Month: June 2008

  • Nation & World

    Shelter amid a health care storm

    South Africa’s Valley of 1,000 Hills is a broad and breathtaking natural contradiction, an enormous valley whose floor is crowded with hills large and small, as if nature wasn’t quite sure what it was making.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Fighting AIDS now and in the future

    In the heart of the South African AIDS epidemic, at a medical school named for the nation’s legendary anti-apartheid leader, a fight against a different sort of oppression is being waged.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Researchers develop new technique for fabricating nanowire circuits

    Scientists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), collaborating collaborating with researchers from the German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen, have developed a new technique for fabricating…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    New source of heart stem cells discovered

    Harvard Stem Cell Institute(HSCI) researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston are continuing to document the heart’s earliest origins. Now, they have pinpointed a new, previously unrecognized group of stem cells that…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Boning up on frogs’ defenses

    Harvard biologists have determined that some African frogs carry concealed weapons: when threatened, these species puncture their own skin with sharp bones in their toes, using the bones as claws…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Previously unknown regulator of fat and cholesterol production discovered in mice

    Researchers have discovered an unknown regulator of fat and cholesterol production in the liver of mice, a significant finding that could eventually lead to new therapies for lowering unhealthy blood…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scientists isolate a toxic key to Alzheimer’s disease in human brains

    Scientists have long questioned whether the abundant amounts of amyloid plaques found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s actually caused the neurological disease or were a by-product of its…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Edward C. Forst named Harvard executive vice president

    Edward C. Forst, global head of the Investment Management Division for Goldman, Sachs & Co. and a member of the firm’s Management Committee, will become Harvard University’s first executive vice president, effective September 1, Harvard President Drew Faust announced today.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Judith D. Singer named senior vice provost for Faculty Development and Diversity

    Judith D. Singer, the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and former academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), has been named senior vice provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University, Provost Steven E. Hyman announced today.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Lori Gross named associate provost for arts and culture

    Lori E. Gross, director of arts initiatives and adviser to the associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been named associate provost for arts and culture at Harvard University, Provost Steven E. Hyman announced today.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard’s Department of Music announces fellows and award winners

    Harvard’s Department of Music recently announced a host of fellowship and award recipients. The Oscar S. Schafer Award is given to graduate students “who have demonstrated unusual ability and enthusiasm in their teaching of introductory courses, which are designed to lead students to a growing and lifelong love of music.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Richard Musgrave

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 8, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Richard Abel Musgrave, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Musgrave was the leading public finance economist of his generation.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ernst Mayr

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 20, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Ernst Mayr, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Mayr helped lay the foundations of contemporary evolutionary biology.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Herbert Bloch

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 6, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Herbert Bloch, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, Emeritus, was place upon the records. Bloch did pioneering work on Greek and Roman historians.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ash Institute names innovation award finalists

    The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) recently announced the 15 finalists for the 2008 Innovations in American Government Awards competition. These programs are models of government excellence, representing innovative programming from the local, county, city, tribal, state, and federal levels. The finalists were selected from an initial pool…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ash Institute awards grants to Harvard Kennedy School faculty, students

    The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) recently announced its faculty and student summer grant recipients for the 2008 academic year. The institute will fund four summer 2008 independent student research grants, two student Ash Summer Fellowships in Innovation, and five faculty research grants. Such grants are part of…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    David Roy Shackleton Bailey

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 20, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late David Roy Shackleton Bailey, Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Shackleton Bailey was one of the greatest twentieth-century scholars of Latin textual criticism.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy awards certificates

    The Harvard Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy recognized 39 seniors at its annual certificate ceremony during graduation week.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    IOP announces internships and thesis funding

    The Institute of Politics (IOP), located at Harvard Kennedy School, Monday (June 9) announced the selection of 42 undergraduate students, chosen from a pool of 275 candidates, for paid summer political internships.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Banda and Beauchamp awarded prestigious Trudeau Scholarships

    The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation recently awarded $150,000 prizes to Harvard doctoral students Maria Banda and Jonathan Beauchamp.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Mossavar-Rahmani Center names Sperling the John T. Dunlop Prize winner

    The Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government (M-RCBG) at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has named Michael Sperling ’08 the winner of the 2008 John T. Dunlop Prize in Business and Government.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Twelve grad students named Rappaport Fellows

    A dozen talented graduate students from Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Suffolk, and Tufts have been awarded a prestigious fellowship that will allow them to spend the summer helping area public officials address a variety of key issues. The students, who were selected from nearly 100 applicants, will be working as Rappaport Public Policy Fellows…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Research in brief

    BLACKS, HISPANICS LESS LIKELY TO GET FOLLOW-UP RADIATION THERAPY, BLACKS MORE LIKELY TO CHOOSE AGGRESSIVE CARE AT END OF LIFE

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Peabody awards Gardner Fellowship to Singh

    The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has announced that Dayanita Singh of New Delhi, India, has been awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Aquatic genome captures foreign DNA

    Long viewed as straitlaced spinsters, sexless freshwater invertebrate animals known as bdelloid rotifers may actually be far more promiscuous than anyone had imagined: Scientists at Harvard University have found that the genomes of these common creatures are chock-full of DNA from plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    HMS, HSPH rename ‘Global Health’ departments

    Departments at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) are changing their names to reflect the increasingly international aspect of public health in the 21st century.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Indigenous culture clarifies nature and limits of how humans measure

    The ability to map numbers onto a line, a foundation of all mathematics, is universal, says a study published in the journal Science, but the form of this universal mapping is not linear but logarithmic.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Protective mechanism fails when obesity sets in

    Reporting in the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) said they have shown for the first time that fat-storing cells, or adipocytes, contain a protective anti-inflammatory immune mechanism that prevents the cells from overreacting to inflammation-causing stimuli, such as fatty acids in the diet.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Cluzel named professor of molecular and cellular biology, applied physics

    Philippe Cluzel has been appointed professor of molecular and cellular biology and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, effective July 1.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Small suds make a big splash at SEAS

    The latest engineering feat to emerge from the laboratories at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been largely accomplished with the aid of kitchen mixers. Researchers have whipped up, for the first time, permanent nanoscale bubbles — bubbles that endure for more than a year — from batches of foam made from a…

    3 minutes