Science & Tech
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Lifting a few with my chatbot
Sociologist Sherry Turkle warns against growing trend of turning to AI for companionship, counsel
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Hate mosquitoes? Who doesn’t? But maybe we shouldn’t.
Entomologist says there is much scientists don’t know about habitats, habits, impacts on their environments
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‘Harvard Thinking’: Climate alignment is no easy task
Experts at the Salata Institute outline tensions between global and local priorities
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A playbook for policy change
Leah Stokes turns a love for the wilderness into a commitment to help mitigate climate change
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Under pressure
New tool for precise measurement of superconductors
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Glimpse into how mind may affect healing
Study finds bruising fades faster in patients who are led to believe more time has passed than actually has
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Innovating an innovation
HubWeek fall festival takes place Oct. 1‒3 in Boston’s Seaport District.
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Ending ‘dead zones’
Harvard scientists are teaming up with sustainability officers and landscaping experts to test a new fertilizer that won’t wash into water supplies.
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Up close and personal with neuronal networks
Researchers from Harvard University have developed an electronic chip that can perform high-sensitivity intracellular recording from thousands of connected neurons simultaneously, allowing them to identify hundreds of synaptic connections.
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The future of mind control
A new paper explores why neuron-like implants could offer a better way to treat brain disorders, control prosthetics, or even enhance cognitive abilities.
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Solve ocean’s troubles and climate change too?
Experts from Harvard and beyond gathered Monday to discuss the oceans’ plight in a warming world, offering hopeful solutions despite the often bleak assessment prompted by warming, pollution, acidification, and coral bleaching.
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Break it up
Researchers at Harvard and Cornell have discovered exactly how a reactive copper-nitrene catalyst could transform a strong carbon-hydrogen bonds into a carbon-nitrogen bond, a valuable building block for chemical synthesis.
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A shot in the arm for vaccine research
Immunology research at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard has advanced an HIV vaccine into the clinic, and will diversify thanks to a major gift from Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon.
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A precise chemical fingerprint of the Amazon
A group of researchers are using a drone-based chemical monitoring system to track the health of the Amazon in the face of global climate change and human-caused deforestation and burning.
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Playing our song
Samuel Mehr has long been interested in questions of what music is, how music works, and why music exists. To help find the answers, he’s created the Music Lab, an online, citizen-science project aimed at understanding not just how the human mind interprets music, but why music is a virtually ubiquitous feature of human societies.
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A silly-sounding prize for some serious science
Harvard-trained researchers win Golden Goose Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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An umbrella to combat warming
Harvard’s Keutsch Research Group is working on a controversial idea that might someday be our best hope against climate change: stratospheric aerosol injection.
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Life on the ice
Harvard researchers describe life in the South Pole.
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A ‘Goldilocks zone’ for planet size
Researchers have redefined the lower size limit for planets to maintain surface liquid water for long periods of time, extending the so-called habitable zone for small, low-gravity planets.
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A SWIFTer way to build organs
A new technique called SWIFT (sacrificial writing into functional tissue) ultimately may be used therapeutically to repair and replace human organs with lab-grown versions containing patients’ own cells.
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Lessons in learning
Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think
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Hunters, herders, companions: Breeding dogs has reordered their brains
Erin Hecht, who joined the faculty in January, has published her first paper on our canine comrades in the Journal of Neuroscience, finding that different breeds have different brain organizations owing to human cultivation of specific traits.
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Fighting flora with fauna
Scientists at the Arnold Arboretum are employing a species of predator moth to fight the invasive swallow-wort vine.
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Pancreas on a chip
Islet-on-a-chip technology allows clinicians to easily determine the therapeutic value of beta cells for any given patient.
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A gentle grip on gelatinous creatures
To study jellyfish and other fragile marine life without damaging them, researchers developed ultra-soft underwater grippers that catch and release jellyfish without harm.
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Exposing how pancreatic cancer does its dirty work
New research has found that pancreatic cancer actively destroys nearby blood vessels and replaces them with cancerous cells, blocking chemotherapy from reaching tumors. This insight could lead to new treatments that act by preventing cancer’s colonization of blood vessels.
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How a zebrafish model may hold a key to biology
Martin Haesemeyer set out to build an artificial neural network that worked differently than fish’s brains, but what he got was a system that almost perfectly mimicked the zebrafish — and that could be a powerful tool for understanding biology.
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Want to avoid climate-related disasters? Try moving
For decades, the response to flooding and hurricanes was a vow to rebuild. A.R. Siders believes the time has come to consider managed retreat, or the practice of moving communities away from disaster-prone areas to safer lands.
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Clever crows
A new paper, co-authored by Dakota McCoy, a graduate student working in the lab of George Putnam Professor of Biology David Haig, suggests that, after using tools, crows were more optimistic.
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Prospects clouded for finding life on the largest class of planets
Led by Laura Kreidberg, a Clay Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a new study shows that LHS 3844b, a terrestrial exoplanet orbiting a small sun 48.6 light-years away, has no detectable atmosphere
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How the moon came to be
A fourth-year graduate student in the lab of Professor of Geochemistry Stein Jacobsen, Yaray Ku is working on a project aimed at understanding how the moon formed, and to do it, she’s working with actual lunar samples.
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Astronomy Lab sees the light — and wants everyone else to, too
Accessibility devices at the lab use sound to allow the visually impaired to envision the stars
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Uncovering how cells become organs
Tiny sensors are embedded into stretchable, integrated mesh that grows with the developing tissue, allowing scientists to track how cells grow into organs.
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A red oak live tweets climate change
Tree in Harvard Forest outfitted with sensors, cameras, and other digital equipment sends out on-the-ground coverage.
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Predicting the strength of earthquakes
Scientists will be able to predict earthquake magnitudes earlier thanks to new research by Marine Denolle, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard.
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Mercury levels in fish are on the rise
A new study concludes that while the regulation of mercury emissions have successfully reduced methylmercury levels in fish, spiking temperatures are driving those levels back up and will play a major role in the methylmercury levels of marine life in the future.