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Campus & Community
Sackler Museum, Gutman Library ‘Step Into Art’ with children
“Look at that blue! Look at it! Isn’t it pretty?” exclaims Adriana, a sixth-grader from Mother Caroline Academy in Dorchester. Four of Adriana’s peers rush to see the plastic paint tray she’s pointing at. They’re eager to share in Adriana’s excitement: after all, she’s just discovered a new shade of blue. This color, a luminous…
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Campus & Community
HKS students will help out city of Boston
When the mayor of Somerville needed help with his city’s fiscal crisis in 2004, he looked to Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) for assistance. Four years later, in today’s uncertain economic climate, the city of Boston is turning to the institution for aid.
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Science & Tech
Shai Agassi dreams of a gas-free future
Electric cars with zero emissions. Powered by renewable energy. All over the world. That is Shai Agassi’s dream. The 40-year-old Israeli entrepreneur left a lucrative corporate software track last year to found Better Place, a transportation company based on sustainability and independence from oil.
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Science & Tech
Lovins: Protecting the environment is ‘a highly profitable enterprise’
As U.S. automakers plead for a government bailout, the next great automotive revolution is already under way, as Japanese automakers plan for a generation of lightweight cars that vastly increase mileage and whose advanced materials pay for themselves through dramatically streamlined assembly and smaller engines, an energy expert said Wednesday (Dec. 3).
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Nation & World
HLS students effect real change in law, policy clinic
In October 2007, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment made the unprecedented decision to deny a permit application for three new coal-fired generating units that together would emit 11 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, citing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change as the reason for the denial.
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Health
Researchers replicate ALS process in lab dish
A Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) research team has succeeded in deriving spinal motor neurons from human embryonic stem cells, and has then used them to replicate the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) disease process in a laboratory dish.
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Health
Researchers successfully track voyage of single stem cell
The title of the letter in the Dec. 3 edition of the journal Nature — “Live-animal tracking of individual haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells in their niche” — doesn’t begin to describe it, this real-life, real-time view of a single stem cell making its way to its ultimate home inside the bone-marrow cavity of a living mouse.
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Health
Dybul urges partnering with governments, communities to fight AIDS
In honor of World AIDS Day (Dec. 1), Ambassador Mark Dybul, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator who is leading the implementation of the $48 billion President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), spoke Dec. 4 in Sever Hall.
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Health
Rights, AIDS, past and future
Sixty years after the United Nations declared health care a basic human right, the AIDS epidemic highlights how much work remains to be done as the disease rages on among populations with little access to quality care.
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Health
Research may lead to treatment for retinitis pigmentosa
Rods and cones coexist peacefully in healthy retinas. Both types of cells occupy the same layer of tissue and send signals when they detect light, which is the first step in vision.
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Science & Tech
Of Neanderthals and dairy farmers
Harvard Archaeology Professor Noreen Tuross sought to rehabilitate the image of Neanderthals as meat-eating brutes last week, presenting evidence that, though they almost certainly ate red meat, Neanderthal diets also consisted of other foods — like escargot.
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Campus & Community
‘Form follows function’
Officially complete this month, Harvard’s ambitious new Northwest Science Building — located just north of the Harvard Museum of Natural History — houses some 520,000 square feet of laboratories, classrooms, and offices.
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Arts & Culture
Class, war, and discrimination in 1812 Korea
Sun Joo Kim’s laugh is as easy as it is infectious. Her cheery nature no doubt comes in handy when she’s conducting her intensive research in three complex languages.
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Campus & Community
Zimbabwean student is Harvard’s 4th Rhodes Scholar
A Harvard College senior from Zimbabwe has become the fourth Harvard student to be named a Rhodes Scholar this year, accepting the prestigious award to study at Britain’s Oxford University.
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Campus & Community
A half-century of life at Harvard
Simon: What drew you to Harvard as a young graduate student in the early 1950s?
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Campus & Community
Celebrating the life and career of Stanley Hoffmann
One could measure Stanley Hoffmann’s achievements in book publications (more than 18), academic titles (University Professor, chair, co-founder of the Center for European Studies) or honors (Commandeur in the French Legion of Honor, to name one). But the broad smiles and teary eyes at the Center for European Studies last Friday (Dec. 5) indicated the…
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Nation & World
Panel looks at ‘the crime of all crimes’
On Dec. 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted a convention that for the first time in history provided a legal definition for genocide. Organized mass murder with the intention of destroying an ethnic or national group, a legacy of World War II, was still a fresh world memory — just as it is fresh today,…
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Nation & World
‘Is Afghanistan Lost?’
At a panel discussion Monday at the Harvard Kennedy School, Maleeha Lodhi evoked Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat to describe the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
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Campus & Community
Hailing an unfulfilled promise
Harvard marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Wednesday (Dec. 10), highlighting both the document’s power and its unfulfilled promise through theater, song, and ideas.
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Health
Hormone therapy for prostate cancer does not appear to increase cardiac deaths
Treating prostate cancer patients with drugs that block hormonal activity does not appear to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, according to a study led by Harvard Medical…
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Campus & Community
Task Force Releases Report on the Arts
A concerted effort should be made to put the arts at Harvard University on par with the study of the humanities and sciences, according to a report released today (Dec. 10) by a University-wide task force that examined the role the arts play in campus life.
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Health
Connie Cepko
In some ways, Connie Cepko’s job has gotten easier. The Harvard Medical School genetics professor is working to uncover the mysteries of the eye, to understand how it develops and…
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Health
Fresh insight into retinitis pigmentosa
Rods and cones coexist peacefully in healthy retinas. Both types of cells occupy the same layer of tissue and send signals when they detect light, which is the first step…
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Science & Tech
Having happy friends can make you happy
If you’re happy and you know it, thank your friends — and their friends. And while you’re at it, their friends’ friends. But if you’re sad, hold the blame. Researchers…
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Health
Some blood-system stem cells reproduce more slowly than expected
A research collaboration lead by Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found a subpopulation of hematopoietic stem cells, which generate all blood and immune system…
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Science & Tech
Thinking globally and mapping locally
Akiyuki Kawasaki thinks globally and maps locally. To do that, the Japanese researcher, who is spending the academic year as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied…
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Health
Another step forward in ALS and stem cell research
A Harvard Stem Cell Institute research team has succeeded in deriving spinal motor neurons from human embryonic stem cells, and has then used them to replicate the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) disease process in a laboratory dish.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Dec. 29, 1627 — John Harvard enters Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, England.
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Arts & Culture
‘The health of poetry’
As a graduate student at Oxford, Gwyneth Lewis wrote her dissertation on 18th century literary forgery. But as a working poet for three decades — and this year as a Radcliffe Fellow — she is as far from that fraud as conceivable.
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Arts & Culture
Patricia Cornwell endows conservationist at Straus Center
Harvard Art Museum announced the establishment of the Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist position at the museum’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Funded by a $1 million commitment from best-selling author Patricia Cornwell, the Cornwell Conservation Scientist will play a key role in the analytical laboratory and beyond.