Noted

Planning to start a business? Yale management professor Olav Sorenson and Aalborg University colleague Michael Dahl studied more than 10,000 Danish start-ups and found that, compared with newcomers, an entrepreneur who had been in a region more than six years had a nine percent lower failure rate and an average of $8,172 more in annual profits. Their study appeared in the June issue of Management Science.

Yale paleontologist Nicholas Longrich and colleagues have identified what they believe is the missing link—for snakes. Longrich examined fossils at Yale’s Peabody Museum and elsewhere and argues, in the July 25 issue of Nature online, that Coniophis precedens, a fossil reptile with a lizard’s head and snake’s body, is a transition stage that shows serpents originated on land, not in the sea. 

Mothers-to-be considering a cesarean for reasons other than medical necessity may want to think twice. Yale medical school neurobiologist Tamas Horvath and his team report in PLoS One that, in mice, vaginal delivery triggered expression of a protein important in brain development and function. Its expression was impaired in mice delivered by C-section.