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  • Health

    Brain pollution: Common chemicals are damaging young minds

    Learning disabilities. Cerebral palsy. Mental retardation. A “silent pandemic” of these and other neurodevelopmental disorders is under way owing to industrial chemicals in the environment that impair brain development in fetuses and young children. That’s the conclusion of a data analysis by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Mount Sinai…

  • Health

    Mystery muscles make mightier mice

    Scientists have muscled in on a genetic switch that allows mice to run longer and faster. Humans possess the same switch, so the discovery might open new paths to treating muscle-wasting diseases and building better bodies.

  • Health

    World’s largest flower evolved from family of much tinier blooms

    The plant with the world’s largest flower – typically a full meter across, with a bud the size of a basketball – evolved from a family of plants whose blossoms are nearly all tiny, botanists write this week in the journal Science. Their genetic analysis of rafflesia reveals that it is closely related to a…

  • Campus & Community

    Sengupta wins $4.1 million ‘Era of Hope’ award for breast cancer advances

    An assistant professor of medicine at Harvard has won a $4.1 million “Era of Hope” scholar award from the U.S. Defense Department’s Breast Cancer Research Program in support of his cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research aimed at fighting breast and other types of cancer.

  • Science & Tech

    New York artist expresses long passion

    They are odds and ends of lives long past, lived in the cold and ice of the world’s polar regions. They are bits and pieces that give a feeling as…

  • Campus & Community

    Stiller, Johansson named Hasty Pudding’s Man and Woman of Year

    The Hasty Pudding Theatricals of Harvard University has announced that Ben Stiller and Scarlett Johansson are the recipients of the 2007 Man and Woman of the Year awards.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard creates new, University-wide committee to guide interdisciplinary efforts in science

    The Harvard Corporation has authorized the establishment of a new, University-wide standing committee on science and engineering to guide the University into a new era of collaborative, cross-disciplinary science initiatives. The Corporation also created a $50 million fund to provide initial support for the committee’s work, pending the submission of a budget by the committee.

  • Campus & Community

    Permanent location for HUAM in Allston selected

    Harvard University and its Art Museums have selected a site in Allston that will become a permanent additional location for a portion of the Harvard University Art Museums’ operations and staff, and will include public galleries primarily for the display of modern and contemporary art.

  • Campus & Community

    Ukrainian map collection arrives at Harvard

    The collection includes numerous early maps of Europe, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, the Crimea, and the Black Sea, and represents the major European mapmakers: Mercator, Hondius, Blaeu, Jansson, Pitt, DeWit, Sanson, L’Isle, and Seutter.

  • Campus & Community

    Boston filmmakers Steffen and Christian Pierce will be at HFA

    Boston filmmaking brothers Steffen and Christian Pierce will screen their second and latest movie, “Marrakech Inshallah,” at 7 p.m. Saturday (Dec. 16) at the Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., and answer questions afterward. ($8 general public, $6 students and senior citizens.)

  • Campus & Community

    Shapiro, Fisher receive peacemaker award

    For several years, the Southern California Mediation Association (SCMA) has presented its annual Peacemaker of the Year award to a member of the dispute resolution community for the member’s passion and dedication to peacemaking in his or her profession and daily life. In 2004, it was the vision of the association’s incoming president, Jeff Kichaven,…

  • Campus & Community

    Roundtable considers what Islamic studies program should look like

    You might think Harvard University has already mastered Islamic studies. It has offered courses in Arabic and in the history of the Ottoman Empire since the 19th century. Its endowed chair in Arabic has been in place for nearly 100 years.

  • Campus & Community

    Georgia leader hails progress, new steps that curb corruption, restore faith

    The three years since the Rose Revolution peacefully overthrew the government of Georgia have seen dramatic change and reform in the fledgling democracy, its current prime minister said Friday (Dec. 8).

  • Campus & Community

    Ukrainian map collection arrives at Harvard

    The late Bohdan Krawciw (1904-1975) was a Ukrainian-born poet, journalist, literary critic, translator, and nationalist, and an avid collector of maps depicting his homeland. As a map collector, Krawciw acquired items that included the region in even the smallest way, so that he eventually built a collection containing more than 900 maps, books, research files,…

  • Campus & Community

    Constitutional law scholar to join HLS

    Constitutional law scholar and well-known author Noah Feldman, currently a tenured professor of law at New York University, has accepted an offer to join the Harvard Law faculty beginning next fall. Feldman is a leading expert in many aspects of constitutional law, particularly law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory.

  • Campus & Community

    Flu vaccines offered through early Jan.

    Free flu vaccinations will be available Dec. 18 and 19 and Jan. 8 and 9 from noon to 3 p.m. at the Harvard University Health Services’ Monks Library on the second floor of Holyoke Center. Flu vaccinations are available to children by contacting Pediatric Services for an appointment at (617) 495-4171. Additional information about the…

  • Campus & Community

    Senior Hemel is named Marshall Scholar, 2007

    Lowell House senior, social studies concentrator, and Harvard Crimson managing editor Daniel J. Hemel has been named a 2007 Marshall Scholar and plans to spend the next two academic years studying at Oxford University.

  • Campus & Community

    PBHA volunteers play bingo with their elders

    Marcia Gray, 67, lives at Vernon Hall, a nursing home on Dana Street, five minutes by foot from Harvard Yard. She has been there two years. In her room, Gray said, she has a television with no picture, and a radio with no lights, “but it still gives good music.”

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Sensory Ethnography’

    From the mountainous terrain of Nepal to a riverside in Manchuria to a tiny truck-stop town in Nebraska, Harvard University graduate students have spent the past year recording indigenous and emerging cultures around the world, and producing compelling works of art that push the study of anthropology beyond the written report.

  • Campus & Community

    HBS professor, member of Accounting Hall of Fame Robert Anthony dies

    Robert N. Anthony, member of the Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty for more than 40 years, renowned and prolific scholar, author and innovator in the field of management accounting and control, and public servant at the U.S. Department of Defense and other government agencies, died on Dec. 1 at the Kendal Retirement Community in Hanover,…

  • Campus & Community

    David Rockefeller visits Harvard’s new office in Brazil

    David Rockefeller visited the new Brazil Office of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) in São Paulo. The staff, directed by Jason Dyett and including Tomás Amorim, Marina de Moura, and interns Bruno Yoshimura and Allan Panossian, presented an overview of the activities and objectives of the new office, which was inaugurated…

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Teacher Man’ talks about ‘writer man’

    Frank McCourt, the schoolteacher-turned-memoirist, appeared at the Gutman Conference Center Tuesday evening (Dec. 12) to share the tale of how his New York City students goaded him into turning his “miserable childhood” in Ireland into the stuff of best sellers.

  • Campus & Community

    Former VP calls for change in thinking

    There’s money to be made in responding to rising global temperatures, former Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore told an auditorium packed with future business leaders Monday (Dec. 11) at Harvard Business School (HBS).

  • Campus & Community

    GSD team designs ‘City of the Future’ in History Channel competition

    Nine students in the master in design studies program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and a master of architecture student were selected to construct a model of their concept of Los Angeles 100 years from now for the national competition “A 22nd Century City of the Future,” sponsored by the History Channel.…

  • Campus & Community

    Glauber Lectureship begun at Kennedy School

    Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has established the Robert Glauber Endowed Lectureship. The lectureship will honor the transformative leadership of Robert Glauber ’61, D.B.A. ’65, retiring chairman and CEO of NASD and a longtime affiliate of the Kennedy School. The lecture fund was created by a gift from NASD and announced in New York on…

  • Campus & Community

    TCH to serve up 17th season, early sign-up available

    The Tennis Camps at Harvard (TCH) will host its 17th consecutive summer of fun and instruction for players of all ages and abilities beginning June 11. Co-directed by Harvard’s men’s and women’s head coaches David Fish and Gordon Graham, TCH offers programs for children 4-17 years old, as well as clinics, leagues, and lessons for…

  • Campus & Community

    Tillim wins first Gardner Fellowship

    As a young photojournalist in South Africa in the 1980s, Guy Tillim found that photography could be a way of bridging the racial gap that apartheid had imposed on his society.

  • Campus & Community

    In brief

    ‘Tis still the season: Community Gifts accepting pledge cards Though maybe not exactly a Christmas miracle, Harvard’s annual Community Gifts campaign has extended its deadline for pledge cards through Dec.…

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Joyful Noise,’ Harlem Gospel Choir to honor Kings

    In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Joyful Noise – the annual gospel concert honoring the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center (CMAC) will present the Harlem Gospel Choir at Sanders Theatre on Jan. 13.

  • Campus & Community

    Kellerman honored with KSG’s Burns Lectureship

    Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has announced the establishment of the James MacGregor Burns Lectureship in Public Leadership to honor the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and political scientist. Barbara Kellerman, former executive director and former research director at the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, will be the first to hold the chair.