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84 stories in August 2012
A new art exhibit opens a yearlong celebration of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, which turns 50 in May.
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.
Tapping the body to fight disease
Researcher Biju Parekkadan is developing devices that employ cell therapy to help people with organ failure.
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.
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.
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.”
Wexners give $3M to HKS’s Center for Public Leadership
Leslie and Abigail Wexner, founding and sustaining donors of the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard’s Kennedy School, announced today an additional gift of $3 million to the center. Their gift, an extension of the couple’s longtime commitment to inspiring, preparing, and connecting tomorrow’s global leaders, brings the Wexners’ total commitment to the center [...]
Nieman Foundation welcomes 24 new fellows, including some who tell their gripping stories using tools beyond words.
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.
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.
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.
Shorenstein Center welcomes new fellows
The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, located at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is pleased to announce its 2012 Fall Fellows and Visiting Faculty. “This fall we have an outstanding group of fellows and visiting faculty representing both broad experience and cutting-edge work and scholarship,” said Alex Jones, the [...]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lawrence D. Bobo has won the American Sociological Association’s Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Contributions to Sociological Social Psychology.
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.
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.
CMES Outreach Center holds Arabic teacher training program
Earlier this summer, 29 undergraduate students from three countries and 10 states came to Harvard’s campus for advanced training in Arabic language and culture teaching. They were here for an intensive three-week workshop, the Arabic Institute for the Next Generation, run through the Outreach Center at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Funded by a [...]
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.
SEAS grad Pratheev Sreetharan named top innovator
Pratheev Sreetharan ’06, Ph.D. ’12, a pioneer in pop-up robotics, has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as among the world’s top innovators under the age of 35. A panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, published by MIT, selected him from more than 300 nominees. Sreetharan recently graduated with a [...]
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.
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.
In the synthetic biology lab of Professor Pamela Silver, researchers are looking for ways to make biological engineering faster, cheaper, and more predictable.
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.
A Harvard study reveals that over the past 19 years, a warming climate has been reshaping Massachusetts butterfly communities.
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.
Ethan Lasser appointed curator at Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums are pleased to announce the appointment of Ethan Lasser as Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art, effective Sept. 18, 2012. Lasser will join the Art Museums’ Division of European and American Art. Lasser’s innovative work as a curator and academic experience align well with the Art Museums’ teaching and [...]
Science & Cooking lecture series returns to Harvard Sept. 4
Inspired by one of the most talked-about Harvard College courses in recent history, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” the Science & Cooking public lecture series will return on Sept. 4. Members of the general public are once again invited to attend talks by world-class chefs and eminent food [...]
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.
Medicaid expansion debated as presidential campaign heats up
Is Medicaid, the health care program for low-income Americans, a costly program that doesn’t work well? Or is it an essential program vital to the health of millions? The debate over Medicaid has heightened in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2012 health care ruling, which made Medicaid expansion optional for states. While some [...]
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 search crews following a disaster.
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.
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.
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.
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 the truth. Such “false memories,” unavoidable in everyday life, can have disastrous consequences in courtrooms and other settings where exactitude matters.
Consumer information unlikely to lower health care costs in Massachusetts
Harvard School of Public Health experts Leonard Marcus and Ashish Jha commented on the new bill passed by Massachusetts lawmakers on July 31, 2012 aimed at controlling health care spending in the Commonwealth, in a Boston Globe story published the following day. Gov. Deval Patrick has said that he will sign the bill, which includes among its cost-control strategies payment system [...]
Wedding digital with traditional
Event showcases metaLAB summer projects displaying ways to access, annotate, and remix knowledge in the digital age.
Men with prostate cancer more likely to die from other causes
Men diagnosed with prostate cancer are less likely to die from the disease than from largely preventable conditions such as heart disease, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). It is the largest study to date that looks at causes of death among men with prostate cancer, and suggests that [...]
The tangled web around spiders
A biologist with an affinity for spiders shared his passion, taking the audience on a tour of arachnids large and small and making a pitch for their conservation as natural pest control.
Xiao-Li Meng, chair of Harvard’s Department of Statistics, has been named dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
After the Supreme Court announced it will hear a major case on affirmative action in October, Harvard joined 13 other universities to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting considerations of race in college admissions.
Funding, political support critical for polio eradication
The 24-year international campaign to eradicate polio is “within striking distance of its goal,” but could become undone if obstacles to vaccination stall further progress, Jay A. Winsten, associate dean for health communication and Frank Stanton director for the Center for Health Communication, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on July 24, 2012. Emily Serazin, a [...]
Harvard carrying Dell on campus, online
At Harvard's Technology Products and Services, personal purchasers can now buy a selection of Dell notebooks, desktops, and displays on campus.
An extensive archive at the Schlesinger Library illuminates the life and work of Julia Child, whose writings and TV show brought the world of French cuisine to the American masses.
Thirty high school students from the Boston area gathered for the Crimson Summer Academy’s annual poetry slam. The young scholars spend three consecutive summers on the Harvard campus, amid classes, projects, field trips, and cultural activities to achieve their dream: success at college.
Simplifying multidrug therapies
As described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team found that by studying how drugs interact in pairs, researchers can predict how larger combinations of drugs will interact.
More than 100 faculty, students, and staff from the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology turned out for a barbecue to celebrate the full-professor promotions of Kevin Eggan, Konrad Hochedlinger, and Amy Wagers.
Harvard Olympians are making headway in the 2012 London Olympic Games.
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