Science & Tech

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.

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.

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

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.

Accessibility devices at the lab use sound to allow the visually impaired to envision the stars

Tiny sensors are embedded into stretchable, integrated mesh that grows with the developing tissue, allowing scientists to track how cells grow into organs.

Tree in Harvard Forest outfitted with sensors, cameras, and other digital equipment sends out on-the-ground coverage.

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.

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.

Mansi Srivastava’s lab worked with middle school teachers in an education workshop on DNA and evolution.

Led by Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Roger Fu, a team of researchers has shown that the makers of ancient Mesoamerican statues found in Guatemala intentionally carved the figures to place the magnetic areas over the navel or right temple — suggesting not only that they were familiar with the concept of magnetism, but had some way of detecting the magnetic anomalies.

A researcher is reviving the study of bioelectricity to learn how cells communicate with each other to form tissues and organs, and how harnessing those signals could one day lead to truly regenerative medicine, in which amputees could simply regrow limbs.

Researchers at the SEAS and IBM Research developed a better way to help people detect AI-generated text.

To speeding up wound healing, researchers have developed active adhesive dressings based on heat-responsive hydrogels that are mechanically active, stretchy, tough, highly adhesive, and antimicrobial.

Understanding how DNA and proteins interact — or fail to — could help answer fundamental biological questions about human health and disease.

Researchers from Harvard University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and the University of Edinburgh suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material — silica aerogel — that would mimic Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse effect.

A trio of Harvard astronomers reflect on the impact of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, then and now.

New study debunks long-held theory that dolphins had ridged skin, which helped them swim faster.

Researchers have discovered why the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific appeared to warm twice as much as the global average, while the Northwest Pacific cooled over several decades.

Harvard astronomer Laura Kreidberg studies the atmospheres of extrasolar planets to search for signs of life.

New research from an interdisciplinary team of researchers shows an early plague pandemic reached post-Roman Britain and had unexpected genetic diversity.

Dakota McCoy, in collaboration with David Haig, led a group of researchers at Harvard studying the black spider and its ultrablack coat with microlenses that could lead to innovations in solar panels and sunglasses glare.

Scientists at the Institute for Theory and Computation have made a comprehensive calculation suggesting that panspermia could happen, and have found that as many as 10 trillion asteroid-sized objects might exist that carry life.

The first soft ring oscillator gets plushy robots to roll, undulate, sort, meter liquids, and swallow.

A portable, miniature camera that can image polarization in a single shot has potential applications in machine vision, autonomous vehicles, security, atmospheric chemistry, and more.

Snowball the dancing cockatoo is the subject of a study by Radcliffe fellow and Tufts neuroscientist Ani Patel, who suggests the bird’s ability to move in time to music is connected to the way humans groove to a beat.

Scientists have used an optimized version of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system to prevent hearing loss in so-called Beethoven mice, which carry a genetic mutation that causes profound hearing loss in humans and mice alike.

A new technique speeds creation of nanowire devices, boosting research into what’s happening inside cells.

A new NASA-funded program will study water worlds and environments to understand the limits of life as part of the search for life on other planets.

Harvard researchers have devised a time-saving method that makes it possible to speed up the process of profiling gene regulation in tens of thousands of individual human cells in a single day, a development that promises to boost genomics research.