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HarvardScience
By: Alvin Powell/
May 20, 2013
Humanitarian relief workers and climate scientists gathered in Cambridge this week to discuss the connection between climate change and humanitarian disasters and what relief workers can learn from science.
A malfunction aboard NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has jeopardized what has been one of the agency’s highest-profile missions, one that has revealed a galaxy rich with planets. The Gazette talked to Astronomy Professor Dimitar Sasselov, one of the mission’s principal investigators, about the implications.
Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors.
Led by Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, a group of Harvard researchers has made a host of technical improvements in the “Brainbow” imaging technique.
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A team at Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Mourning that vexes the future
In a new paper, Professor of Psychology Richard McNally and graduate student Don Robinaugh say that while people suffering from complicated grief — a syndrome marked by intense, debilitating emotional distress and yearning for a lost loved one — had difficulty envisioning specific events in their future, those problems disappeared when they were asked to imagine an alternate future that included their lost loved one.
Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans, a study says.
In research described earlier this year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Elinor Amit, a College Fellow in psychology, along with two collaborators, Cheryl Wakslak and Yaacov Trope, showed that people increasingly prefer to communicate verbally (versus visually) with people who are distant (versus close) — socially, geographically, or temporally.
Lower health care costs may last
A slowdown in the growth of U.S. health care costs could mean a savings of as much as $770 billion on Medicare spending over the next decade, Harvard economists say.
Four Harvard School of Public Health students presented recommendations to the Boston City Council on how to make Boston a safer city for cyclists.
Building with an eye on the sky
Real estate developer Jonathan Rose highlighted recent progress in incorporating green features into affordable housing projects, saying America’s cities provide an energetic counterpoint to the stagnation in Washington, D.C.
Students in Matthew Liebmann’s “Encountering the Conquistadors” class recently got a feel for prehistoric life, trying their hands at an ancient weapon called the atlatl.
Robotic insects make first controlled flight
The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Understanding student weaknesses
As part of an unusual study that surveyed 181 middle school physical science teachers and nearly 10,000 students, researchers found that the most successful teachers were those who knew what students would get wrong on standardized tests.
Latanya Sweeney, Harvard professor of government and technology in residence, wants to add a new factor to the weighting Google uses when delivering online ads, one that measures bias. In a new paper, she describes how such a calculation could be built into the ad-delivery algorithm Google uses.
Giants behind, challenges ahead
Fifty years after its founding, the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population took time for reflection and a look ahead on April 25 during an all-day symposium at the School.
Melding the Web and the tactile
An organismic and evolutionary biology course this semester has formed a virtual classroom with other universities to examine the holdings of museum collections and the vast amount of data they contain and integrate them into the classroom.
Potential diabetes breakthrough
Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have discovered a hormone that holds promise for a dramatically more effective treatment of type 2 diabetes, a metabolic illness afflicting an estimated 26 million Americans.
Teams of students from “Engineering Sciences 20: How to Create Things and Have Them Matter” in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are working to create unusual products that are designed to change the world.
People would like to predict the future, says author and mathematician David Orrell, but it remains quite a difficult thing to do, even with lots of data at hand.
Robot hands gain a gentler touch
Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed an inexpensive tactile sensor for robotic hands that is sensitive enough to turn a brute machine into a dexterous manipulator.
Insignificant, with a lousy future
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss described a universe with mysterious particles popping in and out of existence, in which the discoveries of dark energy and dark matter have made mankind more insignificant than ever.
Pitcher plants provide tipping point
New research out of the Harvard Forest offers insight on exactly when the tipping point occurs that can disrupt the intricate web of life in a lake.
Earth feels impact of middle class
The rise of the middle class is a bigger environmental challenge than the rising global population, according to Sir David King, the former science adviser to the British government, who urged the adoption of sustainable development as a way to manage growing global demands in a finite world.
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