Star music, Kavli kudos, and summertime heart risks

This month’s “Insights & Outcomes” has some good news and bad news when it comes to the sun, word of an intercontinental research project involving ancient bacteria, and honors for two Yale researchers who were named as Kavli Fellows for their exceptional work.

As always, you can find more science and medicine research news on Yale News’ Science & Technology and Health & Medicine pages.

Good vibrations — from the stars

According to a new study, astronomers may soon have a new detection tool to use in the search for Earth-like planets in the universe: the seismic vibrations of smaller stars.

Currently, researchers who study such vibrations tend to look at stars heavier than Earth’s sun. This is because these stars are hotter and brighter, making it easier for telescopes to detect and characterize their orbiting planets.

But a new study co-authored by Sarbani Basu, the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Astronomy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), may have put smaller, cooler, and dimmer star systems back in play.

For the study, Basu and other researchers used the new Keck Planet Finder instrument, located in Hawaii, to collect precise vibrational measurements for the star HD 219134 — a cool, orange-colored star 21 light-years from Earth. The researchers determined the star’s age to be 10.2 billion years old, which is about twice the age of Earth’s sun.

Illustration of HD 219134. Sound waves within the stellar interior were used to measure its age, size and characterize the planets orbiting the star. (Audio by Yaguang Li. Video created with Adobe Stock and OpenAI, based on original artwork from Gabriel Perez Diaz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias)

“The characterization of any star and its planetary system is incomplete without knowing how old the system is,” said Basu, who conducted the seismic analysis for the study. “What this work shows is that not only can we observe seismic signatures in small stars, but we can analyze the signatures successfully to characterize the star.”

The study appears in The Astrophysical Journal. Yaguang Li, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawai‘i, is the study’s first author.

Kavli Kudos

Since 1989, the National Academy of Sciences has organized a series of forums — called the Kavli Frontiers of Science symposia — to showcase future leaders in a variety of U.S. science disciplines.

This year two Yale scientists, Lidya Tarhan, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences in FAS, and Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), were selected as Kavli Fellows.

During the recently completed spring semester, Tarhan and Chen participated in a three-day symposium in Irvine, California. An international bilateral symposium with Israel and a trilateral symposium with Japan and Germany are also planned. The events bring together scientists 45 years old or younger, who are engaged in exceptional research.

Tarhan’s lab uses the planet’s sedimentary record to develop a multidisciplinary understanding of ancient life and environments during key intervals in Earth’s history. Chen’s lab focuses on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health, using multidisciplinary approaches in climate and air pollution sciences, exposure assessment, and environmental epidemiology.

Hot smoggy days worsen heart risk

For many people, climate change hits close to the heart — sometimes literally.

In a new study, Yale researchers found that ozone pollution, also called smog, and high temperatures together increase the risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), commonly known as a heart attack.

For the study, researchers leveraged comprehensive data from a nationwide private insurance company to investigate possible associations between short-term joint exposure to smog and high temperatures and the occurrence of AMI. This helped them evaluate an often underrepresented and understudied population in research on heart attacks: younger adults.

“This study has multiple strengths from a methodological perspective, such as the inclusion of a large number of adults aged 18 to 64 years from across the U.S. and the use of health care claims to ascertain AMI,” said Xiaomei Ma, professor and interim chair of the department of chronic disease epidemiology at YSPH and co-senior author of the study published in the journal Circulation. “These methodological strengths enhance the rigor and reproducibility of our study and bolster our confidence in the findings.”

Their findings suggest that even moderate environmental exposures can pose serious heart risks, especially among men.

“This means that it is critical to consider both ambient ozone pollution and high temperatures when designing health strategies to reduce the heart attack risks among younger adults,” said Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at YSPH and co-senior author of the study.

Chen is also co-faculty director for the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health at YSPH. Ma is co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Yale School of Medicine.

Other Yale authors of the study include Lingzhi Chu, Rong Wang, Cary P. Gross, Yuan Lu, and Harlan M. Krumholz.

New light on ancient bacteria

Michael Murrell, a faculty member of the Yale Systems Biology Institute and associate professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, will take part in an intercontinental project supported by the Human Frontier Science Program. The project will span the United States, the UK and South Africa.

The three-year project aims to uncover the driving force in plant-like growth in filamentous cyanobacteria, which possess the remarkable ability to grow like plants. The ancient photosynthetic organisms, scientists say, played a pivotal role in Earth’s early evolution by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere — and continue to be important in modern ecosystems.

Murrell’s interdisciplinary team will use tools from soft matter physics and synthetic biology to understand how cyanobacteria became terrestrial — how they assemble from individual cells into multicellular filaments, how they penetrate the soil, and how they grow towards the light. In particular, the group will focus on cyanobacteria’s mechanical properties, and how they move collectively within the filaments.

The Murrell Lab will partner with David Lea-Smith (principal investigator), from the University of East Anglia in England, and Albena Lederer, from Stellenbosch University, in South Africa.

The Human Frontier Science Program promotes international collaboration in basic research focused on the elucidation of the sophisticated and complex mechanisms of living organisms.

Jim Shelton, Meg Dalton, and Jon Atherton contributed to this report.