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Campus & Community
Whirl domination
Moments after guiding the Harvard women’s basketball team to a March 2 victory over visiting Cornell to snatch up the 2007 Ivy League championship — the program’s 10th — coach Kathy Delaney-Smith was already looking ahead to the Crimson’s two remaining games of the season. The Crimson mentor may have been pleased with Harvard’s 64-48…
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Campus & Community
Tian loves poetry – from Plath to Yuanming
Xiaofei Tian, a youthful looking Harvard scholar of Chinese poetry, could easily be mistaken for an undergraduate in the halls of 2 Divinity Ave., where she works in a book-lined office. Last September, at age 34, Tian got word of her tenure in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. To celebrate, she and…
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Health
HSPH study suggests taking wraps off drug safety data
For years, pharmaceutical companies have sought to restrict public access to drug safety data collected in clinical trials on the basis that it is proprietary information, arguing that competitors could use that information in the development of their own products. However, a number of recent cases of drugs found to have dangerous side effects after…
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Health
Despite their heft, many dinosaurs had surprisingly tiny genomes
They might be giants, but many dinosaurs apparently had genomes no larger than those of a modern hummingbird. So say scientists who’ve linked bone cell and genome size among living species and then used that new understanding to gauge the genome sizes of 31 species of extinct dinosaurs and birds, whose bone cells can be…
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Health
I know just how you feel
When people talk with psychotherapists, the best results occur if both feel similar emotions, when both “like” each other. But do most therapists really connect with patients this way? No one has ever tried to directly measure the biology of empathy between the two.
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Health
At Radcliffe, microbiologist explains ‘biocomplexity’
The scientist who revolutionized the study of cholera paid a visit to Harvard this week. On March 6, microbiologist and oceanographer Rita R. Colwell, a Johns Hopkins University public health researcher, delivered the last in a series of science talks in the 2006-2007 Dean’s Lecture series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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Health
Obesity runs in families – and friends, too
Having overweight family and friends increases the likelihood someone will become overweight, according to a Harvard researcher who examined obesity and social network data from the long-running Framingham Heart Study.
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Health
Seeing the forest, from the trees
Alain Houle thinks higher-status chimpanzees likely feed on more, higher-quality fruit — found higher up in the tree — than lower-status chimpanzees, which leads to the chimps being in better physical shape and greater breeding success. “I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then…
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Campus & Community
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dies at 89
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a member of Harvard’s History Department from 1954 until 1962, died Feb. 27 in New York City. He was 89.
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Nation & World
HGSE sponsors alumni of color conference
In a crowded banquet hall at the Cambridge Center Marriott, William Demmert Jr. Ed.D.’73 — a Tlingit who grew up in southeast Alaska — finished up a detailed lecture on Native American languages, culture, and early childhood education. And as soon as the talk ended, the 72-year-old writer and researcher was on the crowded dance…
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Nation & World
HBS sponsors program for NFL pros
Is there life after pro football? The Harvard Business School (HBS) thinks so. For the third year, it’s sponsoring an executive education program for young athletes from the National Football League. In separate three-day modules, one in February and another in April, experts help the players conserve and invest the dollars they earn on the…
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Nation & World
Three Republican campaign strategists say the battle’s just begun
Iraq, Mormonism, and health care topped the agenda Monday night (March 5) in a 2008 presidential campaign preview featuring top aides to three Republican hopefuls in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Campaign strategists for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, U.S. Sen. John McCain, and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that the Iraq…
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Nation & World
Schulz: U.S. should take stand on torture
“The ancient Greeks would have been ashamed of us.” That was the assessment of Amnesty International USA’s former executive director William Schulz of the U.S. military’s abuses of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. Schulz said that Greeks and Romans routinely tortured slaves as a way to establish the truth of a situation…
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Campus & Community
Sports briefs
Women’s hockey selected at-large pick Icer sweep sets up quarterfinal appearance Squash takes men’s, women’s individual titles
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Campus & Community
Kwang-chih Chang
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on October 17, 2006, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Kwang-chih Chang, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. As a scholar and as a person, K.C. was an enduring source of inspiration.
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Arts & Culture
Undergrad grants available through Schlesinger Library
The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America invites Harvard undergraduates to make use of the library’s collections with competitive awards (ranging from $100 to $2,500) for relevant research projects.
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Science & Tech
Undergrads to compete at Programming Contest
A group of Harvard undergraduates will travel to Tokyo to compete in the Association for Computing Machinery’s 31st annual International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) on March 12-16. More than 6,000 teams, representing 1,756 universities from around the globe, participated in the regional competitions last fall. The top 88 teams earned coveted spots on the 2007…
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Campus & Community
Harvard College sets Cambridge Queen’s Head opening for April 19
Following intensive consultation with students and some two years of planning and preparations, Harvard College will open the Cambridge Queen’s Head on April 19. The new 176-seat pub in Loker Commons, intended to augment the College’s House-based social life with a comfortable common venue for meeting and socializing, will debut with some 15 special events…
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Campus & Community
Faust inauguration set for October
The inauguration events for Harvard’s 28th president, Drew Gilpin Faust, will take place beginning the evening of Oct. 11. The inauguration will continue with the installation ceremony scheduled for Oct. 12 at approximately 2 p.m. More details will be made available as plans progress.
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Campus & Community
Fencers split at North Champs
On a weekend where every touch was fought with intensity and passion, great respect was manifest but no love was lost between Ivy League fencing rivals Harvard and Columbia. The two schools, after all, were battling for supremacy at the Ivy League North Championship (Feb. 25) at Harvard’s Gordon Track and Field Center.
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Health
Common prostate cancer therapy may carry risks
Androgen deprivation therapy – one of the most common treatments for prostate cancer – may increase the risk of death from heart disease in patients over age 65, according to a new study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and other institutions.
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Nation & World
Young scholars show findings at HGSE Student Research Conference
In a basement classroom in Larsen Hall on Friday (Feb. 23), there was everything young learners need: chalkboards, a screen, bright lights, sturdy chairs – and good teachers. In this case, four good teachers – all of them Ed.M. students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). The four were among 230 young scholars…
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Health
Over-the-counter pain relievers increase the risk of high blood pressure in men
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that the three most commonly used drugs in the United States, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and aspirin, increase the risk of developing high blood pressure in middle-aged men. These findings are published in the Feb. 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
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Science & Tech
Medieval Islamic architecture presages 20th century mathematics
Intricate decorative tilework found in medieval architecture across the Islamic world appears to exhibit advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry – a concept discovered by Western mathematicians and physicists only in the 1970s and 1980s. If so, medieval Islamic application of this geometry would predate Western mastery by at least half a millennium.
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Health
Harvard athletes grow bigger, better hearts
Strenuous exercise can cause a heart to grow as much as 10 percent and its chambers to enlarge, Harvard researchers have discovered after testing the University’s athletes. What they are learning from these studies could someday be applied to advising nonathletes about caring for their hearts.
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Campus & Community
College announces new sophomore advising plan
Harvard College has announced a new preconcentration advising program to help rising sophomores. As the former freshmen are being welcomed into House life, advisers will help them choose their concentration.
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Campus & Community
New York City mayor to receive award, deliver remarks at KSG
Michael R. Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, will receive the Pathfinder Award Friday (March 2) from the Leadership for a Networked World (LNW) Program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG). Bloomberg will also deliver remarks before an audience of invited guests at the School’s Wiener Auditorium beginning at 4 p.m. and will be…
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Science & Tech
Jackson raps abundance of ‘experts’
In 1973, Shirley Ann Jackson became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Decades – and 38 honorary degrees – later, Jackson is the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Her resume includes time as a university researcher (in theoretical elementary particle physics);…
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Arts & Culture
Tackling tradition and taboos
Mary Gitagno plainly remembers the pain of her traditional Tanzanian tribe’s female circumcision ritual. It is a pain she determined her own daughters would never feel. In the years since, Gitagno went far beyond sparing her daughters from female genital mutilation, beginning a nonprofit organization to lobby the government and educate the public about the…