Featured series 
Tag: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Nation & World
Stars in the making
A paper authored by Harvard’s Eli Visbal with colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University suggests that it may be far easier than commonly thought to peer deep into the universe’s history and observe the telltale signs of the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
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Nation & World
Health care savings, naturally
Though questions persist about whether natural remedies are as effective as their pharmacological cousins, one Harvard researcher is trying to understand the economic benefits people receive by relying on such traditional cures.
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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
Mushroom relations
Harvard researchers are using one of the most comprehensive fungal “family trees” ever created to unlock evolutionary secrets.
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Nation & World
Market dominance
Free-market thinking now pervades most facets of everyday life. In “What Money Can’t Buy,” rock-star lecturer and philosopher Michael Sandel asks readers to consider what they really value — and whether some things shouldn’t come with a price.
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Nation & World
House renewal, ready for launch
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard College announced plans to launch the systemwide effort to renew the University’s 12 undergraduate Houses. The announcement unveils Dunster as the first full House to be renewed, along with the location of “swing” housing, and the pacing for the project.
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Nation & World
Getting a leg up, through Year Up
Gerald Chertavian, founder and CEO of Year Up, a national program that trains urban young adults and places them in internships, visited Harvard to celebrate the achievements of seven Year Up participants who just completed the program.
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Nation & World
Helping hunt for the Higgs
For decades, it has been the holy grail of particle physics, an elusive subatomic particle that offered the tantalizing possibility of explaining how much of the universe works. Billions of dollars have been spent in the search for it. Thousands of researchers — including dozens from Harvard — have conducted trillions of experiments as part…
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Nation & World
Transforming cancer treatment
Professor Martin Nowak is one of several co-authors of a paper, published in Nature on June 28,that outlines a new approach to cancer treatment that could make many cancers manageable, if not curable, by overcoming resistance to certain drug treatments.
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Nation & World
One million species, and counting
Just weeks after adding its millionth Web page, the online biology clearinghouse called the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has received a grant from the Sloan Foundation that will allow it to continue its mission of documenting every living plant and animal species on the globe.
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Nation & World
The positives of playing favorites
As described in a paper in Scientific Reports, a study led by Feng Fu, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, found that in-group favoritism — the tendency of people to help other members of the same group — is critical in establishing high-level cooperation that ultimately benefits the whole.
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Nation & World
Quantum computing, no cooling required
Using a pair of impurities in ultra-pure, laboratory-grown diamonds, researchers have created room-temperature quantum bits and have stored information in them for nearly two seconds — an increase of nearly six orders of magnitude over the life span of earlier systems. The work, described in the June 8 issue of Science, is a critical first…
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Nation & World
Win for Obama, but no let-up in debate
The U.S. Supreme Court decision on Thursday upholding the basis of national health care reform is far from the last word on the topic, Harvard faculty members said, and merely raises the curtain on act two: November’s general election.
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Nation & World
Planet probe
In a paper published in the June 7 issue of Nature, Associate Professor Sujoy Mukhopadhyay presents evidence that the Earth’s deep mantle incorporated gas found in the solar nebula in the first few millions of years of the solar system’s formation.
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Nation & World
The growing brain
As reported on June 7 in the journal Neuron, a team of researchers led by Professor Jeff Lichtman has found that just days before birth mice undergo an explosion of neuromuscular branching. At birth, the research showed, some muscle fibers are contacted by as many as 10 nerve cells. Within days, however, all but one…
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Nation & World
Climbing out of hiding
For decades, scientists have been stymied in their attempts to better understand proboscis anole, a small lizard whose defining feature is a horn on its nose, because it appeared to be all but extinct — until now.
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Nation & World
The problem of pre-existing mutations
In a critical step that may lead to more-effective HIV treatments, Harvard scientists have found that, in a small number of HIV patients, pre-existing mutations in the virus can cause it to develop resistance to the drugs used to slow the progression of the disease.
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Nation & World
Nine professors named 2012 Cabot Fellows
Eight professors were named 2012 Cabot Fellows to honor their excellent publications.
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Nation & World
Tracing the brain’s connections
A team of researchers is using a genetically modified version of the rabies virus to create the first comprehensive list of inputs that connect directly to dopamine neurons in two regions of the brain.
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Nation & World
‘Stealing’ life’s building blocks
Researchers have found that a parasitic flower takes large portions of its genetic code from its host, and that some genes borrowed by the flowers may even be functional. The surprising finding suggests that the process may convey some evolutionary advantage to the flowers.
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Nation & World
Probing the sparrow’s beastly past
A new study led by Harvard scientists shows that birds are, essentially, living dinosaurs, with skulls that are remarkably similar to those of their juvenile ancestors.
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Nation & World
Straight to the source
As described in an April 23 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), graduate students Eric Morrow and Carling Hay demonstrate the use of a statistical tool called a Kalman smoother to identify “sea level fingerprints” — telltale variations in sea level rise — in a synthetic data set. Using those…
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Nation & World
Signs of progress against PTSD
A decade after the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, studies have shown that the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among troops is surprisingly low, and a Harvard researcher credits the drop, in part, to new efforts by the Army to prevent PTSD, and to ensure that those who develop the disorder…
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Nation & World
Horace Gray Lunt II
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 1, 2012, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Horace Gray Lunt II, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Professor Lunt spearheaded a golden age of Slavic studies.
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Nation & World
William von Eggers Doering
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 1, 2012, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late William von Eggers Doering, Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Time called Professor Doering’s synthesis of quinine “one of the greatest scientific achievements in a century.”
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Nation & World
Oleg Grabar
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 1, 2012, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Oleg Grabar, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Professor Grabar was one of Islamic art and architecture’s most influential and insightful scholars.
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Nation & World
Hoffman, Beerbohm win teaching prize
Physicist Jenny Hoffman and political theorist Eric Beerbohm have won the Roslyn Abramson Award, given annually to assistant or associate professors for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
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Nation & World
Ahead of the learning curve
From the $40 million Hauser gift to support teaching and learning initiatives to the recent announcement of the global online platform edX, Harvard tackled the future of higher education head-on in 2011-12. As the University’s 375th anniversary draws to a close, the Gazette asked some prescient professors: “What’s the one big idea that will transform…
