Science & Tech

According to a new Harvard study, our ancestors between 2 and 3 million years ago started to spend far less time and effort chewing by adding meat to their diets and using stone tools to process food.

Harvard researchers have designed a new type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable, and self-actuated. It can change size, volume, and shape; it can fold flat to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the next task.

“This latest work extends the capabilities of our multi-material bioprinting platform to thick human tissues, bringing us one step closer to creating architectures for tissue repair and regeneration,” says the study’s senior author, Jennifer A. Lewis of both the Wyss Institute and Harvard’s Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences.

In recent decades, women have made progress in pay and parity with men in such professions as medicine and law. But when it comes to running things at the highest levels, it’s generally still a man’s world.

A study last year claiming that more than half of all psychology studies cannot be replicated turns out to be wrong. Harvard researchers have discovered that the study contains several statistical and methodological mistakes, and that when these are corrected, the study actually shows that the replication rate in psychology is quite high.

Ten research projects driven by faculty collaborators across six Harvard Schools will share over $1 million in the second round of grants awarded by the Climate Change Solutions Fund, an initiative launched last year by President Drew Faust to encourage multidisciplinary research around climate change.

Grasslands across North America will face higher summer temperatures and widespread drought by the end of the century, a study says, but those negative effects should be offset by an earlier start to the spring growing season and warmer winter.

Cameron Waites served in Iraq as an Army medic/health care specialist from 2004 to 2008. At 34, he is a student at Harvard Medical School where he hopes to discover solutions to problems that plague his fellow veterans.

Harvard researchers contributed to a study identifying a 124-year freeze running from the sixth century into the seventh, with widely disruptive effects.

With the elderly beginning to outnumber the young around the world, workers, employers, and policymakers are rethinking retirement — what work we do, when to stop, and how to spend our later years.

A panel of marriage counselors and negotiators tells an audience of Harvard Law students how to use negotiation skills in their romantic relationships.

In a surprising finding that runs counter to most climate change research, Harvard scientists examining temperature records have shown that, in regions with the most intense farming, peak summer temperatures have declined over the decades.

Proper management can bring species back from the brink and create healthier ocean ecosystems, experts said during a Center for the Environment panel.

Blue-banded bees bent on pollination bang their heads against tomato plants at a rate of 350 times per second, a Harvard researcher found.

A team of researchers from the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School has developed a new method for engineering a broad range of biosensors to detect and signal virtually any desired molecule using living eukaryotic cells. Its applications could range from detecting hormones to benefiting agriculture.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, collaborating with scientists in Finland and France, have shown what ultimately causes the brain to fold — a simple mechanical instability associated with buckling.

A new study led by Harvard’s Matthew Liebmann examines the health and ecological consequences of European colonists’ contact with Native Americans.

Harvard research teams find a promising new approach that uses direct mechanical stimulation to repair severely damaged skeletal muscles.

A team of scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has evolved their microscale 3-D printing technology to the fourth dimension, time.

For Harvard computer scientists, entrepreneurship is often a fulfilling extension of their cutting-edge research.

Globular star clusters date back almost to the birth of the Milky Way, and according to new research, they also could be extraordinarily good places to look for space-faring civilizations.

New European ice-core data provides a view of the difficult times that led up to and may have worsened the Black Death.

The University of Virginia School of Medicine and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed an artificial pancreas system designed to help regulate blood sugar levels of individuals with type 1 diabetes mellitus.

A postdoctoral fellow has launched a citizen-science project that aims to digitize thousands of pages of detailed observations on the life cycles of African trees.

Some Airbnb hosts discriminate on the basis of race, suggests a study by researchers at Harvard Business School.

Panelists in a Harvard Chan School forum examined how the Paris climate agreement might affect human health.

Harvard researchers examined the nation’s registry, where oil and gas production companies disclose the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing, and found that they do it less than in the past.

The Paris agreement to fight climate change greatly expands the international commitment to the cause, Harvard Professor Stavins says.

The need for continuous rigorous and relevant climate science will be more important than ever. With that framing, a group of scholars on Wednesday shared their ideas for improving the process by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) carries out its research agenda, at a side panel at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris.

The private sector — from large corporations to small businesses — will undoubtedly be impacted by whatever international agreement emerges from the U.N. Climate Change Conference taking place in Paris, but opinions vary as to how burdensome and costly those impacts will be.