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Science & Tech
Chandra finds “cool” black hole at heart of Andromeda Galaxy
A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., reported that the gas funneling into a supermassive black hole in the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, designated as “M31,” is a “cool” million degrees Celsius. This unexpected result adds one more quirk to the strange behavior previously observed at the center…
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Science & Tech
Betelgeuse’s chromosphere beats like a human heart
For many years astronomers have known that the atmospheres of pulsating stars either expand or contract over time, but they have long puzzled over the question: “What physical mechanism drives these amazing dynamics?” Alex Lobel and Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge and Ronald Gilliland of the Space Telescope Institute…
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Science & Tech
Streamers of gas feed beast at center of our galaxy
Astronomers have long known that a supermassive black hole, more than 2 million times more massive than our Sun, lies at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy some 27,000 light-years from Earth. A point-like source of radio emission called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) marks the location of this black hole. Now researchers Robin S.…
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Science & Tech
Little giants create a big cosmic controversy
A new measuring technique used to determine the distances to a class of stars called “Red Clumps” in the Large Magellanic Cloud produced a much smaller distance than that found by other popular methods of measurement. The smaller distance means that the universe may be expanding faster than previously thought — a finding which has…
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Campus & Community
Harvard track defeats Northeastern Huskies
The Harvard men’s and women’s track teams both defeated their Northeastern counterparts at the Gordon Track and Tennis Center Saturday. The women, led by Captain Brenda Taylor with wins in the 60 meter hurdles and 200 meters, beat the Huskies 95-30. Nicky Grant ’02 broke her own school record in the 20-pound weight toss and…
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Science & Tech
Researcher Sunney Xie interested in molecule as an individual
Sunney Xie is one of the world’s leading researchers in molecular imaging and in single-molecule reactions. Xie’s has devised a way to use laser beams to see collections of protein molecules. The new imaging method is important because it allows researchers to see how biomolecules are assembled in biological membranes and how their relative position…
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Health
‘Take two aspirin and call me manana’
Harvard Medical School is attempting to bridge the language barriers that sometimes arise in medical settings. A set of three medical phrasebooks was first offered in 1999 in three different languages: Communicating with the Patient during Urgent Care, Communicating with the Patient on Work Rounds, and Communicating with the Patient during Review of Systems. All…
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Science & Tech
State-of-the-art health guide created
Harvard Medical School believes it has a cure for problems associated with finding accurate, up-to-date medical information: a comprehensive (1,288 pages), $40 medical guide tied to a Web site that will update the book weekly. Published by Simon and Schuster in October 1999, it’s the first family health guide that will never go out of…
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Science & Tech
Light weapons are most common in today’s small wars
In the 1990s, approximately 4 million soldiers and civilians were killed by small arms in the internecine conflicts of the developing world. More people, in other words, were killed in that decade in war by small arms than by major weapon systems, according to a Harvard research report. Likewise, millions have been wounded, displaced from…
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Science & Tech
Study finds biotech workers ‘thrive’ on instability
Marked by job insecurity, dependence on changing technology, and uncertain financing, the biotechnology industry is viewed by researchers as one of the best examples of the workplace of the future. A study by the Radcliffe Public Policy Center (RPPC) released in December 1999 found that biotech workers were actually thriving in this highly unstable environment.…
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Science & Tech
Industrial disasters sparked field of environmental health
Two large, unnatural disasters helped to create the impetus for the field of environmental health to grow in scope. But before there was a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and before the National Institutes of Health (NIH) included environmental health, there was the Kresge Center for Environmental Health at Harvard’s School of Public Health. Beginning in…
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Science & Tech
Black silicon: A new way to trap light
Eric Mazur, Harvard College Professor and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, and his students were studying what kinds of new chemistry can occur when lasers shine on metals, like platinum. One day, they decided to put a chip of gray silicon into a vacuum chamber, add some halogen gas, and scan it with ultrashort,…
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Science & Tech
New electronic tools reveal forgotten China
German-born photographer Hedda Hammer Morrison (1908-1991) could often be seen bicycling through Peking with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck, capturing her times through her lens as both participant and observer. A simple way of life was rapidly changing in the 1930s and ’40s behind the walls of China’s Forbidden City. Morrison’s photographs of Peking…
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Science & Tech
21 moons ‘swarm’ planet Uranus
In 1999 three new moons were discovered orbiting Uranus, a great gasball of a planet about 2 billion miles from Earth. The discovery raised the number of Uranian moons to 21, the most, as far as is known, in the skies of any planet. Researchers believe the moons were “captured” billions of years ago. “We…
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Science & Tech
‘Ultracold’ trap unveils secrets of matter in the universe
Physics Professor John Doyle traps the tiny particles that make up the universe and then studies them, looking for what they can tell him about the most basic rules of nature. Specifically, Doyle is looking for evidence of discrepancies in the theory known as the Standard Model, the major theory of how the basic particles…
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Science & Tech
Exploring big and small possibilities of the information revolution
” ‘System-on-a-chip’ is the new buzzword today,” said Professor Woodward Yang in 1999. “It’s really not that far away.” As Yang sees it, the computer revolution is really just beginning. Systems are poised to become smaller, more portable, and found everywhere from traditional desktops to cell phones and pagers. Yang in 1999 said researchers are…
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Science & Tech
What killed the dinosaurs?
Charles Marshall’s childhood passion led him to a career in paleontology, trying to understand the interplay between inheritance, environment, and catastrophe in directing evolution. Marshall’s work attracted media attention in 1996. He and University of Washington geologist Peter Ward concluded there may have been other causes than just the well-publicized comet or asteroid impact responsible…
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Science & Tech
Archaeology team helps find oldest deep-sea shipwrecks
About 2,700 years ago, two Phoenician ships sank to the Mediterranean’s muddy bottom, where they lay upright, preserved in the relative stillness and tremendous pressure of the deep, dark waters. They were found 1,000 feet down in June 1999 by a team made up of Harvard archaeologists led by Lawrence Stager, Dorot Professor of the…
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Health
Jolie-Pitt Foundation Donates $2 Million to Global Health Committee to Fight HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis in Ethiopia
The Global Health Committee (GHC) has announced it will receive $2 million dollars from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to bring life-saving medicines to Ethiopians suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The money will be used to create a center for AIDS and tuberculosis-affected children in the capital city of Addis Ababa, and to help establish a program…
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Science & Tech
El Nino found to be 124,000 years old
Records preserved in corals from Indonesia reveal that El Niño was causing severe weather even before the last ice age began, when the climate apparently was like it was for most of the 20th century. “No question about it; there were El Niños that long ago,” says Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences.…
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Campus & Community
Human Biological Clock Set Back an Hour
The internal clock that drives the daily activities of all living things, from wild flowers to whales, is wound by Earth’s rotation. The 24-hour cycle, tied to one turn of the planet on its axis, embodies a biological clock mimicked by timepieces invented to measure the human day. But these external clocks don’t exactly match…
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Science & Tech
Student-designed lamp brightens Harvard dorms
Halogen lamps became increasingly popular through the ’90s. Their high-wattage bulbs gave off a clear, pleasant light and — at $15 to $25 — even a student could afford them. Unfortunately, the lamps also gobbled electricity and their bulbs burned hot enough to be blamed for several fires and two fatalities. As part of her…
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Campus & Community
Growth Factor Raises Cancer Risk
High levels of a well-known growth factor significantly increase the risks of colorectal, breast, and prostate cancer, medical researchers have found. At the same time, they determined that a protein that binds to the growth factor seems to neutralize it and reduce the risk of these malignancies, which are three of the four biggest cancer…
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Science & Tech
Harvard students uncover Martha’s Vineyard history
Some significant details emerged from the items uncovered by Harvard archaeology students at a dig on Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. For instance, the site has been used by humans much longer than archaeologists first expected. A stone spear tip indicated the spot was inhabited by humans as long as 10,000 years ago — just 1,000…
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Health
Paying attention to attention: How active is hyperactive?
McLean Hospital researcher Martin Teicher and his team believe that the surest way to separate youngsters who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from those with other problems is to look at their brain activity. His team carefully monitored the motions of thousands of children, including 700 first- and second-graders. They found that specific patterns…
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Health
Diving into the gene pool
Maryellen Ruvolo, professor of anthropology, specializes in the analysis of human and primate family trees using DNA data, a subfield of molecular evolution. She is probably best known for her work showing that people are more closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas, contrary to previous thinking. She has also worked on the search for…
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Science & Tech
Discovering a new earthquake fault under Los Angeles
“Los Angeles is caught in a vise,” says John Shaw, an associate professor of structural and economic geology at Harvard who was half of a research team that discovered a large, active crack in the earth, capable of causing destructive earthquakes, under Los Angeles. The researchers announced their discovery in March 1999. The crack, or…
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Science & Tech
Physicists Slow Speed of Light
Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic — 38 miles an hour. An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together…