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We still have a few more days until spring, but March 11 seemed as good a day as any to learn about the physics underlying bird nests, from Professor Corey O'Hern. With real life examples of bird nests from the Yale Peabody Museum, we learnt about some of the features that determine the resilience of a nest.

A team of Yale researchers constructed the first thermoGreenWall™ as a sustainable feature at the Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory (UEDLAB) on Science Hill this past August. The team hopes the technology will be a sustainable alternative to cooling towers, which currently provide cooling and power needs worldwide.

The field of protein design holds great promise for the creation of new materials, catalysts, drugs, and drug delivery systems. To fully tap that potential, though, researchers need to perfect their understanding of existing structures – to the point of being able to take apart natural proteins and correctly reassemble them.

A study from Yale's Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena (CRISP) has been selected as a 2015 Editors' Choice article for the Journal of Chemical Physics.

A cross-disciplinary training program covering science at the intersection of engineering, physics and biology is slated to receive a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.

Whether in the business of jamming granular materials into a solid (manufacturing pills, for instance) or keeping materials from solidifying (as in wastewater treatment), it's crucial to understand the processes of how particle systems make the transition from a jammed state to an unjammed one, and vice versa.

Understanding how the flow of water affects a riverbed’s sediment is no easy trick. Complexities like grain-grain friction, non-spherical grain shape, and fluid turbulence figure into it. The amount of energy lost when grains collide also contributes to how grains move. 

This week, the work of Yale’s Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena (CRISP) is featured on the cover of the Journal of Chemical Physics.

With spring finally here and the snow nearly entirely gone, much of what was buried throughout the winter is now being repurposed in birds’ nests.