This month's "Insights & Outcomes" features research that either zooms in or zooms out for answers to pressing questions about life, the mind, and the universe.
There are items about the intrusion of mental illness in the developing brain, a high-speed fuel-up for a supermassive black hole, insights into why some brain seizures cause a loss of consciousness, and a new proposal for studying dark matter and dark energy.
As always, you can find more science and medicine research news on Yale News' Science & Technology and Health & Medicine pages.
Brain disorders take root early in development
A new Yale study suggests that mental illnesses may begin in the developing brain before birth - possibly even in the first trimester of pregnancy - much earlier than previously believed.
Using human stem cells grown in the lab to mimic early brain development, along with data from prenatal human brains, researchers tracked markers in neural stem cells (the special fetal cells that build the brain, producing more mature cells such as neurons) that may be a root cause of disorders.
They found that many genes linked to disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are switched on surprisingly early, during the first stages of brain growth, long before neural stem cells become mature cells. This finding, researchers say, suggests that these early periods may be especially vulnerable to genetic disruptions.
"This research offers new clues about the origins of cortical disorders," said study author Nicola Micali, an associate research scientist in neuroscience in the laboratory of Pasko Rakic, the Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), who led the study.
"We demonstrated that many risk genes involved in neuropsychiatric disorders are already active before birth, in the very early phases of brain development when neural stem cells are functional," Micali said. "The dysfunction of these genes may alter brain assembly, potentially leading to manifestations later in life."
The team also mapped the regulatory networks of key genes involved in disorders such as ADHD and depression, and malformations like microcephaly. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Fast gas - in space
F1 pit crews can only dream of being this fast.
In a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, a research team including Yale scientists reports the discovery of a possible "ultra-fast inflow" - gas falling into a supermassive black hole at about 15% to 20% of the speed of light - in a distant galaxy.
"This could represent a rare glimpse into how black holes pull in matter, offering valuable insight into chaotic accretion processes," said first author Alessandro Peca, a researcher at Eureka Scientific and laboratory associate in Yale's Department of Physics.
The gas inflow appeared in two separate observations by NASA's NuSTAR X-ray space telescope, in 2023 and 2024, in a galaxy designated "ESP 39607." The inflow was occurring at about 100 to 134 million miles per hour.
Documented cases of ultra-fast inflows are rare, astronomers say, due to their short-lived nature.
Meg Urry, the Israel Munson Professor of Physics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is a co-author of the new study, along with colleagues from Eureka Scientific, Diego Portales University in Chile, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technnology.
Seizure spread marks loss of consciousness
Loss of consciousness can pose real dangers for people with seizure disorders. And while not all seizures cause loss of consciousness, Yale researchers have now discovered how one common type of seizures do.
Frontal lobe seizures are classified as "focal" seizures, a subtype in which the problematic activity generates in a single region of the brain. In the case of frontal lobe seizures, activity originates in the brain's frontal lobes, located behind the forehead.
But while some cause loss of consciousness, others don't.
The reason, researchers found, is that not all frontal lobe seizures are equal.
For the study, primary author and former Yale postdoc Elaheh Salardini, working with Yale's Hal Blumenfeld, analyzed a trove of data of human brain activity recordings collected from three different medical facilities - including 65 seizure episodes in 30 different patients.
"We discovered a subset that cause impaired consciousness by spreading to other large areas of the brain," said Blumenfeld, the lead author, who is the Mark Loughridge and Michele Williams Professor of Neurology at YSM and a professor in neuroscience and neurosurgery and director of the Yale Clinical Neuroscience Imaging Center. "The activity invades much wider areas that are thought to be important for consciousness, whereas activity from other frontal lobe seizures remains restricted to the frontal lobe."
The findings were published in the journal Neurology.
This new understanding may help scientists better predict seizure activity and develop treatments, including brain stimulation, that can restore consciousness during seizures.
FINESST winner will explore dark matter, dark energy models
Isaque Dutra, a Ph.D. student in physics in Yale's Graduate of Arts and Sciences, recently won a NASA FINESST award for graduate student-designed research projects.
The Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) competition, which recognizes research projects across five divisions of the agency's Science Mission Directorate, provides up to $150,000 in funding for the winning projects, spread over three years. This year, FINESST received 456 proposals for astrophysics - and selected 24 of them to support.
Dutra's proposal, which will be overseen by Priyamvada Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor and Chair of Astronomy and professor of physics in FAS, will probe the fundamental nature of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter, which has yet to be detected, is theorized to constitute the majority of matter in the universe; dark energy is a theorized force that appears to defy gravity and is believed to be powering the measured accelerating expansion of the universe.
While the mechanics of dark matter and dark energy are not known, researchers like Dutra, Natarajan, and their collaborators suspect they may be at the heart of several persistent, small-scale discrepancies in the Lambda Cold Dark Matter cosmological model (the current standard model for understanding the universe's evolution) - such as cases where observed gravitational lensing signals have drastically exceeded theoretical predictions. Likewise, recent data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument hint at the need for new physics beyond the standard model.
Dutra and Natarajan plan to use observed strong lensing by galaxy clusters as astrophysical laboratories to simultaneously probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Dutra will compare high-resolution simulations with data to constrain alternatives to cold dark matter. He and Natarajan will also leverage observations to probe the time evolution of dark energy, one of the fundamental open questions in cosmology.
Karen Guzman and Jim Shelton contributed to this report.
Research Redux:
Timing is everything: Finding treatment windows in genetic brain disease
Yale engineers develop breakthrough method for practical nanowire materials
As the world churns - a history of ecosystem engineering in the oceans
Urban heat is delaying spring in NYC's parks
