 

received a molecule that siphons the triplet 

energy away. Thus, it seemed like melanin 

chemiexcitation, using chemicals to create 

a high-energy state, and melanin-lipofuscin 

association could be studied as a pathway for 

lipofuscin degradation. 

Schraermeyer believes that upregulating 

melanin in the retina could be a therapeutic 

target. Having already shown that people 

lose melanin in the retina with age, he 

theorizes that the melanin is being 

used up in its protective 

role throughout one’s 

life. Brash, on the other 

hand, is convinced about 

the importance of dioxetane 

chemistry, but not so much 

about melanin itself. “I’m willing 

ABOUT THE 

AUTHORS 

to bet 

that as you 

get older, the 

melanin may well 

contribute to AMD, 

so it’s like a double-edged 

sword,” Brash said. Brash’s 

therapeutic goal is to get tripletstate 

precursors into the eye so that 

dioxetane chemistry can be harnessed 

for AMD prevention. 

Seeing Eye-to-Eye 

While Hafler and Brash took two very 

different approaches to characterizing 

some of the underlying mechanisms of 

AMD, their findings both pave a new 

way forward for the development of 

potential treatments. With scores of 

scientists studying AMD from various 

specialties and backgrounds, the pursuit 

of an effective treatment that accounts for 

multiple mechanisms grows increasingly 

hopeful—while potentially also addressing 

diseases beyond the retina as well. ■ 

RISHA CHAKRABORTY 

JOHNNY YUE 

RISHA CHAKRABORTY is a third-year Neuroscience and Chemistry major in Saybrook 

College. In addition to writing for YSM, Risha plays trumpet for the Yale Precision Marching 

Band and La Orquesta Tertulia, volunteers at YNHH, and researches Parkinson’s Disease at 

the Chandra Lab. 

JOHNNY YUE is a second-year student majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental 

Biology in Trumbull College. Outside of YSM, Johnny volunteers at HAVEN Free Clinic and 

researches alcohol use disorder in the Cosgrove Lab at the Yale School of Medicine. 

THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK Dr. Brian Hafler and Dr. Douglas Brash for their time 

and enthusiasm about their research. 


Biomedical Engineering 

FOCUS 

COVID-19 

NASAL 

SPRAY 

Could an Inhalable Vaccine 

Replace a Shot? 

BY EVELYN JIANG 

ART BY SONIA JIN 

Traditional vaccines, such as those developed against smallpox and tetanus, have 

relied upon the introduction of weakened or inactivated pathogens into the 

body to stimulate the immune system, effectively priming it to recognize and 

counteract these pathogens in the future. For several decades, however, scientists 

have pursued an ambitious mission to harness the untapped potential of messenger 

RNA (mRNA) as a replacement for the pathogens in vaccines. By introducing 

mRNA, a small piece of genetic material that instructs cells to produce part of a 

pathogen, the vaccines would theoretically trigger an immune response without 

causing disease. Scientists envisioned mRNA vaccines harnessing the body’s own 

cellular machinery to combat pathogens. Their collective efforts, spanning years of 

research, pushed mRNA vaccine technology to the brink of reality. 

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis of unprecedented proportions that 

necessitated a rapid global response. In a mere eleven months, Pfizer/BioNTech 

produced the first mRNA vaccine to ever achieve full FDA approval for use 

in the United States. As of September 2023, over eighty percent of the U.S. 

population has received at least one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, 

fundamentally altering the pandemic’s trajectory and saving millions of lives 

in the U.S. alone. Yet the quest for innovation continues. In a study recently 

published in Science Translational Medicine, a team of Yale scientists ventured 

into a new frontier in vaccinology: the development of a nasally administered 

COVID-19 mRNA vaccine using nanoparticles. 



FOCUS 


Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus. 

IMAGE COURTESY OF DAVIAN HO 

The Promise and Pitfalls of Respiratory 

Delivery 

Current intramuscular mRNA vaccines, 

typically injected into the upper arm, 

excel at activating immune defenses in 

the bloodstream, but they are not as 

effective in rallying protective responses 

in the upper airway and lungs. Thus, for 

a viral respiratory illness like COVID-19, 

the allure of an inhalable mucosal vaccine 

stems from its geographical advantage. 

When a viruses enter the body through 

the nasal route, the respiratory mucosa 

(the lining of the respiratory tract) 

becomes the primary battleground for 

early encounters. Notably, the Omicron 

variant has been recorded in higher 

concentrations in the lungs than in the 

rest of the body. According to Benjamin 

Goldman-Israelow, an assistant professor 

of internal medicine at the Yale School 

of Medicine and one of the authors of 

the paper, mucosal vaccines are better 

designed to engage the immune system 

precisely at this entry site, enhancing 

the body’s ability to mount a swift and 

targeted response there. 

The effectiveness of the oral polio 

vaccine, which played a significant role 

in the global effort to eradicate polio, 

is grounded in the same principle. 

Following ingestion, the vaccine induces 

a strengthening of immune defenses 

within the virus’ favored environment— 

the gastrointestinal tract. This localized 

approach minimizes the delay associated 

with the migration of immune defenses 

from the bloodstream to the environment 

of interest, thereby reducing the 

window of vulnerability and bolstering 

protection against invading pathogens. 

While the promise of inhalable 

vaccines is compelling, it is not without 

its challenges. Only one mucosal vaccine 

currently exists to combat pathogens 

entering through the nasal route: a nasal 

spray comprising of weakened flu viruses 

known as FluMist. While this nasal spritz 

proves reasonably effective in children— 

occasionally even surpassing the 

performance of its injected counterpart— 

its potency wanes significantly in adults. 

This may be because the pre-existing 

immunity built up over a lifetime of 

influenza exposure can inhibit the 

vaccine’s effects before it can establish 

new protection, according to Goldman- 

Israelow. Thus, developing a mucosal 

vaccine tailored for respiratory viruses 

presents a unique challenge, and there is 

no well-established template to follow. 

Mark Saltzman, the Goizueta Foundation 

professor of biomedical engineering at Yale 

and a senior author of the paper, shared that 

there were several fundamental challenges 

in devising an effective mucosal vaccine. 

The effectiveness of mucosal vaccines 

relies heavily on how well they can reach 

and activate immune cells in the mucosal 

surfaces. To reach cells in the lungs, the 

vaccine must be able to overcome physical 

barriers, such as cilia and mucus, meant to 

prevent debris and pathogens contained in 

inhaled air from reaching the lungs’ small 

air sacs, or alveoli. Phagocytic cells, which 

actively participate in the body’s immune 

surveillance by destroying microbes 

and debris, introduce another obstacle. 

These cells may engulf vaccine particles, 

thwarting their intended journey to the site 

of action and potentially compromising 

the vaccine’s effectiveness. 

Finally, respiratory mucosa is 

especially prone to producing unwanted 

immune reactions. While current 

mRNA vaccines employ small fat-based 

capsules called lipid nanoparticles 

(LNPs) as their delivery vehicles, these 

components have been noted to incite 

inflammation when administered via 

nasal routes. In the development of 

nanoparticles tailored for inhalation, the 

team would have to maximize mRNA 

delivery efficiency while minimizing 

detrimental inflammatory responses in 

the respiratory tract. 

Inhaling Nanoparticles 

Polymers are molecules formed 

from repeating smaller chemical units 

known as monomers. Visualize them as 

molecular chains built from identical 

building blocks repeated in succession, 

much like LEGO bricks assembling into 

a chain. The Saltzman group designs and 

tests incredibly tiny nanoparticles made 



FOCUS 

from polymers for drug and gene delivery 

to treat cancers and other diseases. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck 

in 2019, Saltzman began thinking about 

how this technology could be applied to 

inhalable vaccines. He drew inspiration 

from the work of Akiko Iwasaki, the 

Sterling professor of immunobiology at 

Yale and a senior author on the study, 

who is a leading expert on the mucosal 

immune response. 

In 2020, Saltzman’s lab began 

working on this project and produced 

biodegradable polymers, called 

poly(amine-co-ester) (PACE), which can 

form so-called “polyplexes” with mRNA. 

The PACE polymers represent a thirdgeneration 

polymer-based delivery 

system for nucleic acids like mRNA, 

distinct from the lipid nanoparticles 

(LNPs) commonly used in vaccines. 

The conventional approach in the field 

has involved employing hydrophobic, 

or water-resistant, polymers, which 

have proven somewhat successful in 

other drugs for delivering nucleic acids. 

However, these early polymers were 

prone to becoming positively charged 

and associating with negatively charged 

nucleic acids. Administration of these 

agents could inactivate enzymes, 

exhibit general toxicity, and affect cell 

membranes. “The positively charged 

particles just weren’t well-tolerated in 

tissues,” Saltzman said. 

During the development of the PACE 

polymers, his team took a different 

approach. The researchers alternated or 

substituted some of the positively charged 

(cationic) groups with hydrophobic groups. 

This design delicately balanced two forces 

holding the polymer-nucleic acid complex 

together: hydrophobic and electrostatic 

interactions. The hydrophobic component 

was situated inside the complex, while 

a mild positive charge resided on the 

outer surface. The researchers postulated 

that reducing the charge density within 

the polymer structure would enhance 

tolerability and minimize potential side 

effects. This breakthrough allowed them to 

create a versatile family of PACE materials 

compatible with various types of nucleic 

acids. The researchers found they could 

fine-tune the polymer’s hydrophobicity 

and charge based on the specific contents 

and objectives of their delivery system. 


Translating Success 

The researchers tested the ability of the 

PACE-mRNA polyplex delivery system 

to induce cell-type-specific mRNA 

expression in the lungs, which would 

indicate that the system was effective 

at precisely delivering the nucleic 

acids to lung cells. Using PACE-mRNA 

polyplexes in mice, they were able to 

show that the mRNA was primarily 

incorporated in epithelial cells lining 

the airways and antigen-presenting cells 

in the lungs, which capture, process, 

and present components of foreign 

molecules to other immune cells to 

initiate further responses. The delivery 

system was successfully used for multiple 

doses without causing significant 

inflammation or immune reactions. 

To explore the practical applications 

of the delivery system, the researchers 

then engineered an inhalable mRNA 

vaccine encoding the spike protein of 

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for 

COVID-19. “With the PACE-delivered 

mRNA, we were able to see the induction 

of immune cellular responses within the 

respiratory tract, as well as in systemic 

circulation,” Goldman-Israelow said. 

The intranasal vaccination prompted 

the production of circulating CD8+ T 

cells specific to the viral antigen, which 

serves as a rapid response team, ready to 

track down and destroy virus-infected 

cells anywhere in the body. 

In the lymph nodes, the vaccine 

stimulated the formation of germinal 

centers, which are specialized areas 

where immune cells undergo intense 

training and maturation. This training 

process resulted in the expansion of 


memory B cells, which “remember” 

the virus’ unique features, enabling 

the immune system to recognize and 

neutralize it more effectively upon 

future encounters. 

The researchers found that the 

vaccine also led to the production of 

antibody-secreting cells (ASCs), another 

critical group of immune cells. ASCs 

are responsible for manufacturing 

antibodies, which are proteins that 

can specifically target and disable the 

virus. The combined action of memory 

B cells and ASCs enhances the body’s 

ability to fend off the virus. Collectively, 

these findings illustrate the practical 

applicability of PACE polyplexes for 

delivering mRNA therapeutics to 

the lungs. 

Future Steps 

Since most individuals have already either 

contracted SARS-CoV-2 or received an 

mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, the focus is now 

on providing booster shots that can keep up 

with new variants. According to Saltzman, 

this plays to the nasal vaccine’s strengths. 

“The beauty of the whole thing is that you 

wouldn’t have to change the delivery system; 

just exchange the mRNA,” Saltzman said. 

Goldman-Israelow, who is also a 

practicing physician, shared a similar 

perspective. “Looking more long-term, 

we know that vaccine hesitancy plays a big 

role… If we can get intranasal booster-type 

vaccines going, especially for respiratory 

illnesses, these will enhance protection 

and reduce transmission.” ■ 

EVELYN JIANG 

EVELYN JIANG is a sophomore in Morse College majoring in neuroscience. In addition to writing for 

the YSM, she works at Yale’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit and the Koleske Lab. 

THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK Dr. Mark Saltzman and Dr. Benjamin Goldman-Israelow for 

their time and enthusiasm in sharing their research. 

FURTHER READING 

Suberi, A., Grun, M. K., Mao, T., Israelow, B., Reschke, M., Grundler, J., Akhtar, L., Lee, T., Shin, K., Piotrowski- 

Daspit, A. S., Homer, R. J., Iwasaki, A., Suh, H., & Saltzman, W. M. (2023). Polymer nanoparticles deliver 

mRNA to the lung for mucosal vaccination. Science Translational Medicine, 15(709). https://doi. 

org/10.1126/scitranslmed.abq0603 


FOCUS 

Astronomy Computational Biology 

VENUS' SKINCARE 

ROUTINE 

How the Planet Maintains Its Youth 

BY CINDY MEI AND DAVID GAETANO 

ART BY KARA TAO 


Astronomy 

FOCUS 

Beneath the endless search for the 

perfect skincare routine is a desire 

to maintain our youth against the 

ravages of time. Yet despite the wealth 

of commercially available aloe creams 

and collagen powders, the march of 

age inevitably slows the skin renewal 

process, leaving wrinkles and rough, dry 

skin. Likewise, the history and age of a 

planet can be deciphered from its surface 

by, for instance, dating the oldest rocks 

and crystals in its bedrock. But what if 

a planet’s surface appears much younger 

than its actual age? 

Venus, the second planet from the sun, 

is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. It 

is theorized that the planet was named 

after the Roman goddess of beauty due 

to its dazzling brightness in the night 

sky. However, Venus has another claim 

to its name: its youthful appearance. The 

planet’s surface is less than one billion 

years old, which is young considering 

the long history of the geophysical 

time scale. According to a recent paper 

published in Nature Astronomy, the 

secret to Venus’ strikingly young surface 

may lie in volcanic events triggered by 

early energetic collisions. 

These interplanetary collisions have 

always fascinated Simone Marchi, a 

planetary scientist at the Southwest 

Research Institute (SwRI), who teamed 

up with Yale geophysicist Jun Korenaga 

and SwRI Sagan Fellow Raluca Rufu to 

investigate the effects of early collisions 

on Venus’ surface. “Venus comes with its 

own mystery and there are a lot of things 

that we don't know,” Marchi said. “So I 

thought, maybe there is something we 

can say about Venus by studying these 

early processes.” 

Are Collisions The New Collagen? 

Imagine an object just short of the 

mass of the moon colliding with the 

surface of Venus. This is the scale at 

which high-velocity collisions occur 

on Venus’ surface. When such objects 

collide with planets at this scale, it 

adds to the surface in a process called 

accretion. The team’s research suggests 

that late accretion events—the buildup 

of new matter in and throughout a 

planet—greatly contributed to Venus' 

overall geological makeup. 

Earlier projects conducted by 

Marchi and colleagues examined the 

consequences of these large-scale 

impacts on Mars and Earth, but Marchi 

had something different in mind for 

Venus. To understand the effect of 

late accretions on Venus, Marchi was 

interested in studying the planet through 

the lens of geophysics—the study of a 

planet’s structure and atmosphere. In 

doing so, the team could figure out how 

Venus’ volcanic activity, which appeared 

to play a major part in its youthful surface, 

was linked to the collisions. “Processes 

like [volcanism] are connected to the 

geophysics of the planet, so that gives us 

the motivation to try to understand how 

this early energetic event could affect 

the geophysical evolution of the planet,” 

Marchi said, referring to the collisions 

that produced late accretions. His work 

on Venus explored the relationship 

between these late accretion events and 

the planet’s prolonged volcanic activity, 

particularly noting that the connection 

between these two phenomena lies in 

Venus’ superheated core. 

Hot To The Core 

Venus has the most volcanoes out of 

all planets in our solar system. Through 

simulations, the researchers were able to 

draw some important conclusions that 

alter how we think about the relationship 

between a planet’s geological makeup 

and planetary accretion. 

The team found that the early highvelocity 

collisions not only created a 

magma ocean on Venus’ surface, but also 

led to a dramatic heating of the planet’s 

core. Furthermore, due to the insulating 

nature of Venus’ surface, the planet’s 

super-heated core could remain at very 

high temperatures. This possibility is 

particularly intriguing because it differs 

from Earth, where the presence of 

plate tectonics cools down the planet’s 

interior very efficiently. Venus, however, 

lacks tectonic plates, creating a different 

geological composition. 

When choosing a model, the 

researchers assumed stagnant lid 

convection on Venus, meaning these 

tectonic plates were completely absent. 

Their results of simulating stagnant 

lid convection starting from highvelocity 

impacts on Venus suggest that 

the planet’s core remains super-heated, 

which helped sustain volcanism for 

billions of years. Geological features 

such as vast volcanic plains and volcano 

domes found on Venus are the result of 

these conditions that can all be traced 

back to late-accretion events which 

heated up the core in the first place. 

Venus’ youthful appearance is thus the 

culmination of these features, perceived 

as a result of the constant magma flow 

that smooths the surface over time. 

While there have been hypotheses 

about Venus’ youthful surface before, 

none have attempted to explain it through 

the planet’s internal core temperature 

and dynamics. “Simone was interested in 

combining [these] very short-time scale 

impact dynamics with long-time scale 

metal dynamics,” Korenaga said. 

What About Earth? 

Like Earth, Venus is a terrestrial 

planet, and is often regarded as Earth’s 

“sister planet” due to their similarities 

in size and orbit around the Sun. Why, 

then, did Earth’s surface fail to fight the 

passage of time? By comparing these 



FOCUS 

Astronomy 

findings to the relatively well-known 

composition of Earth, it is plausible to 

conclude that Earth, unlike Venus, did 

not experience late accretion events that 

affected its core temperature to such a 

great extent. 

While Earth’s large volume of 

surface water broke down the crust 

and uppermost mantle of the planet to 

form tectonic plates, Venus is closer to 

the Sun than the Earth, causing Venus 

to rapidly lose surface water through 

evaporation. This geophysical difference 

is significant, as plate tectonics reduce 

internal heat. In addition, the researchers 

ran a simulation and found that the mean 

impact velocities of late accretions on 

Venus were larger than those of Earth. 

In other words, small celestial bodies 

called planetesimals hit Venus harder 

and faster. The lower-velocity impacts 

on Earth would lead to less core heating 

and an inability to sustain the long-lived 

volcanic activity seen on Venus. These 

key differences are what lends the ‘planet 

of beauty’ its distinct, youthful surface. 

Future Directions 

Marchi and Korenaga hope to use their 

model to make predictions and further 

explain the mystery of Venus. “This 

difference in late accretion by itself may 

not explain all the differences [between 

Earth and Venus], but it may help to 

push it towards the right direction,” 

Korenaga said. The collaboration with 

Korenaga, who has studied the origin 

of life on terrestrial planets for over a 

decade, highlights a key link between 

late accretion and the early history of 

planets. As it did for Venus, late accretion 

played a significant role in Earth's early 

history and has a lasting impact on its 

present surface features, contributing 

substantially to the geological record 

of the planet. Thus, understanding 

late accretions has other far-reaching 

implications for related projects. 

According to Marchi, these energetic 

events could drastically alter the 

chemistry of the atmosphere. For 

example, large-scale impacts can lead 

to the heating of the crust, generating 

a hydrothermal system that could serve 

as a possible reservoir for microbes to 

ABOUT THE 

AUTHORS 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIRANDA SELIN 

The members of Jun Korenaga’s lab: from left to right, (top row) Brianna Fernandez, Darius Modirrousta- 

Galian, Amy Ferrick, Jun Korrenaga; (bottom row) Steph Larson, Meng Guo, Coral Chen 

thrive. “We strive to understand whether 

or not these early impacts could have 

had anything to do with the origin of life 

on Earth,” Marchi said. 

Much of Korenaga’s work in the 

past has focused on early Earth and 

investigating the geophysical catalysts 

for life. “The role of late accretion is 

important to discuss generally, for 

how you can build a habitable planet,” 

Korenaga said. He argues that late-stage 

cosmic collisions have a large impact on 

whether or not a planet can produce life. 

In particular, this research helps us better 

understand the geological makeup and 

formation of planets, a key ingredient for 

a given planet's potential to sustain life. 

As a planetary scientist, Marchi is 

also involved in space missions and is 

currently one of the leaders of the Lucy 

Mission, a NASA space probe with 

the goal of reaching Trojan asteroids 

near Jupiter. Recently, there has been 

a revival of interest in Venus in space 

exploration. NASA selected two future 

space missions to explore Venus in the 

coming decade, and the European Space 

Union has proposed its own mission. 

For next steps, the authors hope to 

build off of this work and potentially 

explore the geophysics of Earth and 

Mars, which could hold more mysteries 

of their own. “The work for Venus is 

definitely not done,” Marchi said. “But 

we'll try to push the new idea forward 

to make predictions and try to test that 

as much as possible—with new missions 

as well.” ■ 

CINDY MEI 

DAVID GAETANO 

CINDY MEI is a junior in Grace Hopper studying neuroscience. In addition to writing for YSM, she serves 

as vice president on the Junior Class Council and Yale Math Competitions. She also conducts epilepsy 

and Tourette’s syndrome research at the Yale School of Medicine.. 

DAVID GAETANO is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles studying Mechanical Engineering. In addition to writing 

for YSM, he is involved in the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association. 

THE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Simone Marchi and Jun Korenaga for their time and 

enthusiasm about their research. 

FURTHER READING: 

Marchi, S., Walker, R.J., & Canup, R.M. (2020). A compositionally heterogeneous martian mantle due to 

late accretion. Science Advances, 6 (7), doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aay2338 


AN 

EEL-ECTRIFYING 

INVENTION 

NEW DROPLET BATTERY COULD POWER 

MINI BIO-INTEGRATED DEVICES 

Chemical Biology 

FEATURE 

All the devices you own right now— 

whether it be your computer, phone, 

or the TV on which you watch your 

favorite shows—would be useless without 

one essential component: a battery. As 

technology has improved, batteries have 

gotten more lightweight and hidden. But 

while they are small enough to operate our 

phones and TVs, they aren’t small enough 

for bio-integrated devices—technology that 

can stimulate our cells. 

When a premature baby is born, their 

whole body is covered in wires and sticky 

tape to measure temperature, blood pressure, 

respiratory rate, and heart rate. These wires 

and tape frustrate both the baby and mother, 

limiting their ability to interact and move. 

Using a bio-integrated device would allow 

them to avoid all this trouble, but currently, 

bio-integrated devices don’t have a power 

source that can operate at the microscopic 

scale and still simulate human tissue. 

University of Oxford researchers Yujia 

Zhang and Linna Zhou from the Hagan 

Bayley lab group have developed a miniature 

battery capable of altering the activity of 

human nerve cells. These researchers were 

inspired by nature and took a cue from 

ocean life: their device mimics electric eels 

by using internal ions to generate electricity. 

Electric eels have been intensely studied 

over the years. In fact, Zhang was inspired by 

a paper that studied the energy mechanism 

of the eels. In it, Thomas B. H. Schroeder, 

Anirvan Guha, and Michael Mayer developed 

a large-scale hydrogen power source using 

that same mechanism. Zhang and his team 

had a simple thought: “Maybe we can shrink 

this down via a droplet technique.” 

The miniature power source they 

envisioned came to life using a chain of five 

nanoliter-sized droplets of a conductive 

hydrogel (a 3D network of polymer 

chains that contain a large quantity of 

absorbed water). For comparison, one 

strand of human hair is 80,000 to 100,000 

nanometers wide. 

Each droplet has a slightly different 

composition, which creates a salt 

concentration gradient. At first, the droplets 

are separated from their neighbors by a 

membrane made of lipids which prevents 

ions from flowing between the droplets. 

But when the structure is cooled, it changes 

the medium, and the power of the structure 

is activated. When the droplets on the ends 

of this chain are connected to electrodes, 

their energy is released and transformed 

into electricity. Electricity then enables the 

hydrogel structure to act as a power source 

for external components. 

Living cells could also be attached to this 

device, which means that their activity 

would be impacted by the ionic current. 

When the power source is “turned on” 

(by cooling the structure), the neurons 

are able to “talk” to each other via 

calcium signaling. 

Their five-droplet units were 

only the beginning. By combining 

twenty of these five-droplet 

units in series, Zhang’s team was 

able to illuminate a two-volt LED 

light. In the future, the team hopes to use a 

droplet printer to produce droplet networks 

made up of thousands of power units. With 

that amount of power, they can run biointegrated 

devices long term. 

“The major goal of this synthetic tissue 

project is to be able to interface with 

real tissues, creating a network between 

synthetic ones and biological ones,” Zhang 

said. “This [project] is only one puzzle 

piece of the whole puzzle.” 

In this project, Zhang’s team was able 

to stimulate neurons, but they are already 

working on stimulating heart tissues in a 

way that allows them to create a network of 

synthetic and real cells. Their end goal is to 

have a multifunctional interface to various 

tissues and organs, not just an interface for 

neurons. Through a full-body interface, the 

researchers would be able to control the 

communication of different types of cells, 

which will allow scientists to study cell 

development and tissue regeneration. 

Zhang says his team owes the majority of 

its success to its breadth of expertise—their 

research involves engineering, chemistry, 

and biology. “It is very important for young 

scientists to understand the interdisciplinary 

nature of experiments, “ Zhang said. “It 

isn’t enough to just be an expert in one 

field, but a lot of different fields. Only by 

combining these fields together can we 

truly solve these problems.” 

In the future, their new battery could 

have a notable impact on devices such as 

bio-hybrid interfaces, microrobots, and 

implants for improved disease monitoring, 

targeted drug delivery, and more. Zhang 

hopes that his team’s research will make 

these ideas one step closer to reality. ■ 

BY SHARNA SAHA | ART BY SOFIA JIN 



FEATURE 

Archaeology 

THE BRICK OF LIFE 

Ancient DNA Reveals Hidden Secrets 

in a 2900-year-old Clay Brick 

BY ILORA ROY 

ART BY MIRANDA SELIN 

Imagine walking down an old pathway, strewn with weathered 

stones, when you trip on a loose brick. You might be irritated, 

but what if those mundane little bricks were more than an 

annoyance? What if they hid the secrets of civilizations from 

thousands of years ago? 

During a series of excavations beginning in 1949 led by Max 

Mallowan and other British archeologists, a clay brick was 

excavated from the ancient city of Kalhu in Mesopotamia, today 

known as Nimrud, Iraq. The brick dates back 2,900 years to 879 

B.C., which was during the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II over 

the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 B.C. to 859 B.C. The Neo- 

Assyrian empire was remarkable for many reasons, including 

advancements in astronomy and mathematics, as well as 

impressive architecture. The excavated “brick of life” was once 

part of King Ashrunasipal’s palace. It is a sundried concoction 

of straw, animal dung, and mud from the Tigris River, with an 

Akkadian inscription on it that reads: “the property of the palace 

of Ashurnasirpal, king of Assyria.” 

The unassuming brick, which had broken horizontally into two 

pieces, was then donated to the National Museum of Denmark 

in 1958. Later, a group of scientists digitized it, splitting the 

brick again, but this time vertically. However, this split wasn’t 

troublesome—in fact, it was quite the opposite, as it allowed 

researchers to study uncontaminated material inside the brick. 

In an interview with Troels Pank Arbøll, Assistant Professor of 

Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen and a key figure 

in the project, he conveyed optimism and enthusiasm for the 

potential discoveries on the horizon. The brick is a portal to a 

bygone era that invites us to peer into the archives of history. 

The researchers took five separate samples from the cracks 

in the clay and analyzed them to produce the aDNA—ancient 

DNA—of thirty-four taxonomic groups of plants. Each crack 

offered a look into the past. This was done through two cuttingedge 

sequencing techniques—a process in molecular biology that 

involves determining the precise order of the building blocks 

of DNA molecules. The first technique is amplicon sequencing, 

which selectively amplifies and sequences specific DNA regions 

within a larger genetic sample. The second is metagenomic 

shotgun sequencing, which enables the exploration of all genes 

across all organisms within a complex sample. These precise and 

critical sequencing techniques were vital tools in uncovering the 

truths behind the fragile aDNA, which is highly degraded due 

to its age. The pursuit of these invaluable insights demanded 

patience and unwavering commitment. 

Scientists are certain that the DNA is uncontaminated since all 

of the samples came from the core of the brick, which has not 

been exposed to the outside world since the brick was first created 

roughly 2900 years ago. Such certainty is remarkable, as it is rare 

for aDNA so old to remain untouched. The species found in the 

clay brick include specimens correlated with different types of 

Iraqi flora, carrots, parsnips, celery, birch, and more. This aDNA 

has bridged gaps in our understanding of the Neo-Assyrian 

Empire, serving as a portal into the past. 

The brick’s aDNA can also help us to look into the future. 

By studying the species in such bricks, researchers may notice 

differences and similarities between plants from 2900 years 

ago and today. These observations will be important to combat 

climate change and help our ecosystem because the past 

furnishes researchers with invaluable insights into patterns of 

biodiversity loss, teaching us how to mitigate similar perils in 

the present day. “The goal would be, in due time, to establish 

a dataset of historical biodiversity for reference in current 

discussions,” Abrøll said. Examining how ecosystems responded 

and adapted in the past can shed light on their resilience and 

capacity for recovery in the future. 

Beyond advancing our understanding of the ecosystem and our 

history, this discovery shows the necessity of interdisciplinary 

collaboration. When discussing the possible future for research 

around endemic plants in Iraq, Arbøll emphasizes the importance 

of collaborating with scientists when researching the history of 

these plants. “It is our hope that future studies with more concrete 

identifications of ancient DNA might help speed this process up,” 

Arbøll said. 

So, the next time you encounter a tricky loose brick, consider 

the possibility that it might harbor a treasure trove of secrets, 

bridging the chasm between antiquity and modernity—a 

testament to the unyielding wonders concealed within the world’s 

most unassuming corners. ■ 


Neuroscience 

FOCUS 

A Scent-sational 

Memory Boost 

How Smelling New Scents During 

Sleep May Improve Your Memory 

BY KENNY CHENG 

ART BY ANGELIQUE ROUEN 

Crying over a textbook with exams approaching? Can’t 

remember the name of that familiar face? The solution may 

lie right under your nose—literally. 

In a paper published in the Frontiers of Neuroscience, scientists at 

the University of California, Irvine (UCI) found that the cognitive 

capacity of older adults increased by a whopping 226 percent 

when exposed to a different fragrance every night for six months. 

Participants of the study simply placed one of seven different essential 

oil scents—eucalyptus, lavender, lemon, orange, peppermint, rose, 

and rosemary—into a two-hour diffuser each night to reap the 

benefits of improved memory. By stimulating neural networks of the 

brain with uncommon odors, it was found that the critical memory 

pathways of participants were significantly strengthened along with 

memory test scores when compared to the control group. 

The association between olfactory stimulation and memory has, 

in fact, long been established. For example, young adults who have 

trained as sommeliers—and therefore are exposed to dozens of wine 

odors every day for months—have thicker brains, specifically in the 

entorhinal cortex, an area heavily associated with memory capacity. 

Another more recent example is the loss of smell as a result of 

COVID-19, which can lead to symptoms of poor memory and ‘brain 

fog.’ However, the most remarkable example of the relationship 

between smell and memory was demonstrated in South Korea where 

dementia patients were exposed to forty odors twice a day, resulting 

in a three hundred percent magnitude of memory improvement 

compared to other dementia patients who didn’t receive this olfactory 

stimulation. So what sets the new UCI study apart? 

“We’ve automated the process of olfactory enrichment. After 

all, it’s unrealistic for patients to open forty bottles of perfume 

and sniff each one every day,” said Michael Leon, Professor of 

Neurobiology and Behavior at UCI and a co-author of the paper. 

“The advantage of using odors at night is that odors can’t wake 

you up. Unlike other sensory systems, the olfactory system 

doesn’t go through the thalamus, which is connected to the sleep 

centers. You can wake somebody up with a noise or bright light or 

by touching them, but you can’t wake somebody up with an odor, 

even if the odor is of frying bacon.” 

While many people may be familiar 

with aromatherapy, in which scents 

from one essential oil are used for 

therapeutic purposes, “olfactory 

enrichment” is distinct. The benefit 

doesn’t come from one particular scent— 

instead, olfactory enrichment is reliant on long-term exposure to a 

multitude of new and distinct scents to stimulate the nervous system. 

Leon’s team has now constructed a diffuser device capable 

of automatically delivering forty odors at night, aptly named 

MemoryAir. But wouldn’t the novelty of these scents wear off? 

“No,” Leon answered. “It turns out that people are not very good 

at identifying odors, let alone forty of them. So people will get that 

novelty experience even if they do it over a course of many months. 

Although, we do have plans to introduce new odors in the future.” 

From their research, Leon and his partners are optimistic about the 

wider implications of their work on treatment for dementia patients 

and for society at large. 

“We believe everybody in the modern affluent world is chronically 

deprived of olfactory stimulation. In fact, if you take a deep breath 

now, you probably wouldn’t smell anything at all,” Leon said. “The 

human brain evolved at the time when there were plenty of odors 

around. So, the good thing about being in the affluent world is that 

you don’t have a lot of odors. The bad thing about not having a lot of 

odors is that your brain is deteriorating or at least not fulfilling its full 

potential because it doesn’t get that stimulation.” 

With the long-term effects of odorless modern life remaining a 

mystery, Leon argues that olfactory enrichment may be a simple 

and inexpensive tool for the prevention and treatment of dementia. 

But first, this technology will need to be tested on a larger pool of 

patients—particularly those diagnosed with dementia. Additionally, 

there were concerns about the small size of the study group since 

some participants were removed to limit confounding factors that 

the COVID-19 pandemic may have introduced. 

Even so, the next time you’re grinding out for your next exam 

past midnight, remember that novel scents—both pleasant and 

unpleasant—may boost your memory. ■ 



FEATURE Physics 

THE 

PHONON PHENOMENON 

Harnessing Photon-Phonon Coupling to Advance Quantum Computing 

BY ANNLI ZHU AND LEA PAPA 

Communication is a natural part of 

life. Humans talk, birds chirp, and 

even trees interact through their root 

networks. To maintain this essential aspect 

of life, we adapt our methods to overcome 

communication challenges: a team meeting 

that once had to be held in a boardroom 

can now be effectively held on a Zoom 

call. For quantum computers—a system 

that looks to advance past the capabilities 

of classical computing—communication 

occurs by leveraging quantum particles and 

their properties, components of sub-atomic 

interactions that have historically been 

challenging to harness. 

Recently, physicist Mo Li and his colleagues 

at the University of Washington were able to 

overcome one such challenge: dealing with 

unpredictable photon emitters. They achieved 

this by designing a deterministic emitter —one 

where they can determine where the photon 

is emitted—and in doing so, they discovered 

that their emitter produced a strong 

interaction between two important quantum 

quasiparticles: photons and phonons. Now, Li 

is hopeful that further research can use this 

interaction to advance communication in 

quantum computing systems and overcome 

some challenges in the field. 

In classical computers, information 

is stored in bits: either 0 or 1. Quantum 

computers use quantum bits— 

called “qubits”—which can exist in a 

“superposition” state of being both 0 and 1 

at the same time, like Schrödinger’s cat. This 

allows them to consider many possibilities 

simultaneously. Through a process called 

entanglement, qubits can be connected 

in a way such that the state of one qubit 

instantly influences the state of another, 

no matter how far apart they are, enabling 

quantum computers to perform complex 

calculations literally faster than light can 

travel. This means quantum computers 

have the potential to revolutionize fields 

like cryptography, drug discovery, and 

more. However, because they are highly 

sensitive to environmental conditions, 

require extremely low temperatures, and 

use extensive space, they are expensive to 

build and difficult to scale. 

Although many subatomic particles 

can be used for quantum computers, 

scientists prefer to use photons—tiny, 

massless particles of light—to transmit 

quantum information because they travel 

at, well, the speed of light. But photons are 

difficult to reliably produce, control, and 

capture. Traditional methods of photon 

generation—through so-called “quantum 

emitters”—involve taking advantage of 

defects in various atomic lattices, which 

are patterned arrays of bound atoms. 

However, these defects often emit photons 

unpredictably, which is undesirable for 

highly precise quantum computers. 

To address this problem, the team of 

scientists at the University of Washington 

set out to build a “deterministic” quantum 

emitter. “We want to engineer it in such a 

way that we can say ‘we want an emitter here’ 

and it indeed emits there,” said Li, Professor 

of Electrical & Computer Engineering and 

Physics and leader of the research team. 

To achieve this goal, the team used two 

single-atom layers of tungsten and selenium, 

similar to existing quantum emitters. Then, 

they draped these layers over hundreds of 

nanoscopic pillars, creating tiny bumps in 

the 2D lattice that isolated the target regions. 

By shining a precise pulse of laser light at an 

electron in the material, they were able to free 

it for a very short period of time. Each time 

an electron returned to its place, it emitted 

a single photon encoded with quantum 

information—a successful quantum emitter. 

Amidst their successes with the 

deterministic emitter, Li and his colleagues 

noticed something 

intriguing in their 

data. “The emitter 

ideally is supposed 

to generate a very 

sharp peak in energy 

at one wavelength 


Physics 

FEATURE 

associated with the photon, but when we 

looked a little bit closer, there [was] a group of 

satellite peaks on the sides, and we wondered 

where that [came] from,” Li said. 

As they analyzed the data, they came to 

an exciting conclusion: phonons—quantum 

quasiparticles that are a unit of vibrational 

energy—may be responsible for these satellite 

peaks. The energy is caused by the vibration 

between two atomic layers, and such motion 

has been described as “atomic breaths.” 

“It’s not uncommon,” Li said. “It’s called 

phonon replica, and it appears in other 

systems as well, but in our system, it’s very 

pronounced.” Normally, the phonon replica 

will appear as a group where intensity is 

strongest at the shortest wavelengths, and then 

rapidly decays. In their system, however, the 

phonon replica is the strongest in the middle 

and weaker at the side peaks. This indicated 

that the “coupling”—the phonon interaction 

with the emitter or the mechanical vibration 

between the two atomic layers—is very strong 

and overwhelms the emission that has no 

interaction with the phonon, creating this 

irregular array of peaks. 

“Every time [the emitter] takes a breath, it 

emits one phonon and that phonon is taken 

out of one photon. So, the optical photon that 

is emitted is reducing energy by exactly one 

phonon,” Li said. 

Phonons have been historically difficult 

to leverage for quantum computation, but 

they have great potential when coupled with 

photons. While photons are very popular for 

communication due to their speed, storing 

information on them is difficult. On the 

other hand, because phonons vibrate at a 

much lower frequency, future advancements 

in quantum technology may allow them to 

live much longer than photons, acting as 

temporary information storage. This is where 

the phonon-photon interaction comes in. 

“They can exchange information. When 

you want to stall the quantum information 

there, you convert them into phonons. The 

information will stay there; a little while 

later you can come back and read it out. But 

if you’re ready to send that information out 

of the system to another system, then you 

convert it into a photon,” Li said. 

Leveraging this deterministic emitter 

and strong coupling activity could advance 

quantum computing systems by improving 

inter-computer communication. Excited, Li 

shared some of his ideas for future research 

that may be able to translate his findings into 

something specifically useful for quantum 

computing. One idea is the possibility of 

building a similar system with more than one 

emitter. But what would this achieve? 

“Because the phonons are localized, if the 

two emitters are close enough, the vibrations 

will interact with each other. This is a way to 

make two emitters talk to each other,” Li said. 

Unlike photons, which don’t couple with 

each other, the phonon’s properties suggest 

a possibility of coordinating two or three 

emitters—by coupling the phonons instead. 

Since the photons cannot interact, they can 

instead “talk through” the phonons before 

flying off to their destinations. If an effective 

two- or three-emitter system is achieved, 

it could revolutionize the way quantum 

computers communicate with each other. 

This theory may also be able to 

address the issue of scaling in quantum 

computers—something that has greatly 

challenged researchers in the field. While 

larger computers with more qubits are 

more powerful in completing tasks, they 

are difficult and expensive to build and 

maintain. Currently, IBM’s 433-qubit 

computer is the largest in the world. “But 

[433 qubits] isn’t enough to do any realistic 

quantum computing,” Li said. “Maybe some 

toy models, but nothing to the level of what 

quantum computers promise in theory.” 

Instead, just like in classical computers, 

tasks would benefit from being modularized, 

split up to be completed in parallel by 

multiple smaller computers. But while 

classical computers can operate at room 

temperature, most quantum computers 

require extremely low-temperature and lownoise 

environments in order to facilitate 

the precise manipulation of qubits. On the 

other hand, any communication between 

computers, achieved by sending photons 

through fiber-optic cables, happens at a 

frequency five orders of magnitude higher 

than that at which quantum calculations are 

performed. “We need something to bridge 

this energy gap,” Li said, “This is where our 

emitters have their potential.” 

The team’s breakthrough in photonphonon 

coupling would allow these spatially 

separate quantum computers to solve the 

problem of effective transduction: converting 

signals between mediums without loss of 

information. This gives researchers the 

potential to build scalable, modularized 

quantum computing networks. 

“The holy grail of this research would 

be to make two, maybe three, or more, 

emitters talk to each other,” Li said. “This 

will allow us to realize the full potential of 

quantum computing.” ■ 

ART BY ANNLI ZHU 



FEATURE 

Geochemistry 

BARNACLE BREADCRUMBS 

FINDING LOST MALAYSIAN AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370 

BY MADELEINE POPOFSKY 

ART BY KARA TAO 

It was March 8, 2014—a day like any 

other—when 239 people took to the 

skies aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 

370 on their way from Kuala Lumpur to 

Beijing. Some were going home after a 

long time away. Others were world-famous 

calligraphers returning from a business trip. 

Some may have been scared of flying and 

clutched the armrests as the plane took off. 

But after that fateful day, none of those 239 

people, nor the plane they sailed away on, 

were ever seen again. And despite years of 

intensive searching—using everything from 

submarines to sonar imaging—their final 

resting place has yet to be discovered. 

Over a year later, on July 29, 2015, Gregory S. 

Herbert, Associate Professor of Paleobiology 

at the University of South Florida, was 

watching the news and saw that a piece of 

the missing aircraft’s wing, called a flaperon, 

had been found on Réunion Island. Herbert 

instantly knew that he had to make some 

calls. A clue that could unlock the location 

of the lost plane had been unearthed, and he 

was uniquely qualified to decode it. 

Herbert’s background lies in stable isotope 

geochemistry; specifically, he decodes ocean 

temperatures from barnacle shells. If a 

drifting object has barnacles, scientists can 

potentially use these temperatures to track 

its path through the ocean. And barnacles, 

clinging to the flaperon, were clearly visible 

on the TV screen. “I knew immediately that 

there were sea surface temperatures recorded 

in those barnacles,” Herbert said. “Some 

of the barnacles were fairly large, and they 

could have recorded the whole drift.” 

Herbert tried to contact the French 

authorities, who had possession of the 

flaperon, and the Malaysian officials, who 

were running the investigation. Both 

attempts failed. However, Herbert was 

not deterred, and the third time proved to 

be the charm: the Australian authorities, 

who helped coordinate the search since 

the plane’s likely final location nears their 

territory, enthusiastically agreed to look over 

his proposal. 

Based on satellite data, the plane’s final 

resting place is thought to lie somewhere 

in the Indian Ocean along the seventh arc, 

between latitudes twenty and forty degrees 

S. However, this is an extremely large area 

that the plane may not even be in. But with 

the technique Herbert and his colleagues 

have developed, scientists can say for sure 

whether the plane is in the seventh arc, and 

can pinpoint its location to a smaller and 

more easily searchable area. 

Barnacles grow in daily layers, similar to 

the rings trees produce every year. Each of 

these layers encodes chemical data about 

their surroundings at the time of growth. 

Different isotopes of oxygen are deposited 

at different sea surface temperatures, with 

a known relationship between their ratio 

and the temperature. Scientists can analyze 

this ratio through δ 18 O values to determine 

the temperature the barnacles experienced 

each day, and match that data with different 

temperature currents that run through 

the Indian Ocean. Other scientists had 

previously jumped on this information to 

produce temperature and location models 

for the aircraft, but in their rush to complete 

the work, they failed to use experimental 

controls, leading to large uncertainties in 

their results. 

Despite these apparent problems with the 

previous studies, Herbert had a difficult time 

securing funding for his study. In the end, 

the Florida Aquarium decided to fund his 

research, as it could also be used to benefit 

sea turtles. Sick sea turtles will float for weeks 

and thus develop barnacles on their normally 

clear front flippers. If these barnacles could 

be traced, scientists could begin to identify 

areas where sea turtles tend to get sick. Thus, 

a method was born that could both trace a 

missing plane and track sick turtles. 

This new technique, created by Herbert 

and his colleagues, had two unique and vital 

components that set it apart from previous 

attempts. The project was the first to create 

an experimentally derived equation for the 

particular species of barnacle (cosmopolitan 


Geochemistry 

FEATURE 

stalked barnacle, Lepas anatifera) that was 

attached to the flaperon. Barnacles were 

placed into tanks, stained with a marker 

(a fluorescent dye) that showed divisions 

between layers, and subjected to slowly 

changing temperatures. The scientists then 

anesthetized the barnacles and analyzed 

their layers for δ 18 O content. Finally, they 

created an equation that relates temperature 

and δ 18 O content. 

The second innovation centered around 

what to do with that temperature data. 

While temperature does vary throughout 

the ocean, there are large bands that are 

the same temperature throughout. “Just 

knowing that first temperature doesn’t tell 

you where the plane is; you have to do a lot 

more work,” Herbert said. In other words, 

each new temperature recorded is needed 

to narrow down the 

search; knowing just the first temperature 

recorded by the barnacle is not enough. 

This extra work involved developing 

a modeling simulation using known sea 

surface temperatures and other data such as 

current velocity that is consistently recorded 

across the oceans. The simulation allowed 

the researchers to cast virtual flaperons 

adrift from various starting points, and then 

statistically analyze their routes to determine 

the most likely path each barnacle on each 

flaperon took based on its temperature data. 

Herbert and others on the team applied 

this technique using previously published 

data for one of the smaller barnacles found 

clinging to the flaperon. First, they calculated 

the barnacle’s age at each layer through an 

experimentally derived equation relating 

barnacle size to age. “We measured the 

size of the barnacle at each sample, at each 

temperature,” Herbert said. 

They then cast 50,000 virtual flaperons 

adrift in different places along the band of 

the ocean defined by the barnacle’s earliest 

temperature value. Then, they compared 

the temperature data these virtual 

flaperons experienced with the actual 

temperature data from the barnacle 

using a method called dynamic 

time warping. Eventually, this 

eliminated all but one virtual 

flaperon, which was the only 

one to end near where it was 

actually found: in waters 

near Réunion Island. 

However, the 

timeline for 

applying this new 

and promising 

t e c h n i q u e 

will have 

to wait 

on the 

French government, which has custody of 

the largest barnacles. These are the only 

barnacles that could have recorded the 

entire drift of the flaperon. “I have a feeling 

that they're still sitting on these shells 

because there were three French scientists 

who worked on them, and their work was 

very rushed, and they did not get any sort 

of a conclusive result,” Herbert said. The 

French government likely wants to keep the 

samples until the foundational work that 

will allow for conclusive results has been 

completed. Thus, it is possible the French 

government will release the barnacles in 

light of these new findings. 

In the meantime, the next step is to improve 

the model and equations. “I just wanted to 

demonstrate how to do the method first,” 

Herbert said. To begin, Herbert and others 

have already started work on a more accurate 

barnacle age model, since shell size is not the 

most accurate predictor. They also want to 

improve the flaperon motion model used; 

for example, accounting for the fact that a 

flaperon does not behave like an idealized 

buoy, and instead drifts slightly left. Finally, 

the researchers need to perform a sensitivity 

analysis. This involves running the model 

thousands more times with different errors 

factored in to see how dramatically these 

errors change the results. This work would 

take up to a year, even if the larger barnacles 

from the French were provided immediately. 

However, hopes are high. Of the five 

drifters in the simulation that best matched 

the known barnacle’s path, four of them 

started in the same location, tightly 

clustered together. “We’re not just looking 

for a single temperature, we’re looking 

for a sequence, a very unique sequence of 

temperatures. And there aren’t that many 

drift origins, and drift pathways, that could 

possibly be consistent with that,” Herbert 

said. When asked if the plane would ever be 

found, Herbert didn’t hesitate. 

“Yes,” he said. ■ 



FEATURE 

Astrophysics 

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, 

GIANT STAR 

INVESTIGATING WHY MASSIVE STARS FLICKER 

BY DIYA NAIK AND ROBIN TSAI 

ART BY LUNA AGUILAR 

A dying star shimmers and twinkles 

as its inner core, formerly a churning 

dynamo, sputters out its final breaths. 

Nuclear fusion combines atomic nuclei 

to birth new heavy elements that 

will soon occupy the cosmos. And 

then it happens: a fiery explosion, 

where the insides of the star 

fly everywhere. Left in the 

aftermath of the chaos is either a 

neutron star or a black hole. 

For astrophysicists back 

home on Earth, understanding 

the characteristics of these 

explosive dying stars is the key 

to understanding our past and 

current universe—everything from star 

formation to galaxy evolution to the very 

beginnings of our universe. But to really 

understand the characteristics of these 

stars, we need to start from the bellies 

of the beasts: the processes within these 

stars. This is done with asteroseismology. 

Asteroseismology applies the techniques 

of seismology—which uses waves to 

understand the interior of the Earth— 

to stars. In order to understand what is 

left behind after a star dies, you have to 

understand its internal 

structure back when it 

was still alive. This 

structure includes 

everything from 

the eddies 

of rotating 

plasma that 

twist deep 

within the 

furnace of the 

core to the light 

and heat that 

jostles from its 

surface. 

So, how do we peer 

inside stars? We must turn an eye to their 

light. How bright is it? Does it change 

over time? Is it high-energy like an X-ray 

or is it low-energy like a radio wave? The 

answers to each question reveal a wealth 

of information on the energy released by 

the star: its temperature, its stability, and 

much more. By making predictions for 

what light outputs should look like, we 

can test the actual light of stars against 

our assumptions to see how well our 

physics match up with the real world. 

Any discrepancies reveal new avenues for 

future scientific exploration. 

For astrophysics postdoctoral researcher 

Evan Anders and his research group at 

Northwestern University, one particular 

real-world signal caught their attention: 

red noise. Red noise is a ubiquitous, lowfrequency 

twinkling in the light signals 

from massive, stable stars—much like the 

static on a blank TV channel. These stars 

are called main sequence stars, a category 

which most stars, like our Sun, belong to. 

Real-life observations about a star allow 

researchers to eliminate possibilities and 

therefore gain a more precise 

understanding of the 

internal mechanics 

of the star. 

“We hoped this 

red noise was 

gravity waves 

because gravity 


Astrophysics 

FEATURE 

waves give you a lot of information about 

the structure of the star,” Anders said. 

“They’re telling you about how big the core 

is.” Gaining a more lucid understanding 

of the inside of the star, such as the size 

of its core, allows us to better understand 

the energy that the star releases and define 

the pressure it uses to create new elements. 

While scientists do have simple models for 

this task, these models fail to align with 

real-world data. They need a more detailed 

model built on empirical evidence, and 

gravity waves could provide that evidence. 

But what is a gravity wave? We can see 

an example here on Earth: storms and 

winds push the ocean waters up, creating 

waves. But the Earth’s gravity resists this 

upward movement, causing the wave to be 

pulled downwards, creating an oscillatory 

displacement. A similar thing happens 

in stars. “[In gravity waves], you 

displace this [fluid] from where 

it wants to be and gravity 

pushes it back down—and 

then you get this wiggly 

pattern,” Anders said. 

Deep within the 

centers of stars, 

nuclear fusion 

of hydrogen into 

helium creates an 

inferno, generating 

immense amounts of 

bright hot plasma that 

have nowhere to go but 

out. When this material 

reaches the very edge of the core, it breaks 

free in a fourteen-day-long ripple before 

sinking back into the heart of the star. As 

fusion continues, the core roils with these 

cycles of hot to cool to hot to cool, churning 

gravity waves across the core. These waves 

propagate through the rest of the star, 

reverberating at different frequencies like 

guitar strings. 

Modeling these waves with a 

supercomputer is extremely difficult, but 

Anders and his team designed a clever 

way of mimicking the red noise. Thanks 

to earlier models by one of the researchers 

(Northwestern fluid dynamicist and 

assistant professor Daniel Lecaonet), 

Anders and his team had previous 

models of wave formation and 

propagation that could be tweaked 

for higher accuracy. 

Anders’ simulations can be 

compared to a music studio— 

recording raw music before passing 

it through a filter to create a specific 

effect. Anders’ ‘filter’ consists of 

code that translates the waves created 

by core convection—showing what they 

would look like distorted by the rest of the 

star outside of the core—and thus what the 

waves actually look like leaving the star 

and reaching our eyes as light. 

The scientists created their filter based 

on a simpler model of how stars worked. 

The idea was that it would be easy to 

predict what the light signals from this 

rudimentary filter should look like. If 

the output of the program matched their 

predicted output, the scientists could 

go back and painstakingly craft 

a more advanced filter with all 

the physical complexities of 

the star—a filter with enough 

refinement to see unique 

signals such as the red noise. 

Their basic filter demo 

passed with flying colors, 

and it was then time for 

the real deal. Anders' team 

set to work crafting a more 

accurate filter, one that 

captured the intricacies of the 

star's mechanics outside of the 

core, reflecting the true polyphony 

of physical effects of a star rather than just 

a few. If the glimmer of signal leaving the 

filter matches the hum of the red noise, 

then gravity waves are the source of the 

red noise. 

However, when Anders combined the 

waves generated by convection and the 

echo of gravity waves outside the core, the 

difference between the output signal and 

red noise was glaring. Their simulation 

revealed that gravity waves are far too 

muted to match the high-amplitude signal 

of red noise. But for scientists, a definitive 

no is just as exciting as a definitive yes. 

Knowing what the red noise isn’t brings 

astronomers closer to understanding 

what it really is. The next theory 

in line is that the red noise 

comes from motions closer 

to the star's surface. 

Anders has two directions 

he might take his future 

research. He might want to 

take the elaborate programs 

he developed here to further 

explore the waves within stars. 

“We use the amplitude of the 

wave to learn something about the 

process that’s driving it,” Anders said. The 

second direction, on the other hand, would 

be refining his simulation further. “[We 

add] rotation, because stars, well, rotate,” 

Anders said. 

There are several possibilities for 

improvement in the team’s research. They 

did not factor in the rotations that affect 

the cycles of plasma, nor did they include 

the effects of magnetic fields. However, 

their work still proves to be an important 

step in understanding the inner workings 

of stars. Listening to asteroseismology’s 

music of the spheres brings us closer to 

understanding the massive stars that 

churn in our universe. ■ 



UNDERGRADUATE PROFILE 

HARPER LOWREY 

BY NYLA MARCOTT YC ’24 

Harper Lowrey (YC ’24) 

first became fascinated 

by the wide-ranging 

implications of science after reading a 

book with her mom called Lab Girl as a 

child. “My mom read it and said that she could never work 

in science, while I was like, ‘Ooh that sounds fun,’” Lowrey said. “[I 

find inspiration] when things get rough, but there are cool results 

that come out of the struggle.” 

Lowrey, who grew up in Colorado, always enjoyed exploring the 

outdoors and first became interested in pursuing a career in research 

after participating in a summer camp at the University of Colorado 

Boulder. During the camp, she stayed at the university’s research 

station and had the opportunity to learn from mycologists— 

scientists who study fungi. “[I was] so enamored by the concept of 

being able to study the world, which I think was probably the start 

that led me into academic science,” Lowrey said. 

Lowrey was determined to continue studying biology in 

college. When applying to Yale, she was selected for the Hahn 

Scholars program, which seeks to recruit high-achieving students 

with extensive STEM research experience. As a first-year, Lowrey 

joined the Gendron Lab, where she investigated how plant 

circadian clocks use post-translational regulation to control the 

amount of protein active in a system at one time. 

Although conducting research could have been an intimidating 

experience, members of the Gendron Lab made sure that Lowrey 

felt like a valued member of the group. “I was immediately treated 

like somebody who had ideas that were important, which I think 

is a really great environment in science, instead of like, ‘You need 

to sit there and be quiet and learn from other people.’ I have really 

benefited from being a part of the team and working towards our 

common goal,” Lowrey said. 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LIANA TALPINS 

Harper Lowrey’s plants on which she researches circadian clocks. 

Lowrey’s research in the Gendron Lab is focused on 

understanding how the growth restrictor gene, CFH1, is 

controlled by a plant’s circadian clock. Circadian clocks allow 

plants to predict changes in their environments on a 24-hour 

cycle and are responsible for the regulation of a variety of 

functions essential for survival, such as growth and defense. 

In the absence of CFH1, plants develop very long hypocotyls, 

the first seedling stems that occur after germination. Lowrey’s 

research has helped uncover CFH1’s role in controlling 

hypocotyl growth in Arabidopsis thaliana, a common plant 

model species. A manuscript that includes Lowrey’s research 

has been submitted for peer review and will likely lead to further 

research regarding how CFH1 works in other plant species. 

In addition to conducting research at Yale, Lowrey participated 

in molecular biology research on transgene silencing—the loss 

of gene expression transferred from one organism to another— 

at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Missouri. In the 

summer after her junior year, she also conducted research at the 

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on argonaute proteins, which 

are integral in RNA interference. Both experiences provided 

her with the opportunity to meet other plant biologists and 

to contribute to postdoctoral research projects. “You learn a 

lot when you are new to a place—getting new techniques or 

doing different things—and I feel like it also helps increase my 

scientific confidence,” Lowrey said. 

While Lowrey’s research is designed to increase knowledge 

of plant physiology and is not specifically linked with industry 

interests, she recognizes the complexities that arise when 

conducting plant biology research more closely tied to industry. 

“I do think a lot more thought needs to be about what products 

we are trying to produce—especially if we’re talking about 

agriculture and products that are going to the market. Just 

because something is cost-effective or we will make money from 

it is not the only reason to make that kind of thing,” Lowrey said. 

In April, Lowrey’s commitment to research earned her the 

prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. She is now working to 

complete her major in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental 

Biology, as well as certificates in French and Education 

Studies. After graduation, she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in plant 

molecular biology. As Lowrey continues to study science, she 

finds enjoyment in building a deeper understanding of the 

world and hopes to help others do the same by running her 

own lab and mentoring the next generation of scientists. 

“Long term, my goal is academia,” Lowrey said. “I am 

really interested in thinking about what kinds of things are 

important in how we’re teaching and policies around teaching. 

It is important that college professors know how to teach [...] 

in ways that are equitable and effective.” ■ 


ALUMNI PROFILE 

ILANA YURKIEWICZ 

YC ’10 

BY HIMANI PATTISAM 

Writer, Copy Editor, News Editor, Features Editor, and 

eventually Editor-in-Chief: during her time at Yale, Ilana 

Yurkiewicz (YC ’10) wore many hats at the Yale Scientific 

Magazine (YSM). But she didn’t leave science writing behind after 

graduation. Even now, as a clinical assistant professor of primary 

care and population health at Stanford, Yurkiewicz combines her 

passions for writing and medicine in her work as a science journalist, 

author, and physician. “YSM was where I got my start. I always had 

an itch to write and take complex scientific concepts and make them 

understandable for people,” she said. 

As an undergraduate, Yurkiewicz explored the depths of a liberal 

arts education, taking philosophy courses and writing seminars in 

addition to a typical pre-med workload of chemistry and biology. She 

also conducted genomics research in a bioinformatics lab studying 

DNA testing for genetic conditions, which sparked her interest in 

bioethics and the intersection between science and the humanities. 

She graduated in 2010 with a degree in Molecular, Cellular, and 

Developmental Biology. 

After Yale, Yurkiewicz took a year off and completed the American 

Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media 

Science and Engineering Fellowship in science journalism, where 

she worked as a science and health reporter at The News & Observer 

in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I had a couple of stories on the front 

page, and it was always really exciting to see that [...] It’s always been 

really important to me that we bridge the gap between hospitals and 

laboratories with everyday lives,” Yurkiewicz said. Following her 

passion for bioethics, Yurkiewicz also interned for the Presidential 

Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues before attending 

Harvard Medical School. 

During her time at Harvard, Yurkiewicz continued writing, creating 

a blog column called “Unofficial Prognosis” for Scientific American 

where she shared reflections on her medical school experiences with 

hundreds of thousands of readers. “I had full editorial freedom to 

write about whatever I thought was interesting,” Yurkiewicz said. She 

then moved across the country to complete her residency in internal 

medicine, followed by a fellowship in oncology and hematology, at 

Stanford. Now, as a faculty member 

there, she co-directs a primary care 

center for cancer survivors. 

In July, Yurkiewicz published 

her debut book, Fragmented: 

A Doctor’s Quest to Piece 

Together American Health 

Care, which she worked on 

for two years. Fragmented 

was inspired by her own 

experiences as a physician 

navigating the healthcare 

system and making decisions 

based on fragmented medical 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY HANNAH HAN 

Ilana Yurkiewicz (YC ’10), a physician at Stanford and the former Editorin-Chief 

of the Yale Scientific Magazine, holds her recently published novel, 

Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care. 

records. “I found myself always working in a partially blindfolded state 

to stitch together patient stories,” Yurkiewicz said. She first became 

interested in the topic after delving into the history of converting paper 

patient notes into a digital format, and she began to investigate how 

medical records can vanish when patients transfer between medical 

facilities. Fragmented zooms out to investigate barriers beyond recordkeeping 

that fracture a patient’s story into pieces, and she explores how 

doctors and patients can piece them back together. 

In the future, Yurkiewicz hopes to write a second book chronicling 

her experiences as a physician providing primary care to cancer 

survivors. She plans to focus on the ‘hard questions’ of life, death, 

and serious illness that cancer patients must grapple with throughout 

their diagnosis and treatment journeys. “My patients often ask me 

to write stories to share their experiences and advocate for them,” 

Yurkiewicz said. She explained that she takes great care to convey 

empathy and compassion and to protect confidentiality while 

exploring complex issues that her patients face. 

For Yurkiewicz, writing journalistic pieces with nuance and depth 

has the power to impact a large audience. Through her work, she aims 

to empower people to advocate for more comprehensive solutions to 

reform the healthcare system. “Illness is a great equalizer, and my focus 

[is] to write for everyone—physicians, policymakers, patients, and 

the general public,” Yurkiewicz said. But she also hopes to someday 

explore a new genre. “I wrote stories for fun at Yale,” she said. Her ‘pipe 

dream’ is to return to those roots and write a science fiction novel, 

grounding her stories in real science. 

Although she has pursued her passion for science writing alongside 

medicine, patient care has always been Yurkiewicz’s highest priority, 

and she has periodically taken breaks from writing to focus on honing 

her medical practice. “There are ebbs and flows in the busy doctor life, 

but science writing always comes back,” she said. Balancing multiple 

professional hats as a physician and journalist is difficult, but Yurkiewicz 

emphasizes that it is possible. Her advice for students interested in both: 

“Pursuing a career in science journalism and medicine is a harder path, 

but if you really care about something, you will do it well.” ■ 


WRITING FOR THEIR LIVES 

BY KEYA BAJAJ 

SCIENCE 

IN 

IMAGE COURTESY OF SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES 

It is late 1937, and the American Society for the Control of Cancer convenes for a press 

dinner under the dim chandeliers of the Harvard Club. All the invitees are welcome to 

attend, except one: America’s premier medical journalist, Jane Stafford. To seat a woman 

at the table would have “considerably changed the character of the dinner,” admitted the 

organization’s publicity director; besides, the University Club didn’t allow women entry 

anyway. Thrumming below the frenzied fever of twentieth-century scientific exploration 

was a culture of leaving women out of a conversation they pioneered, when they were the 

ones deconstructing scientific jargon. 

In her newly released book Writing for Their Lives, historian Marcel Chotkowski 

LaFollette chronicles the untold story of eight female science journalists who made science 

intelligible to the average reader and put its latest advances on the front page, but who were 

themselves omitted from the headlines. These women disseminated scientific discoveries 

through published stories and columns, breaking both the news and the professional 

paradigms of the time. 

“Historians of science have tended to write about scientists, not those who wrote about 

science,” LaFollette writes. In her novel, LaFollette attempts to lift the “historical fog” 

that has hidden the pioneering efforts of these women. In 1921, Science Service, a small 

Washington, D.C.-based science news organization, gave a group of dedicated female 

science journalists their footing. Emphasizing meritocracy instead of gender, Science 

Service boasted a female majority in its cohort of editorial staff writers; Jane Stafford was 

just one of them. 

Jane Stafford’s wide news sweep encompassed everything from schizophrenia to public 

health epidemics, with a particular focus on cancer. Her work involved expository pieces, 

like one in 1928 contesting the nicotine-free contents of a tobacco brand. She brought a 

potent mixture of journalistic strengths to the newsroom: the ability to decipher volumes 

of dense scientific literature, a dexterity with language (specifically in her allusions to 

Classical myths and iconography), and an ability to speak truth to power. 

In 1945, Science Service reported news of the atomic bomb, explaining the science 

behind history as it unfolded in real time. While other news outlets succumbed to 

sensationalism, the female journalists at Science Service collaborated to present a more 

measured report of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki events. Martha Morrow reported on the 

physics; Jane Stafford explored radiation and physiology; Helen Davis wrote about its 

chemistry; and Marjorie Van de Water discussed the bomb’s socio-psychological effects. 

As “career women,” they braved both the pressures of the news cycle and the inherent 

misogynies of a male-dominated scientific community. 

While occasionally dry in its journalistic tone and factually heavy in its ambitious 

scope, LaFollette is successful in her detailed account of the hidden figures of scientific 

journalism. If it took time for science to leave the confines of laboratories and trickle into 

our lives—learning from curbside newsstands, on the taxi radio, and over morning cups 

of coffee—Writing for Their Lives shows us that it took far longer to decide who got to tell 

those stories. “The paths to success [for female journalists] were riddled with the potholes 

of institutionalized bias along with the gaping gullies of entrenched and unapologetic 

misogyny,” LaFollette writes. 

It would be 1973 before the Harvard Club would open its doors to full-time women 

members. By then, Jane Stafford had already established fundamental journalistic 

practices, co-founded the National Association of Science Writers, and served as president 

of the Women’s National Press Club—all while not being allowed to sit in on dinners. ■ 

T 

S 


" 

RACISM IN HEALTH 

BY SAMUEL OBIAMA 

Half of all medical student respondents did not believe that Black 

patients felt pain the way Whites did. So did a lot of practicing 

physicians,” a study published in PNAS reported. If asked when 

this study was conducted, many might guess sometime in the twentieth 

century, or earlier. 

The actual year was 2016. 

This revelation was just one of the many disturbing findings revealed in 

“The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis,” a podcast jointly 

produced by Scientific American and Nature in August. The podcast opens 

by examining Georgia’s new law that bans abortions after six weeks of 

conception, before launching into an explanation of its past precedents and 

future ramifications on pregnant Black women. 

Historically, unintended pregnancy rates are higher among Black women 

compared to White women. Due to income disparities, job insecurity, 

and overall underinsurance, Black women have less access to long-acting 

reversible contraceptives (LARCs) and must resort to using condoms, 

which are a less effective form of contraception. Higher rates of unintended 

pregnancy, coupled with increased susceptibility to mistreatment during 

childbirth, contribute to the racial disparity in maternal mortality rates: Black 

women are three times more likely to die in pregnancy than White women. 

The podcast makes a strong effort to show that socioeconomically 

THE 

disadvantaged Black women are not alone in this phenomenon. Serena 

Williams and Shalon Irving, for instance, are both healthy, educated, 

affluent women whose obstetrician-gynecologists dismissed their concerns. 

Irving visited her doctor multiple times and reported swelling in her right 

leg and a weight gain of nine pounds in two weeks. She was ordered to “wait 

it out” and died in 2017 due to birth-associated complications caused by 

high blood pressure. Williams, on the other hand, told her doctors that she 

thought she had a pulmonary embolism. Even though she had experienced 

one before, her physician ignored her claim, and she nearly died. 

Both of these cases could have been avoided if their own doctors had 

listened to them. 

Is there any hope left? Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, more 

SPOTLIGHT 

awareness has been raised about this issue than ever before. This increased 

public attention may not only help lower the Black maternal mortality rate 

but also help reduce the factors that contribute to the issue, such as implicit 

racial biases among physicians. 

“The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis” integrates 

interviews with researchers, historians, and family members of women who 

died from mistreatment, providing a holistic view of the Black maternal 

mortality crisis. By referencing the complicated, interwoven history of 

childbirth and slavery, analyzing existing stereotypes, and hypothesizing how 

ever-changing legislation will affect Black women in the U.S., this podcast 

calls us to question, analyze, and change our existing healthcare system. ■ 

IMAGE COURTESY OF RAWPIXEL.COM 



POINT 

The Discovery of a Superheavy 

Oxygen Isotope 

Since the days of the Manhattan Project, nuclear 

physicists have concerned themselves with 

the study of certain atomic nuclei known as 

“magic nuclei.” Protons and neutrons, also known 

as nucleons, occupy shells within the nucleus 

corresponding to different energy levels. When 

these shells are full, our leading nuclear theory 

predicts the resulting isotope to be significantly 

more stable than other isotopes of similar mass and 

neutron-to-proton ratios. 

Magic nuclei are unique because they have a full 

shell of either protons or neutrons. Since magic 

nuclei were first discovered, scientists have been 

able to determine if a given nucleus is “magic” by 

counting the number of protons and neutrons. 

Specifically, physicists predict that magic nuclei must 

contain exactly two, eight, twenty, twenty-eight, fifty, 

eighty-two, or 126 protons or neutrons. Following 

this pattern, oxygen-28 ( 28 O), the oxygen isotope 

consisting of twenty neutrons and eight protons, was 

predicted to be “doubly magic,” since it has a magic 

number of both protons and neutrons. 

Oxygen-16 ( 16 O), in its natural form, has six protons 

and six neutrons. To test the stability of 28 O, a team of 

physicists with experimental operations based in the 

RIKEN Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory in Wako, 

Japan, worked to produce the isotope. The generation 

and detection of 28 O was a highly technical feat: 

researchers shot a high-energy beam of calcium-48 

atoms at a beryllium target, producing fluorine-29, 

which is only one proton away from the desired 28 O. 

The team then propelled the fluorine-29 atoms into a 

wall of liquid hydrogen, knocking off the necessary 

proton and creating 28 O. Using a specialized detector, 

the physicists observed the emission of four neutrons 

and a stable oxygen-24 ( 24 O) isotope, indicating that 

28 O had in fact been present before decaying into 

24 O. To their surprise, however, the decay of 28 O 

failed to demonstrate the high stability expected 

of a “doubly magic” isotope, raising a host of new 

questions about its atomic structure. 

Numerous results from the experiment suggested 

that, contrary to expectations, 28 O does not have a 

full shell of neutrons in its nucleus. The first piece of 

evidence was the almost immediate decay of 28 O on 

By Ian Gill 

a faster timescale than the researchers were able to 

measure, indicating that the supposed stability of the 

isotope does not hold up experimentally. 

The researchers also computed the spectroscopic 

factor, a number between zero and one that describes 

the stability of the nuclear structure based on how 

much the arrangement of nucleons changes when 

a proton or neutron is removed. In a nucleus with 

full shells, the structure is very rigid, so removing 

one nucleon doesn’t cause widespread change in the 

arrangement of the surrounding nucleons, resulting 

in a high spectroscopic factor. On the other hand, if 

the structure of a nucleus is very unstable, removing 

one nucleon sets off a cascade of structural changes, 

yielding a low spectroscopic factor. Interestingly, the 

spectroscopic factor found by the team was much 

lower than what would have been expected if 28 O 

had a full shell of neutrons. 

Based on this data, the team concluded that despite 

having the correct number of protons and neutrons to 

fill both nuclear shells, some of the neutrons in 28 O 

occupy higher energy levels instead, making the isotope 

not “doubly magic.” 28 O is not the only exception to the 

typical rule for identifying “doubly magic” nuclei: 24 O, 

which contains sixteen neutrons and eight protons, 

has historically demonstrated the stability that comes 

with being “doubly magic.” In light of these results, 

physicists are left with two major questions: What 

criteria can be used to predict if a nucleus is “doubly 

magic?” And why is it that the numeric rule tends to 

hold, but has a few select exceptions? 

Future experiments aim to gain more context for 

the stability of 28 O and to explore how nuclei with 

high neutron-to-proton ratios, such as oxygen-30 

( 30 O), behave. Through these experiments, scientists 

hope to broaden their grasp of the nuclear shell model 

as a whole, gaining insight into phenomena taking 

place from a scale as small as that of a single isotope, 

to the scale of an entire neutron star. Alternatively, 

it’s entirely possible that these further investigations 

could reveal deep flaws with our current approach 

towards the structure of the nucleus, and perhaps 

even serve as a starting point for new theories. As for 

now, we can only be certain that there is much work 

to be done to fully understand “magic nuclei.” ■ 

COUNTERPOINT 

The Heaviest Air in the World 


INTEGRATION 

OR 

INVASION? 

BY ISAIAH ASBED 

On my desk sits a brain. Until 1984, it was kept in a 

Brown University neuroscience lab. It’s now found 

below a wrinkled Scarface poster, illuminated by 

LEDs. It’s just a plastic model, and the right side of the medulla 

is broken off a little. But regardless of its idiosyncrasies, it’s 

a brain. It has a cerebral cortex, tinted pink and indented 

by the peaks and valleys of gyri and sulci. At its base is its 

cerebellum, darkened by dense collections of cell bodies. It 

even has a pineal gland, Descartes’ seat of consciousness, 

buried deep within the cerebrum. 

And that’s almost enough to make you believe, despite 

its literal plasticity, that electrochemical signals are running 

around in there, from axon to dendrite, from neuron to 

neuron. Because it’s those signals that make a collection of gray 

and white matter a brain. An almost entirely self-contained 

network of cells that uses electrical messages from our sensory 

receptors to conceive of a world both external and internal. 

We recognize that this consciousness, granted to us by the 

synapses between neurons, is something sacred. And yet, 

for millennia, we’ve altered it. When a Tiwanaku shaman, 

exploring a river valley deep in ancient Bolivia, came 

across a psilocybin mushroom, his dendrites proliferated, 

making his nerve networks more intricate than ever before. 

Receptors typically bound by serotonin were inundated by 

psychedelics, permanently changing both his synapses and 

the worlds they created. 

But now, we’ve moved beyond chemical alteration. 

Perspective can dictate whether we’ve shifted to integration or 

invasion. We’ve invited machines into our neural web, and by 

doing so, we’ve let them become a part of our consciousness. 

Functionally both dendrite and axon, electrode arrays can 

not only receive and process information, but also directly 

stimulate neighboring neurons through electrical signals, 

alternately activating and inhibiting their fellow world creators. 

Abilities previously reserved for biological matter have been 

ceded to imitations. 

Instinct might tell us not to tamper with what we hold sacred. 

But we, like that early shaman, can be grateful that we don’t give 

PERI 

instinct too much power. Because our relationship with these 

machines is, for now, more mutualistic than parasitic. Their 

integration with our synapses will give us revolutionary 

insights into the worlds within that grayish-pink model on 

my desk. Research into disorders like epilepsy will develop 

faster than ever before, and the brain’s connection with 

prosthetic limbs will strengthen dramatically. As long as we 

don’t surrender ourselves completely to this technology, the 

changes these machines bring can be for the better. 

Artist’s Statement: 

When I was young, I read the story of John Henry— 

the existentialist slave turned railroad worker who 

gave his life to prove that even in an age of rapid 

industrialization, man was still greater than machine. 

When he collapsed from exhaustion, and his victory 

over steam power turned pyrrhic, I felt angry. I didn’t 

know it then, but that was the birth of an inherently 

human distrust for mechanization. 

When I grew up, and the stories I encountered began 

to evolve, I saw the movie Awakenings, based on the 

work of neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. As I watched him 

manipulate the neurotransmitters that determine our 

responses to stimuli, almost to the point of curing 

an incurable form of encephalitis, I felt a growing 

attachment to our cells and the signals that produce 

conscious thought. 

Somewhat predictably, I’ve always had my suspicions 

about the brain-machine interface. Reading Song et al.’s 

article (pg. 4) on the newest biocompatible electrode 

array didn’t change that. But it did make me consider the 

conflict between the human instinct to cast off the help 

of machines and the human desire for progress. And 

now, I’ve started to wonder which impulse’s victory is in 

our best interests. ■ 

METERKARA TAO 

ART BY 



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Yale Scientific 

for writing, production, web, 

business, or outreach? 

Learn more at 

yalescientific.org/get-involved 

AD_Yale_SC_ENG_half_FALL_10_19qxp.qxp_8 10/7/19 12:05 PM Page 1 

Welcome to Yale! 

The Yale Science and Engineering 

Association is here for you. 

Founded in 1914, the YSEA is one of the oldest university student/alumni 

organizations in the world with a focus on STEM. 

Whether near or far from New Haven, we help our members realize their 

goals and to connect in ways that strengthen the Yale science and 

engineering community. 

We are excited to be a part of your Yale journey, and we look forward to 

supporting you at Yale and beyond! 

Join us at: ysea.org

YSM Issue 96.3

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