This month, the autumn wind delivers news about connections — between regions of the brain, between environmental patterns that affect global warming, and between neonatal ultrasound technology and the ability to provide the best neonatal nutritional care.
This month’s “Insights & Outcomes” also brings laudatory info about early career awards for faculty members at the forefront of physics and engineering.
As always, you can find more science and medicine research news on Yale News’ Science & Technology and Health & Medicine pages.
Cranium crosstalk
Different brain regions are connected by — and interact through — networks of neurons. But the extent to which neuronal wiring drives shared function between these different regions is not well understood. Is this structure-function relationship the same throughout the brain? The same across functions?
Yale researchers have now found that this relationship is variable, which they reported recently in Nature Communications.
For the study, the researchers pulled both structural and functional brain data from large data repositories and calculated how well the coactivation of different brain regions (function) could be explained by the neurons that directly connected them (structure). They evaluated this across brain regions and more than 300 brain functions.
“We found that this relationship exists on a gradient,” said lead author Evan Collins, who is now a graduate student at MIT but who conducted the research as an undergraduate in the Yale Neuroscience Neuroanalytics research group directed by Dennis Spencer and Hitten Zaveri.
“The relationship between structure and function was stronger in the primary sensory and motor cortical areas and for perceptual and motor functions,” Collins said. “It was weakest in the association cortex for complex cognitive functions. Moreover, the way in which humans discern meaning from words mirrors this neural gradient, revealing how our language informs us about our brain organization.”
The evolution of the human brain may help explain this gradient. One possible reason is that while direct connections between brain regions were sufficient for such faculties as vision and movement, as the brain developed more advanced capabilities, like complex cognition, these direct connections had maxed out their usefulness.
“It’s possible that the brain developed more indirect connections between regions in order to establish new, more advanced abilities,” said Zaveri, co-senior author of the study and associate professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine.
AMOC and the Arctic
A new study co-authored by Yale climate scientist Alexey Fedorov offers intriguing possibilities about the future of Arctic warming through the end of this century.
For the study, Fedorov and his colleagues looked at the influence of a key Atlantic Ocean water circulation system — the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) — on accelerated warming in the Artic region (relative to the rest of the globe) known as Arctic amplification. AMOC, which includes the Gulfstream and other ocean currents in the Atlantic, is critically important to a variety of global climate factors, whereas Arctic amplification is one of the salient features of global warming.
The researchers said that if AMOC slows down, as some scientists believe has already begun to occur, it has the potential to moderate Arctic warming by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century.
The finding underscores the influential role of ocean currents in global climate regulation and is vital for formulating effective climate responses to greenhouse gas increases, the authors say.
“It also shows how tightly different components of the climate system are linked to each other,” Fedorov said.
The authors of the study, along with Fedorov, are Yu-Chi Lee and Wei Liu of the University of California-Riverside, Nicole Feldl of the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Patrick Taylor of the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOE awards trumpet future STEM leaders
Three Yale researchers will receive 2024 Early Career Research Program awards from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The award program provides funding for research in an array of fields, including artificial intelligence, fusion energy, and quantum technologies. It is a key part of the federal government’s efforts to develop the next generation of STEM leaders to solidify America’s role as the driver of science and technology innovation around the world.
Recipients from Yale are Eduardo Higino da Silva Neto, an assistant professor of physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS); Ian Moult, assistant professor of physics in FAS; and Lea Winter, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering of the School of Engineering & Applied Science.
Da Silva Neto’s award is for research to investigate the role of itinerant electrons in inhomogeneity in magnetic Van der Waals materials. Moult’s work will explore both formal aspects, and phenomenological applications, of energy flow operators, and build bridges between developments in formal quantum field theory and collider phenomenology. Winter’s research will unlock new electrocatalyst design spaces for multicarbon product generation using C02/CO pre-activation with nonthermal plasma.
Awardees were selected based on peer review by outside scientific experts. The projects announced today are selections for negotiation of a financial award, and the final details for each are subject to final grant and contract negotiations between DOE and the awardees.
Seeing the value of neonatal ultrasound
For preterm infants, patterns of growth — and increases in fat tissue, in particular — may be indicators of metabolic health and brain development. Standard assessments for these measures, however, are often not feasible for fragile preterm infants or nuanced enough to provide necessary detail.
Bedside ultrasound may be the answer, according to Yale researchers. In a study published in the journal Pediatric Research, the researchers showed that ultrasound is delicate enough to be used with very preterm infants and can reliably measure fat tissue in different body areas.
“The ability to continually measure growth and fat distribution in preterm infants could guide nutritional management and provide insight into an infant’s development trajectory,” said Dr. Catherine Buck, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine.
The study yielded data on several body composition measures across different body areas over time. While more data is needed to characterize optimal growth paths and how that growth relates to outcomes, the findings are an important step forward.
“We hope that eventually, integrating ultrasound body composition measures into clinical decision making may be an essential tool in preterm infant nutritional care,” said Buck.
Research Redux:
Here’s what millions of galaxies say about their size, growth
Brain wiring is guided by activity even in very early development
With flexible electronics, stretching the possibilities of soft robots
A promising injectable for HIV prevention
Study sheds light on proteins linked to congenital developmental disorders