Featured series 
Tag: Research
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Nation & World
Fighting disease on a global scale
The idea that the wave of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer breaking over the world is largely the result of wealth and inactivity is not only wrong, it’s counterproductive, says a Harvard research fellow who recently founded a nonprofit organization to fight disease.
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Nation & World
Ludwig Cancer Research awards HMS $90M
Ludwig Cancer Research, on behalf of its founder, Daniel K. Ludwig, has given Harvard Medical School $90 million to spur innovative scientific inquiry and discovery. According to the Ludwig announcement, this new financial support is among the largest private gifts ever for cancer research.
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Nation & World
Following the weather
From the violence of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to Earth’s own extreme weather, Ziff Environmental Fellow Pedram Hassanzadeh is investigating atmospheric vortices, those swirling air masses that make the weather go — and sometimes make it stop.
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Nation & World
Saving tortoises by a hair
Five species of giant, long-lived Galapagos tortoises are thought to have gone extinct, but recent DNA analysis shows that some may survive on other islands in the archipelago, according to work by Michael Russello, Harvard Hrdy Fellow in Conservation Biology.
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Nation & World
Can iPads help students learn science? Yes
A new study by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that students grasp the unimaginable emptiness of space more effectively when they use iPads to explore 3-D simulations of the universe, compared with traditional classroom instruction.
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Nation & World
Probing how the past behaved
Harvard faculty and graduate students lectured, organized, and moderated in big ways throughout a four-day annual meeting in Boston of the History of Science Society.
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Nation & World
U.S. methane emissions exceed government estimates
Emissions of methane from fossil fuel extraction and refining activities in the United States are nearly five times higher than previous estimates, according to researchers at Harvard University and seven other institutions.
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Nation & World
‘Deep pragmatism’ as a moral engine
Professor Joshua Greene talks about his new book, “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.” What makes an issue like abortion or Israeli-Palestinian relations seem insurmountable, he said, can be chalked up, in part, to brain wiring.
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Nation & World
Core objectives
Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Reville talks about the new national standards for K-12 education, known as the Common Core State Standards, and the recent controversy surrounding their implementation.
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Nation & World
Malaria in 3-D
Using an imaging technique known as high-speed holographic microscopy, Laurence Wilson, a fellow at Harvard’s Rowland Institute, worked with colleagues to produce detailed 3-D images of malaria sperm — the cells that reproduce inside infected mosquitoes — that shed new light on how the cells move.
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Nation & World
Broad launches next decade with $100M gift
American philanthropists and entrepreneurs Eli and Edythe Broad announced on Thursday they are investing an additional $100 million into the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to launch a new decade of transformative work to harness recent biomedical discoveries to benefit patients.
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Nation & World
Haunted by the siege
A Davis Center photo exhibit — wrenching and frank — brings back the 872-day Siege of Leningrad through the eyes of women who survived it.
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Nation & World
Change is on the runway
A Harvard conference will emphasize the rising influence of landscape architects in airport design and decommissioning.
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Nation & World
Three days, three wild finds
Tim Laman, an associate of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and an award-winning wildlife photographer, was part of a two-man team that helicoptered into a remote Australian rainforest earlier this year, coming out with three new species: two lizards and a frog.
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Nation & World
Stages of bloom
Harvard researchers have solved the nearly 200-year-old mystery of how Rafflesia, the largest flowering plants in the world, develop.
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Nation & World
Online, on site, in the field
Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk outlined a new vision for public health education Friday (Nov. 1), outlining courses that blend online, in-person, and in-the-field experiences and that take different forms throughout a professional’s life.
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Nation & World
National digital library gains traction
The Digital Public Library of America, with Harvard in its heritage, celebrates its first six months with an idea conference in Boston.
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Nation & World
The digital Dickinson
Houghton Library and Harvard University Press are two of the leading partners in the new Emily Dickinson Archive, a joint venture with other institutions that brings together most of her poem manuscripts.
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Nation & World
New insight on wild nights
New research suggests that, despite moonlight’s apparent hunting advantage, large predators such as lions are actually less active on the brightest nights, while many prey animals — despite the risk of being eaten — become more active.
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Nation & World
The teaching launch
A new study found that middle school teachers can have a real impact not only on students’ short-term educations, but on whether they attend college and on the size of their future paychecks.
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Nation & World
National parks face dangerous foe
Thirty-eight of the United States’ national parks are experiencing “accidental fertilization” at or above a critical threshold for ecological damage, according to a study led by Harvard University researchers and published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
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Nation & World
Improving cord blood transplants
They began with a discovery in zebrafish in 2007, and now researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) have published initial results of a Phase Ib human clinical trial of a therapeutic that could improve the success of blood stem cell transplantation. This marks the first time that HSCI has carried a discovery from…
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Nation & World
The search for other Earths
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are drafting the target list for NASA’s next planet-finding telescope, the orbiting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which will search the Earth’s galactic neighborhood for planets that might support life.
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Nation & World
Cabot Library, re-imagined
The Science Center atrium and Cabot Science Library, already filled with bustling undergraduates, will undergo a transformation to support learning and teaching for the digital age while more effectively connecting the library to the atrium and plaza social spaces.
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Nation & World
A tiny, time-released treatment
Targeted nanotherapy is the wave of the medical future, according to Omid Farokhzad, a Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researcher who has two nanoparticle-based therapies in clinical trials and a slew of ideas for new ways to put the tiny capsules to work for human health.
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Nation & World
Harvard alumnus wins share of medicine Nobel
James E. Rothman, a 1976 Harvard alumnus, won a share of the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for work illuminating the internal machinery that cells use to transport molecules.
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Nation & World
At Du Bois awards, the stars aligned
The six medalists at the W.E.B. Du Bois awards included a White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, playwright Tony Kushner, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, the commissioner of the NBA David Stern, and Hollywood director Steven Spielberg.
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Nation & World
Biography of a bronze
September marked the 375th anniversary of benefactor John Harvard’s death, and the beginning of a course that uses his statue in Harvard Yard to instruct students about the realities of two vanished eras.
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Nation & World
Programming genetic code can lead to better designer genes
The key to programming bacteria to follow orders has been found in its protein production. Researchers have learned that by using more rare words, or codons, near the start of a gene, they can remove roadblocks to protein production. The knowledge may mean new drugs and biofuels.
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Nation & World
The watchword is innovation
Innovation, whether it’s large, small, solo, or institutional, is an increasingly important part of Harvard, a university working to maintain its clearly defined sense of self and at the same time evolve to meet future needs.
