All articles


  • Campus & Community

    Harvard’s Olympians

    When the Olympic Games began, nine competitors and one coach with Harvard ties were there. Together they continued Harvard’s long-standing connection to the event.

  • Health

    Fixing the way we fix the brain

    With neurodegenerative diseases affecting millions and having the potential to bankrupt the U.S. health care system, Harvard Medical School, seven pharmaceutical companies, and the Massachusetts state government have formed the Massachusetts Neuroscience Consortium. The goal: to offer new collaborative research models.

  • Campus & Community

    Justin Stern awarded Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship

    The Harvard Committee on General Scholarships has awarded Justin Stern the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. The competitive fellowship, which affords scholars the opportunity to conduct research or study outside of Cambridge, is awarded to…

  • Campus & Community

    Barreira named HUHS director

    Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber announced July 26 the appointment of Paul J. Barreira, M.D., as director of Harvard University Health Services (HUHS) and Henry K. Oliver Professor of Hygiene.

  • Health

    What wakes me

    Clifford Saper, chair of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center recently discovered a brainstem area that senses oxygen dips and drives waking.

  • Campus & Community

    Liverpool F.C. wins over local youth

    A stop at Harvard had the legendary Liverpool Football Club holding a soccer clinic for area youngsters. The team was on its 2012 North American Summer Tour. [Video: 2:05]

  • Arts & Culture

    No ordinary band

    The Harvard Summer Pops Band celebrated its 40th anniversary with a performance in Sanders Theatre on July 26. They will perform at 3 p.m. July 29 at Boston’s Hatch Shell.

  • Campus & Community

    Feeding culinary curiosity

    A summer program aims to teach local schoolchildren that the kitchen and the laboratory — both intimidating places to newcomers — are a great place to explore their natural curiosity, and to learn lifelong healthy habits, too.

  • Science & Tech

    Mystery of Native Americans’ arrival

    Research led by scientists at Harvard and University College London has shown that Native Americans arrived in three waves of migration, not one, as is commonly held and that at least one group returned home to Asia.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • Health

    Mushroom relations

    Harvard researchers are using one of the most comprehensive fungal “family trees” ever created to unlock evolutionary secrets.

  • 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.