All articles


  • Science & Tech

    Smart suit improves physical endurance

    Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering announced that it has received a $2.6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a smart suit that helps improve physical endurance for soldiers in the field.

  • Science & Tech

    When the beat goes off

    Rhythm research has implications for both audio engineering and neural clocks, said Holger Hennig, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Eric Heller in the Physics Department at Harvard, and first author of a study of the Ghanaian and other drummers in the journal Physics Today.

  • Arts & Culture

    From ‘Emma’ to ‘Charlie Brown’

    Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theatre (HRST) welcomes Harvard undergraduates of all ages and majors to participate in its summer repertory company. The 30 Harvard students participating in the 2012 HRST program and have been collaborating on three plays since mid-May.

  • Arts & Culture

    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.

  • Health

    Women pay high price for high job strain

    New research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) finds that women with high job strain are more likely to experience a cardiovascular-related event compared with women with low job strain. These findings are published in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

  • Health

    Cancer care comes to Rwanda

    Paul Farmer, chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and co-founder of Partners In Health, announced the opening of Butaro Cancer Center of Excellence, which will serve as the first national cancer referral facility in rural Rwanda.

  • Health

    Doctor knots

    Harvard researchers have developed a method to determine the effect of social networks among doctors on cost and quality of care across the nation.

  • Campus & Community

    Tree Mob takes over Arnold Arboretum

    William (Ned) Friedman, director of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, took the whimsical concept of a flash mob — a social media–driven spontaneous gathering — and applied it to outreach to the public to encourage interaction with the scientists, curators, and horticulturalists who work on the Arboretum’s 265 acres. The next Tree Mob is July 25…

  • Arts & Culture

    Memorable expressions

    Harvard curator Elizabeth Rudy discussed “highlights of how portraiture was pushed in different directions by different artists at key moments” in a talk at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

  • Nation & World

    Student achievement stuck in the middle

    U.S. ranks 25th out of 49 countries in student test-score gains over a 14-year period, report three scholars at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Munich.

  • Campus & Community

    HMS faculty wins Clinical Scientist Development Award

    Adam J. Bass, assistant professor in the department of medicine at Harvard Medical School and assistant professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has won a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation 2012 Clinical Scientist Development Award.

  • Campus & Community

    CES names Ekiert as new director

    Grzegorz Ekiert, professor of government at Harvard and longtime affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), has been named director of the center.

  • Science & Tech

    To clean up the mine, let fungus reproduce

    Harvard-led researchers have discovered that an Ascomycete fungus that is common in polluted water produces environmentally important minerals during asexual reproduction.

  • Nation & World

    Progress, but no letup

    In the LGBT community, “equal rights does not necessarily mean equal lives,” Tim McCarthy, an activist and Harvard lecturer, told a Harvard Kennedy School audience on July 11. With that in mind, he and a group of researchers at the Face Value project are aiming to combat real-world stigma, not just legal discrimination.

  • Health

    Personalized medicine closer to reality

    A consortium of scientists at 20 institutions, led by a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, has used stem cells to take a major step toward developing personalized medicine to treat Parkinson’s disease.

  • Campus & Community

    Kuwait Foundation awards $8.1M gift

    The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) has given $8.1 million to Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to support the continuation of the Kuwait Program at HKS’s Middle East Initiative.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard’s IOP announces fall fellows

    The Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School has announced its resident and visiting fellowships for this fall.

  • Campus & Community

    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.

  • Campus & Community

    House renewal supports local economy

    Harvard University today announced plans to undertake a wide-ranging construction program that will result in the creation of nearly 3,600 local construction jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new local economic activity while ultimately funneling approximately $10 million into Cambridge city coffers in permitting fees alone.

  • Campus & Community

    Houses Today

    House Masters and former students discuss learning outside the classroom and how the housing system enriches life and community at Harvard.

  • Arts & Culture

    In 40 films, story of a screen great

    A summer-long festival at the Harvard Film Archive tells the story, in 40 movies, of Paramount Pictures — a legendary cinema enterprise that turned 100 this year.

  • Health

    In obesity battle, beige is the new brown

    Scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have isolated a new type of energy-burning fat cell in adult humans, which they say may have therapeutic potential for treating obesity.

  • Health

    Moving beyond health care’s fee-for-service

    Harvard researchers find that global budgets for health care, an alternative to the traditional fee-for-service model of reimbursement, can slow the growth of medical spending and improve the quality of care for patients.

  • Arts & Culture

    A new avenue for expression

    A new master’s concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Design invites artists and others out of the studio and into the world.

  • Campus & Community

    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.

  • Science & Tech

    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…

  • Campus & Community

    More than a residence: Houses of Harvard

    Silhouetted against the morning sun, a House crew hoists its boat high overhead at dockside, ready for a practice row on the Charles. Inside a master’s residence in Quincy House, amateur artists expand their creative horizons at a “paint bar,” working side-by-side with fellow students, offering encouragement and critique. High in the tower of Lowell…

  • Health

    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.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard represented at Olympics

    Harvard will be well-represented at the upcoming 2012 Olympics in London, as nine athletes and one coach will compete at the games beginning July 27.

  • Health

    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.