Science & Tech

Innovation, whether it’s large, small, solo, or institutional, is an increasingly important part of Harvard, a university working to maintain its clearly defined sense of self and at the same time evolve to meet future needs.

The class Applied Physics 50 is grounded in a teaching philosophy that banishes lectures and encourages hands-on exploration, presenting a collection of best practices gleaned from decades of teaching experience and studious visits to college physics classrooms nationwide.

Harvard’s facility managers are working to improve energy systems and performance in their buildings. Their efforts, which include installing better equipment, are focused on ensuring that buildings operate as efficiently as possible.

Harvard groups support hives, conduct research, and sample honey.

A screening of the film “Chasing Ice” brought Harvard experts together to discuss innovations in monitoring the glaciers’ retreat and how America can tap its own energy sources.

Research by scientists in Elizabeth Spelke’s lab suggests our innate understanding of abstract geometry has origins in the evolutionary past.

The National Science Foundation is awarding grants to create three new science and technology centers this year, with two of them based in Cambridge. The two multi-institutional grants total $45 million over five years.

When Bill Gates came to Harvard as a student, he was known for his myriad interests and unconventional study habits. And then there was his endless fascination with computers, Walter Isaacson writes.

Author and activist Bill McKibben ’82 visited Harvard with a message: In the face of catastrophic climate change, it’s time for overt and energetic civil action.

Harvard’s Matt Holman, a lecturer on astrophysics, and his collaborators at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado are piggybacking their research onto a NASA spaceship that is racing to the farthest edges of the solar system to study objects in the far-flung Kuiper Belt.

New York Times columnist Harold McGee and chef Dave Arnold introduced this year’s “Science and Cooking” public lecture series, which runs through December.

A Harvard study provided strong evidence that female physicians are underpaid compared to their male counterparts.

Psychology Professor Mahzarin Banaji gave incoming members of Harvard’s Class of 2017 a tour of their own biases, helping to raise awareness that can help them avoid making decisions based on unconscious preferences.

The accumulation of money woes and day-to-day anxiety leaves many low-income individuals not only struggling financially, but cognitively, says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. In a study featured in Science, he reports that the “cognitive deficit” caused by poverty translates into as many as 10 IQ points.

In a question-and-answer session, Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, explains the latest hack attacks on major news media outlets.

Using a gel-based audio speaker, Harvard researchers have shown that electrical charges carried by ions, rather than electrons, can be put to meaningful use in fast-moving, high-voltage devices.

A Harvard model predicts that by 2050, wildfire seasons will be three weeks longer, up to twice as smoky, and will burn a wider area in the western United States.

GoAmazon2014 is part of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), the largest umbrella for research in the Amazon, which explores everything from social issues to scientific inquiries.

Harvard air chemistry expert Scot Martin is working with the Department of Energy, as well as several international partners, to track how pollution above the pristine Amazon rainforest is changing the climate.

A growing number of Harvard faculty members, fellows, and even students are looking to take their innovative ideas a step further and bring them to the marketplace.

A recently published paper says that during the last glacial maximum, more ice than previously thought covered the globe.

A Harvard School of Public Health graduate and doctoral candidate in environmental health is one of the creative forces behind SolSource, a revolutionary, sun-powered grill designed specifically to reduce pollution inside rural houses.

In the face of a coming century of rising seas, a Harvard design studio opens the door to creative speculation on how to remake the infrastructures of coastline cities.

A new study by Chia-Jung Tsay, a musician and Harvard Ph.D., examines the power of visual information in evaluating classical music.

Nathan Black, the French Environmental Fellow, is studying how nations fall into civil war during the type of agricultural disruption possible with a changing climate — and what some nations might do to prevent it.

Thirty-one schoolteachers spent four days on campus last week at a workshop put together by Harvard’s regional centers and programs to provide background on the growing global water crisis.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a way for photographers and microscopists to create a 3-D image through a single lens, without moving the camera.

A new transparent, bioinspired coating makes ordinary glass tough, self-cleaning, and incredibly slippery. It could be used to create durable, scratch-resistant lenses for eyeglasses, self-cleaning windows, improved solar panels, and new medical diagnostic devices.

Envisioning a green space that is as inviting and social as it is operative and effective, students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design worked last semester to transform a concrete patio space at Gund Hall into a modular system of vegetation and planters that could absorb and purify stormwater.

Despite advances, the best software and video cameras cannot seem to get computer-generated images and digital film to look exactly the way our eyes expect them to. Harvard’s Hanspeter Pfister and Todd Zickler are working to narrow the gap between “virtual” and “real” by asking the question: How do we see what we see?