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  • Health

    Learning how the SARS virus spikes its quarry

    Structural images that show how the SARS virus’s spike protein grasps its receptor may help scientists learn new details about how the virus infects cells and could also help in…

  • Science & Tech

    How to build a big star

    The most massive stars in our galaxy weigh as much as 100 small stars like the Sun. How do such monsters form? Do they grow rapidly by swallowing smaller protostars…

  • Science & Tech

    Fastest pulsar speeding out of galaxy

    A speeding, superdense neutron star somehow got a powerful “kick” that is propelling it completely out of our Milky Way Galaxy into the cold vastness of intergalactic space. Its discovery…

  • Campus & Community

    McCrossan appointed dean for administration at HLS

    Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan has appointed Francis X. McCrossan to serve as dean for administration, the Schools chief administrative and financial officer. McCrossan, who began work on Aug. 1, will oversee a range of administrative departments including Information Technology Services, Human Resource Services, Facilities Management, Financial Services, Administrative Publications, Major Capital Projects, and…

  • Campus & Community

    Gates Foundation awards two Harvard investigators $26 million

    Harvard investigators researching a needle-free tuberculosis vaccine and new ways to gather public health information in developing countries received major boosts from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the form of $26 million in two separate grants.

  • Campus & Community

    Urine test tracks deadly birthmarks

    A simple urine test holds promise for detecting both life-threatening birthmarks and the presence of cancer. Out-of-control growth of both is tied to proteins that reveal themselves in urine.

  • Campus & Community

    Corporation Search Committee invites nominations and advice

    Members of the Harvard community are invited to offer nominations and advice regarding the search for a new member of the Harvard Corporation, the Universitys executive governing board.

  • Campus & Community

    Food and fun fill Tercentenary Theatre

    The sun was out and the weather was in the 90s, but that didnt prevent guests at Harvards 30th annual Senior Picnic from enjoying themselves. In addition to lunch, music, and dancing, the event featured speeches by local politicians and civic leaders as well as a rousing performance of patriotic songs by the Cambridge Senior…

  • Campus & Community

    Robot rolls around Children’s Hospital

    Gizmo has been working at Childrens Hospital Boston for almost three years without a vacation or even a coffee break. She underwent a major brain transplant a few weeks ago, but she never calls in sick and is never late. Busy nurses, harried administrators, excited young patients all love the 4 1/2-foot-tall, 600-pound bilingual robot…

  • Campus & Community

    Crimson Summer Academy students get a taste of doctor’s life

    The chorus of eeews when the microsurgery port punched its way into the patients abdomen quickly gave way to an awed silence as the surgical tools passed through the port and began their work.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard, MGH researchers track egg cell production to marrow

    Harvard researchers have found new evidence that female mammals can produce egg cells throughout life and have traced their production out of the ovary and into the bone marrow in findings that could both reshape sciences understanding of female reproduction and provide new avenues for treatment of infertility.

  • Campus & Community

    Newsmakers

    Dormandy to direct research at Belfer Center The U.S. National Security Council’s Xenia Dormandy will join the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as executive…

  • Campus & Community

    Police reports

    Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department for the week beginning Aug. 18 and ending Aug. 21. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

  • Campus & Community

    Willett wins Bristol-Myers/Mead Johnson award

    Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition Walter C. Willett was named winner of the 25th annual Bristol-Myers Squibb/Mead Johnson Freedom to Discover Award for Distinguished Achievement in Nutrition Research earlier this month. An independent panel selected Willett, who is also the chairman of the Department of Nutrition in the Faculty of Public Health,…

  • Campus & Community

    Sports in brief

    HMS student takes bronze at World University Games Third-year Harvard Medical School (HMS) graduate student Elizabeth Shakhnovich captured a bronze medal for the U.S. Taekwondo Team this month at the…

  • Campus & Community

    Japan scholar Shiveley dies

    Donald Howard Shively, an authority on Japanese urban life and popular culture in the Tokugawa period and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, where he also served as director of the Japan Institute (now the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies), died on Aug. 13 in a nursing facility near…

  • Campus & Community

    Ruggie named UN special representative on human rights

    Evron and Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs John Ruggie was appointed as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annans special representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises this past month. Ruggie served as UN assistant secretary-general and adviser to Annan on strategic planning from 1997 to 2001.

  • Campus & Community

    Summer in the city: Local teens work at PBHA-run camps

    Each summer, more than 850 economically disadvantaged children from Boston and Cambridge have a fun, safe, enriching experience at the 12 summer camps run by the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA).

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard students awarded FTE fellowships

    Three Harvard students recently joined 167 scholars nationwide to receive fellowships through the Fund for Theological Education (FTE). FTE fellowships provide financial assistance and support to talented students from diverse backgrounds that demonstrate the professional and personal skills needed to be effective pastors, scholars, and educators. These fellowships are divided into four categories (congregational, doctoral,…

  • Campus & Community

    Fogg Art Museum gathers ‘A New Kind of Historical Evidence’

    Ever since its invention more than a century and a half ago, photography has proved difficult to classify. Does it deserve to be grouped with the traditional arts of painting and sculpture, or is it simply a technique for recording visual facts?

  • Campus & Community

    Crimson Summer Academy gives Boston, Cambridge youth a taste of college

    Its dinnertime in Annenberg Hall, and Celia Arias-Piña is enjoying a time-honored ritual of college life: She tucks into a heaping bowl of brightly colored sugary cereal, leaving the chicken and broccoli on her plate untouched.

  • Campus & Community

    Undergraduates spend summer creating living machines

    Come September, Sasha Rush, a Harvard junior, can tell his friends he spent his summer in a Harvard bio lab, breeding bacteria, manipulating them, and working with other undergraduates to create a biological machine that can transmit a signal from one point to another.

  • Campus & Community

    Fryer brings mathematical economics to stubborn racial issues

    Roland G. Fryer Jr. is a brave man. An economist and self-described math geek, Fryer plunges fearlessly into the roiling waters of racial inequality, often surfacing with findings that contradict…

  • Campus & Community

    Getting to fear you

    Researchers showed some 20 young black and white women and men pictures of a snake and a spider, followed by pictures of a bird and a butterfly. Humans, apes, and…

  • Campus & Community

    A new look at anemia

    Leonard Zon and his colleagues at the Harvard Medical School were trying to find out how hemoglobin forms by studying zebrafish, small piscians whose transparent bodies allow their inner workings…

  • Science & Tech

    Genome scanning technique spots disease risk

    A new technique, admixture mapping, takes advantage of the higher-risk genetic segments from one population that show up in the other through generations of racial mixing. The presence of higher-risk…

  • Campus & Community

    Adult cells transformed into stem cells

    Harvard researchers fused adult skin cells with embryonic stem cells in such a way that the genes of the embryonic cells reset the genetic clock of the adult cells, turning…

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard University reaches settlement agreement with USAID

    Harvard University has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to pay $26.5 million to settle a $120 million civil lawsuit arising out of a project awarded to the former Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID).

  • Campus & Community

    Harper concludes service on Harvard Corporation

    Conrad K. Harper has decided to conclude his service on the Harvard Corporation, the University announced today.

  • Health

    Critical step traced in anthrax infection

    An anthrax bacterium secretes three nontoxic proteins that assemble into a toxic complex on the surface of the host cell to set off a chain of events leading to cell…