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Health
New branch of science
Scientists from the Arnold Arboretum and the University of Colorado are working to define for the first time the complete microbiome of a tree.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard’s best listeners
Harvard’s Audio Preservation Studio, tucked away in a few rooms on Story Street, does the heavy lifting (and listening) required to make “loss-less” digital copies of archived sound artifacts in collections University-wide.
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Arts & Culture
Taking a Thursday tour
This summer, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research is offering tours of its art collection. Led at noon on Thursdays by Sheldon Cheek, senior curatorial associate for the Image of the Black in Western Art Project and Photo Archive, at the Rudenstine Gallery.
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Nation & World
UC Berkeley joins edX
EdX, the online learning initiative founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and launched in May, announced today the addition of the University of California, Berkeley, to its platform.
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Arts & Culture
Fantasy, fairy tales, happy endings
Sixteen teachers were selected to attend the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar course on fairy tales and fantasy literature at Harvard University. Maria Tatar, chair of the program in Folklore and Mythology, led the seminars.
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Health
Giving phobias a rest
A Harvard-led research team has found that exposure therapy for irrational fear of spiders seems to be more effective if it is followed by sleep, according to a recent study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
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Health
Artificial jellyfish swims in a heartbeat
A team of researchers at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology has turned inanimate silicon and living cardiac muscle cells into a freely swimming “jellyfish.”
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Campus & Community
HMS student named to AMA Foundation
The American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation welcomed four new members to the national philanthropic organization’s board of directors, including Harvard Medical School student Benjamin Schanker.
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Science & Tech
NaCl to give way to RockSalt
A team led by Harvard computer scientists, including two undergraduate students, has developed a new tool that could lead to increased security and enhanced performance for commonly used Web and mobile applications.
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Campus & Community
Helpman named British Academy Corresponding Fellow
Elhanan Helpman, the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade, was named a 2012 British Academy Corresponding Fellow by the British Academy at its recent annual general meeting. The British Academy recognizes highly distinguished…
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Health
Mushroom relations
Harvard researchers are using one of the most comprehensive fungal “family trees” ever created to unlock evolutionary secrets.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.