Tag: Peter Reuell

  • Nation & World

    Horizontal helper

    Cassandra Extavour and Leo Blondel provide the strongest suggestive evidence yet that at least part of a specific gene came from bacterial genomes.

    7 minutes
    Cassandra Extavour.
  • Nation & World

    From ancient flooding, modern insights

    Tamara Pico, a postdoctoral fellow, is using records of flooding in the Bering Strait to make inferences about how the ice sheets that covered North America responded to the warming climate, and how their melting might have contributed to climate changes.

    5 minutes
    Tamara Pico in front of an image of the Earth.
  • Nation & World

    28 top stories of 2019

    A review of the top 28 Harvard Gazette stories of 2019.

    3 minutes
    2019 graduates.
  • Nation & World

    New faculty: Martin Surbeck

    A new member of the faculty of the Department of Human and Evolutionary Biology, Martin Surbeck runs one of the few bonobo research sites in the world.

    4 minutes
    A portrait-style photo of professor in front of a large globe
  • Nation & World

    The archaeology of plaque (yes, plaque)

    Christina Warinner says ancient dental plaque offers insights into diets, disease, dairying, and women’s roles of the period.

    9 minutes
    Christina Warinner is a new faculty member photographed in front of a display at the Peabody Museum.
  • Nation & World

    Physics, real and fictional

    A Harvard study is exploring the way humans’ sense of “intuitive physics” of the real world leaves fingerprints on the fictional universes we create.

    7 minutes
    Levitating frog.
  • Nation & World

    A clue to biodiversity?

    An analysis of 20 butterfly genomes found evidence that many butterfly species — including distantly related species — show a surprisingly high amount of gene flow between them, Harvard researchers found.

    5 minutes
    Heliconius xanthocles butterfly illustration with wings spread.
  • Nation & World

    Both marathoner and sprinter

    Scientists from Harvard and the University of Virginia have developed the first robotic tuna that can accurately mimic both the highly efficient swimming style of tuna, and their high speed.

    4 minutes
    George Lauder holding a robotic fish
  • Nation & World

    Tiny tweezers

    Using precisely focused lasers that act as “optical tweezers,” Harvard scientists have been able to capture and control individual ultracold molecules – the eventual building-blocks of a quantum computer – and study the collisions between them in more detail than ever before.

    5 minutes
    optical tweezers in use
  • Nation & World

    Promising projects

    Sixteen Harvard scientists are among the 93 researchers who have been selected to receive grants through the National Institutes of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward program, which funds innovative research designed to address major challenges in biomedical science.

    10 minutes
    Beakers and lab equipment
  • Nation & World

    Playing our song

    Samuel Mehr has long been interested in questions of what music is, how music works, and why music exists. To help find the answers, he’s created the Music Lab, an online, citizen-science project aimed at understanding not just how the human mind interprets music, but why music is a virtually ubiquitous feature of human societies.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Black hole project nets Breakthrough Prize

    The nearly 350 astronomers, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates who worked for more than a decade to capture the first-ever image of a black hole have been named the recipients of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

    5 minutes
    Shep Doeleman
  • Nation & World

    Lessons in learning

    Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think

    6 minutes
    two students looking at notebook together
  • Nation & World

    How a zebrafish model may hold a key to biology

    Martin Haesemeyer set out to build an artificial neural network that worked differently than fish’s brains, but what he got was a system that almost perfectly mimicked the zebrafish — and that could be a powerful tool for understanding biology.

    5 minutes
    Researchers looking at zebrafish
  • Nation & World

    Want to avoid climate-related disasters? Try moving

    For decades, the response to flooding and hurricanes was a vow to rebuild. A.R. Siders believes the time has come to consider managed retreat, or the practice of moving communities away from disaster-prone areas to safer lands.

    5 minutes
    Storm surge hitting houses along coast.
  • Nation & World

    Clever crows

    A new paper, co-authored by Dakota McCoy, a graduate student working in the lab of George Putnam Professor of Biology David Haig, suggests that, after using tools, crows were more optimistic.

    6 minutes
    Crow with tool
  • Nation & World

    How the moon came to be

    A fourth-year graduate student in the lab of Professor of Geochemistry Stein Jacobsen, Yaray Ku is working on a project aimed at understanding how the moon formed, and to do it, she’s working with actual lunar samples.

    4 minutes
    Yaya Ku researches the moon
  • Nation & World

    What fuels prejudice?

    A postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Psychology Professor Matt Nock,Brian O’Shea is the lead author of a study that suggests racial tension may stem not from different groups being exposed to each other, but fear of a different sort of exposure — exposure to infectious diseases. The study is described in a July…

    3 minutes
    Brian O'Shea
  • Nation & World

    Funding promising scientists

    Associate Professor of Physics Cora Dvorkin and Associate Professor of Computer Science Stratos Idreos will each receive at least $150,000 a year for the next five years through the Department of Energy Early Career Research Program.

    3 minutes
    Matter in space
  • Nation & World

    Future M.D.’s passion to help comes in many forms

    Cynthia Luo, who’s concentrating in both molecular and cellular biology and English, was inspired by her time in Uganda to become a physician and improve global health.

    5 minutes
    Cynthia Luo in front of stairs
  • Nation & World

    Unpacking the power of poverty

    Social scientists have long understood that a child’s environment can have long-lasting effects on their success later in life. Exactly how is less well understood. A new Harvard study points to a handful of key indicators, including exposure to high lead levels, violence, and incarceration, as key predictors of children’s later success.

    5 minutes
    Professor Robert Sampson
  • Nation & World

    Cities’ wealth gap is growing, too

    Harvard research has found that separation between rich and poor communities has increased during the past 40 years.

    4 minutes
    Robert Manduca.
  • Nation & World

    Before the Big Bang

    Harvard researchers are proposing using a “primordial standard clock” as a probe of the primordial universe. The team laid out a method that may be used to falsify the inflationary theory experimentally.

    5 minutes
    A representation of the timeline of the universe.
  • Nation & World

    Identifying exotic properties

    Though they have unusual properties that could be useful in everything from superconductors to quantum computers, topological materials are frustratingly difficult to predictably produce. To speed up the process, Harvard researchers in a series of studies develop methods for efficiently identifying new materials that display topological properties.

    5 minutes
    illustration of water and how symmetry indicators work as a net to catch topological materials
  • Nation & World

    ‘Seeing the unseeable’

    A years-long effort by dozens of researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reveals the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole.

    9 minutes
    In the first picture of a black hole, it is outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon.
  • Nation & World

    A black hole, revealed

    Researchers at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) just unveiled the first-ever image of a black hole, which captures what EHT Director Sheperd Doeleman called “a one-way door from our universe.”

    5 minutes
    Harvard Senior Research Fellow Shep Doeleman
  • Nation & World

    Breaking down ‘Beowulf’

    Using a statistical approach known as stylometry, which analyzes everything from the poem’s meter to the number of times different combinations of letters show up in the text, a team of researchers found new evidence that “Beowulf” is the work of a single author.

    8 minutes
    Madison Krieger.
  • Nation & World

    Coding for a cause

    Professor Jelani Nelson develops new algorithms to make computer systems work more efficiently, but also takes his educational efforts beyond Harvard’s walls. He founded AddisCoder, a program that teaches students in Ethiopia how to code.

    8 minutes
    Jelani Nelson sitting in front of a laptop
  • Nation & World

    The genetics of regeneration

    Led by Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Mansi Srivastava, a team of researchers is shedding new light on how animals perform whole-body regeneration, and uncovering a number of DNA switches that appear to control genes used in the process.

    7 minutes
    Three-banded panther worms.
  • Nation & World

    Should landlords have to share what’s been bugging them?

    It might seem crazy for landlords to tell potential tenants about past bedbug infestations, but Alison Hill believes it will pay off in the long run. In a study, Hill found that while landlords would see a modest drop in rental income in the short term, they would make that money back in a handful…

    5 minutes
    A bedbug.