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Campus & Community
Librarian Finds Treasure in the Stacks
A librarians mundane afternoon in the Widener Library stacks and a subsequent sleepless night have thrust Harvard into the limelight throughout the Spanish-speaking literary world.
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Campus & Community
Dede To Join GSE Faculty
Chris Dede, an expert in technology and education, will join the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a full professor in August 2000.
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Campus & Community
Presidential Debates Get Attention, Not Enthusiasm
The recent rash of presidential primary debates has spawned news coverage that has caught the publics attention, but the debates have failed to generate deep voter interest or excitement, according to recent polls by the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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Campus & Community
Determining Your Risk for Cancer
The first Web site in the country where you can get a personalized estimate of your risk for various cancers, together with advice on how to lower that risk, is now available to everyone for free.
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Campus & Community
Healthy Lifestyles, Regular Screenings Would Cut U.S. Colon Cancer Morbidity in Half
The bad news: colon cancer is a killer. The disease is responsible for approximately 48,000 deaths in the United States each year, making it the second leading cause of cancer death in the country.
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Campus & Community
Young Scholars Find Challenges, Acceptance at Extension School
Extension School students David Colt and Amos Lichtman strolled into Sever Hall on their way to their College Algebra class. A little early, they plunked themselves down on the wooden benches in the hallway to compare their answers to the homework assignment. Wearing jeans, running shoes, and T-shirts, they were dressed like most other Extension…
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Campus & Community
2000-01 Fellowships at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs has announced the following opportunities for fellowships during the 2000-01 academic year: Graduate Student Associate Positions The Graduate Student Associate Program provides a supportive and stimulating environment in which promising Harvard graduate students can interact with each other, with faculty, and with fellows of the Center as they complete…
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Campus & Community
Phillips Brooks House To Celebrate Centennial
The Phillips Brooks House Association Inc. (PBHA), the oldest and largest volunteer public service organization at Harvard College, is rededicating its home, the historic Phillips Brooks House, on the centennial of its original dedication, Sunday, Jan. 23, 2000. The event begins at 4 p.m. At 4:30, Peter Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and…
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Science & Tech
New detector may open new window on the universe
A new receiver is capable of detecting and amplifying very-high- frequency signals with very fine frequency resolution, so it can detect the spectral lines, or chemical fingerprints, of interstellar molecules that emit radio signals at terahertz frequencies — the highest frequencies ever achieved with any radio receiver. The unique detector of astronomical radiation, developed at…
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Science & Tech
Chandra finds “cool” black hole at heart of Andromeda Galaxy
A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., reported that the gas funneling into a supermassive black hole in the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, designated as “M31,” is a “cool” million degrees Celsius. This unexpected result adds one more quirk to the strange behavior previously observed at the center…
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Science & Tech
Betelgeuse’s chromosphere beats like a human heart
For many years astronomers have known that the atmospheres of pulsating stars either expand or contract over time, but they have long puzzled over the question: “What physical mechanism drives these amazing dynamics?” Alex Lobel and Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge and Ronald Gilliland of the Space Telescope Institute…
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Science & Tech
Streamers of gas feed beast at center of our galaxy
Astronomers have long known that a supermassive black hole, more than 2 million times more massive than our Sun, lies at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy some 27,000 light-years from Earth. A point-like source of radio emission called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) marks the location of this black hole. Now researchers Robin S.…
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Science & Tech
Little giants create a big cosmic controversy
A new measuring technique used to determine the distances to a class of stars called “Red Clumps” in the Large Magellanic Cloud produced a much smaller distance than that found by other popular methods of measurement. The smaller distance means that the universe may be expanding faster than previously thought — a finding which has…
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Campus & Community
Harvard track defeats Northeastern Huskies
The Harvard men’s and women’s track teams both defeated their Northeastern counterparts at the Gordon Track and Tennis Center Saturday. The women, led by Captain Brenda Taylor with wins in the 60 meter hurdles and 200 meters, beat the Huskies 95-30. Nicky Grant ’02 broke her own school record in the 20-pound weight toss and…
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Science & Tech
Researcher Sunney Xie interested in molecule as an individual
Sunney Xie is one of the world’s leading researchers in molecular imaging and in single-molecule reactions. Xie’s has devised a way to use laser beams to see collections of protein molecules. The new imaging method is important because it allows researchers to see how biomolecules are assembled in biological membranes and how their relative position…
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Health
‘Take two aspirin and call me manana’
Harvard Medical School is attempting to bridge the language barriers that sometimes arise in medical settings. A set of three medical phrasebooks was first offered in 1999 in three different languages: Communicating with the Patient during Urgent Care, Communicating with the Patient on Work Rounds, and Communicating with the Patient during Review of Systems. All…
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Science & Tech
State-of-the-art health guide created
Harvard Medical School believes it has a cure for problems associated with finding accurate, up-to-date medical information: a comprehensive (1,288 pages), $40 medical guide tied to a Web site that will update the book weekly. Published by Simon and Schuster in October 1999, it’s the first family health guide that will never go out of…
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Science & Tech
Light weapons are most common in today’s small wars
In the 1990s, approximately 4 million soldiers and civilians were killed by small arms in the internecine conflicts of the developing world. More people, in other words, were killed in that decade in war by small arms than by major weapon systems, according to a Harvard research report. Likewise, millions have been wounded, displaced from…
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Science & Tech
Study finds biotech workers ‘thrive’ on instability
Marked by job insecurity, dependence on changing technology, and uncertain financing, the biotechnology industry is viewed by researchers as one of the best examples of the workplace of the future. A study by the Radcliffe Public Policy Center (RPPC) released in December 1999 found that biotech workers were actually thriving in this highly unstable environment.…
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Science & Tech
Industrial disasters sparked field of environmental health
Two large, unnatural disasters helped to create the impetus for the field of environmental health to grow in scope. But before there was a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and before the National Institutes of Health (NIH) included environmental health, there was the Kresge Center for Environmental Health at Harvard’s School of Public Health. Beginning in…
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Science & Tech
Black silicon: A new way to trap light
Eric Mazur, Harvard College Professor and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, and his students were studying what kinds of new chemistry can occur when lasers shine on metals, like platinum. One day, they decided to put a chip of gray silicon into a vacuum chamber, add some halogen gas, and scan it with ultrashort,…
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Science & Tech
New electronic tools reveal forgotten China
German-born photographer Hedda Hammer Morrison (1908-1991) could often be seen bicycling through Peking with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck, capturing her times through her lens as both participant and observer. A simple way of life was rapidly changing in the 1930s and ’40s behind the walls of China’s Forbidden City. Morrison’s photographs of Peking…
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Science & Tech
21 moons ‘swarm’ planet Uranus
In 1999 three new moons were discovered orbiting Uranus, a great gasball of a planet about 2 billion miles from Earth. The discovery raised the number of Uranian moons to 21, the most, as far as is known, in the skies of any planet. Researchers believe the moons were “captured” billions of years ago. “We…
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Science & Tech
‘Ultracold’ trap unveils secrets of matter in the universe
Physics Professor John Doyle traps the tiny particles that make up the universe and then studies them, looking for what they can tell him about the most basic rules of nature. Specifically, Doyle is looking for evidence of discrepancies in the theory known as the Standard Model, the major theory of how the basic particles…
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Science & Tech
Exploring big and small possibilities of the information revolution
” ‘System-on-a-chip’ is the new buzzword today,” said Professor Woodward Yang in 1999. “It’s really not that far away.” As Yang sees it, the computer revolution is really just beginning. Systems are poised to become smaller, more portable, and found everywhere from traditional desktops to cell phones and pagers. Yang in 1999 said researchers are…
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Science & Tech
What killed the dinosaurs?
Charles Marshall’s childhood passion led him to a career in paleontology, trying to understand the interplay between inheritance, environment, and catastrophe in directing evolution. Marshall’s work attracted media attention in 1996. He and University of Washington geologist Peter Ward concluded there may have been other causes than just the well-publicized comet or asteroid impact responsible…
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Science & Tech
Archaeology team helps find oldest deep-sea shipwrecks
About 2,700 years ago, two Phoenician ships sank to the Mediterranean’s muddy bottom, where they lay upright, preserved in the relative stillness and tremendous pressure of the deep, dark waters. They were found 1,000 feet down in June 1999 by a team made up of Harvard archaeologists led by Lawrence Stager, Dorot Professor of the…
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Health
Jolie-Pitt Foundation Donates $2 Million to Global Health Committee to Fight HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis in Ethiopia
The Global Health Committee (GHC) has announced it will receive $2 million dollars from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to bring life-saving medicines to Ethiopians suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The money will be used to create a center for AIDS and tuberculosis-affected children in the capital city of Addis Ababa, and to help establish a program…
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Science & Tech
El Nino found to be 124,000 years old
Records preserved in corals from Indonesia reveal that El Niño was causing severe weather even before the last ice age began, when the climate apparently was like it was for most of the 20th century. “No question about it; there were El Niños that long ago,” says Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences.…