Month: August 2012

  • Nation & World

    At 50, a building still dares

    A new art exhibit opens a yearlong celebration of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, which turns 50 in May.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bringing the psych lab online

    A team of researchers from Harvard and Wellesley College shows that data gathered from online volunteers can be just as good as data collected in the lab.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Tapping the body to fight disease

    Researcher Biju Parekkadan is developing devices that employ cell therapy to help people with organ failure.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Clues in the cucumber’s climb

    Harvard researchers, captivated by a strange coiling behavior in the grasping tendrils of the cucumber plant, have characterized a new type of spring that is soft when pulled gently and stiff when pulled strongly.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    College announces investigation

    The Harvard College Administrative Board is investigating allegations that a significant number of students enrolled in an undergraduate course last semester may have inappropriately collaborated on answers, or plagiarized their classmates’ responses, on the final exam for the course.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Let them both eat cake

    For the first time, Harvard’s American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) and the Yale Repertory Theatre (Yale Rep) are collaborating on a stage production: the world premiere of “Marie Antoinette.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    More than words

    Nieman Foundation welcomes 24 new fellows, including some who tell their gripping stories using tools beyond words.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Guides to the gallows

    The Harvard Law School Library’s “Dying Speeches” collection of English crime broadsides — street literature sold at public executions — is one of the largest in the world and the first to be completely digitized.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘From Austen to Zola’

    Works from Amy Lowell’s collection are showcased in “From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector,” Houghton Library’s fall exhibition. This exhibit opens on Sept. 4 and will run through Jan. 12, 2013.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    HLS Professor Roger Fisher dies

    Roger D. Fisher ’43, LL.B. ’ 48, co-author of the perennial best-selling book “Getting to Yes” and the Williston Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard University, died Aug. 25 in Hanover, N.H. He was 90 years old.

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A moving experience

    More than 1,600 undergraduates took the first step yesterday to making Harvard their home for the next four years, as they began arriving early in the morning for the ritual of freshman move-in day.

    10 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Perfecting optics

    Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without imparting the distortions of conventional lenses.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Seeds of inspiration

    An artist and curatorial associate at Arnold Arboretum fuses material she has gathered during her 25-year Harvard career into evocative works of art. Hardy Brown’s first solo exhibit at the Arboretum, “Ex Herbario: Recent Works by Susan Hardy Brown,” is now on view at the Hunnewell Visitor Center through Sept. 16.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Merging the biological, electronic

    For the first time, Harvard scientists have created a type of cyborg tissue by embedding a 3-D network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Lawrence Bobo honored by ASA

    Lawrence D. Bobo has won the American Sociological Association’s Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Contributions to Sociological Social Psychology.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    School vouchers’ greatest impact

    A new study on the impact of school vouchers on college enrollments shows that the percentage of African-American students who enrolled part time or full time in college by 2011 was 24 percent higher for those who had won a school voucher lottery and used their voucher to attend a private school.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Listening for clues

    Baby songbirds learn to sing by imitation, just as human babies do. So researchers at Harvard and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, have been studying the brains of zebra finches — red-beaked, white-breasted songbirds — for clues to how young birds and human infants learn vocalization on a neuronal level.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Where sand and sun meet science

    The annual Rhino Cup volleyball league stokes the competitive fires of Harvard’s biological community, drawing researchers out of the lab and onto the sandy volleyball court in the courtyard of the Biological Laboratories.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Vitamin D’s impact on infection

    A study led by Harvard researchers of Mongolian schoolchildren supports the possibility that daily vitamin D supplementation can reduce the risk of respiratory infections in winter.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Researchers awarded NARSAD grants

    The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation announced $11.9 million in new research grants, strengthening its investment in the most promising ideas to lead to breakthroughs in understanding and treating mental illness, including 19 grants to Harvard researchers.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Synthetic future

    In the synthetic biology lab of Professor Pamela Silver, researchers are looking for ways to make biological engineering faster, cheaper, and more predictable.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A story that doesn’t hold up

    A study conducted by Professor of Psychology Richard J. McNally and colleagues from the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam is casting doubt on the “amnesia barrier” that has long been a hallmark of multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, by demonstrating that patients have knowledge of their other identities.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Butterflies heading north

    A Harvard study reveals that over the past 19 years, a warming climate has been reshaping Massachusetts butterfly communities.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Using evolution to understand pollution

    A tool rarely used to understand the impact of pollution on the natural world is evolution, an oversight that an environmental toxicologist says is robbing investigators of important information.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Teens learn and earn at Harvard

    Despite a bleak forecast for summer jobs for teenagers, Harvard employed more than 150 teens from Boston and Cambridge to work throughout the University. According to the teens, the skills they acquired include some valuable life lessons.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Soft robots go for color, camouflage

    Researchers have developed a system — inspired by nature — that allows soft robots to either camouflage themselves against a background, or to make bold color displays. Such a “dynamic coloration” system could one day have a host of uses, ranging from helping doctors plan complex surgeries to acting as a visual marker to help…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Soft Robots, in color

    Having already broken new ground in robotics with the development, last year, of a class of “soft”, silicone-based robots based on creatures like squid and octopi, Harvard scientists are now working to create systems that would allow the robots to camouflage themselves, or stand out in their environment.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    CYCLOPS genes an Achilles’ heel in tumors?

    Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT used new technology to explore a 19-year-old theory, discovering what may be an Achilles’ heel for cancer cells: essential genes disrupted in the process of becoming cancerous that can be attacked further with drug therapy.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Re-creating a slice of the universe

    Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have made it possible to build a universe from scratch.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Making sense of memory

    It happens to all of us: We think we learned of the Sept. 11 attacks from a radio report, when, in fact, the news came from a co-worker; we’re sure the robber running from the bank was tall, when actually he was short; we remember waking up at 7 yesterday, when 8 is closer to…

    3 minutes