Month: July 2012
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Nation & World
When microbes make the food
A Harvard Summer School class spurs learning through food, by examining how microbes — bacteria and fungi — can help as well as harm when they get into food, doing much of the work preparing cheeses, beer, soy sauce, and even chocolate.
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Nation & World
E.O. Wilson wins Cosmos Prize
E.O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, has been awarded the 20th annual International Cosmos Prize by Japan’s Expo ’90 Foundation. The prize, worth 40 million Japanese yen ($511,444), will be presented to Wilson on Oct. 29 in Osaka, Japan.
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Nation & World
Harvard baseball coach dies
Joe Walsh, the Joseph J. O’Donnell ’67 Head Coach for Harvard Baseball, died suddenly at his Chester, N.H., home early this morning, the Department of Harvard Athletics announced July 31.
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Nation & World
Hidden Spaces: Tower classrooms
Hidden Spaces is part of a series about lesser-known spaces at Harvard. The classrooms in Memorial Hall are a beautiful example.
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Nation & World
Giving slime the slip
A team of Harvard scientists has developed a slick way to prevent the troublesome biofilms from ever forming on a surface.
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Nation & World
Airborne pollutants lead a double life
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have provided visual evidence that atmospheric particles — which are ubiquitous, especially above densely populated areas — separate into distinct chemical compositions during their life cycle.
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Nation & World
Concerns about climate change, health
A team of researchers led by James G. Anderson, the Philip S. Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, warns that a newly discovered connection between climate change and depletion of the ozone layer over the U.S. could allow more damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation to reach the Earth’s surface, leading to increased incidence of skin cancer.
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Nation & World
A fresh look at mental illness
In a paper published in Neuron, Joshua Buckholtz and co-author Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg identify a biological reason for why many mental disorders share similar symptoms, a situation that makes diagnosis challenging.
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Nation & World
Stages of superconductivity
Harvard physicists say they have unlocked the chemical secret that controls the “fool’s gold” of superconductivity, a “pseudogap” phase that mimics, but doesn’t have all the advantageous properties of, superconductivity.
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Nation & World
Expanding Medicaid to low-income adults
A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds that expanding Medicaid to low-income adults leads to widespread gains in coverage, increased access to care, and — most importantly — improved health and reduced mortality.
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Nation & World
Liverpool visits Harvard
British football club and English Premier League member Liverpool practiced at Harvard University this week prior to the team’s friendly exhibition against Roma at Fenway Park July 25.
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Nation & World
Harvard’s Olympians
When the Olympic Games began, nine competitors and one coach with Harvard ties were there. Together they continued Harvard’s long-standing connection to the event.
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Nation & World
Fixing the way we fix the brain
With neurodegenerative diseases affecting millions and having the potential to bankrupt the U.S. health care system, Harvard Medical School, seven pharmaceutical companies, and the Massachusetts state government have formed the Massachusetts Neuroscience Consortium. The goal: to offer new collaborative research models.
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Nation & World
Justin Stern awarded Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship
The Harvard Committee on General Scholarships has awarded Justin Stern the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. The competitive fellowship, which affords scholars the opportunity to conduct research or study outside of Cambridge, is awarded to…
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Nation & World
What wakes me
Clifford Saper, chair of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center recently discovered a brainstem area that senses oxygen dips and drives waking.
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Nation & World
Liverpool F.C. wins over local youth
A stop at Harvard had the legendary Liverpool Football Club holding a soccer clinic for area youngsters. The team was on its 2012 North American Summer Tour. [Video: 2:05]
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Nation & World
No ordinary band
The Harvard Summer Pops Band celebrated its 40th anniversary with a performance in Sanders Theatre on July 26. They will perform at 3 p.m. July 29 at Boston’s Hatch Shell.
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Nation & World
Feeding culinary curiosity
A summer program aims to teach local schoolchildren that the kitchen and the laboratory — both intimidating places to newcomers — are a great place to explore their natural curiosity, and to learn lifelong healthy habits, too.
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Nation & World
Mystery of Native Americans’ arrival
Research led by scientists at Harvard and University College London has shown that Native Americans arrived in three waves of migration, not one, as is commonly held and that at least one group returned home to Asia.
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Nation & World
New branch of science
Scientists from the Arnold Arboretum and the University of Colorado are working to define for the first time the complete microbiome of a tree.
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Nation & World
Harvard’s best listeners
Harvard’s Audio Preservation Studio, tucked away in a few rooms on Story Street, does the heavy lifting (and listening) required to make “loss-less” digital copies of archived sound artifacts in collections University-wide.
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Nation & World
Taking a Thursday tour
This summer, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research is offering tours of its art collection. Led at noon on Thursdays by Sheldon Cheek, senior curatorial associate for the Image of the Black in Western Art Project and Photo Archive, at the Rudenstine Gallery.
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Nation & World
UC Berkeley joins edX
EdX, the online learning initiative founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and launched in May, announced today the addition of the University of California, Berkeley, to its platform.
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Nation & World
Giving phobias a rest
A Harvard-led research team has found that exposure therapy for irrational fear of spiders seems to be more effective if it is followed by sleep, according to a recent study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
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Nation & World
Artificial jellyfish swims in a heartbeat
A team of researchers at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology has turned inanimate silicon and living cardiac muscle cells into a freely swimming “jellyfish.”
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Nation & World
HMS student named to AMA Foundation
The American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation welcomed four new members to the national philanthropic organization’s board of directors, including Harvard Medical School student Benjamin Schanker.
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Nation & World
NaCl to give way to RockSalt
A team led by Harvard computer scientists, including two undergraduate students, has developed a new tool that could lead to increased security and enhanced performance for commonly used Web and mobile applications.