Science & Tech

Four years ago, Harvard’s Office of Technology Development launched its Accelerator Fund, a $10 million revolving account to be used as a bridge across the “valley” between creation and development. The fund is proving to be just such a bridge.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have shown that the primary explanation for the reduction in CO2 emissions from power generation that year was that a decrease in the price of natural gas reduced the industry’s reliance on coal.

Engineers at Harvard have demonstrated a new kind of tunable color filter that uses optical nanoantennas to obtain precise control of color output. The advance has the potential for application in televisions and biological imaging, and could even be used to create invisible security tags to mark currency.

Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have added a new type of planet to the mix. By analyzing the previously discovered world GJ1214b, astronomer Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues proved that it is a water world enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere.

When faced with a tough choice, we already have the cognitive tools we need to make the right decision, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, told a Harvard Law School audience on Feb. 16. The hard part is overcoming the tricks our minds play on us that render rational decision-making nearly impossible.

A production method inspired by children’s pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process will enable the creation of a broad range of electromechanical devices.

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. The presence of the star cluster suggests that the black hole was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy.

Plastic pollution in the oceans is a large and growing problem, but one that may be out of the reach of consumers to solve and instead may require cooperation from industry, said Max Liboiron, regional co-director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Students develop hurricane response plans on Cambridge roads, gaining practical experience in computational science competition, ComputeFest, a two-week program hosted by the recently created Institute for Applied Computational Science within the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

One might expect, these days, to find corn products in food, fuel, and fabric, but a corn-based glue that can heal an injured eyeball? That’s a-maize-ing.

Wyss Institute scientists have created a material that mimics the hard outer skin of bugs. The result is low-cost and easily manufactured, and tough. It eventually might provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to plastic.

For a week in January, 40 students from a variety of backgrounds — comparative literature to computer science — engaged in a “design thinking” workshop led by IDEO, an internationally renowned design consulting firm. Throughout, the human element was key — How do people actually use a product? — as was a certain amount of ad-libbed fun.

Opportunities for women and people of color to pursue careers in science have improved in recent years, but still lag behind those of white men, Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds told a crowd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in her keynote address at the Institute Diversity Summit.

In 1934, a group of enterprising young Turks pooled their money and bought construction plans for a glider. Pioneers in the infancy of aviation, they built it by hand, out of wood and fabric, and when the time came for its maiden flight, they drew straws.

Today, the Experiment Fund, a new seed-stage investment fund, opens its doors with backing from storied venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Designed specifically to support student start-ups and nurture novel technologies and platforms created in Cambridge (or by innovators educated in Cambridge), the Experiment Fund will eventually include additional strategic angel investors and advisers.

The social networks of the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, show evidence that many elements of social network structure may have been present at an early point in human history.

New research at Harvard explains how bacterial biofilms expand on teeth, pipes, surgical instruments, and crops.

The rapid rise in discoveries of planets circling other stars is changing astronomers’ views of the galaxy and the Earth’s place in it, giving impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life, astronomer and Radcliffe Fellow Ray Jayawardhana says.

Using friendship data collected from Facebook, Harvard sociologists have found that people who share similar interests in music and movies are more likely to befriend one another, but that very few interests are likely to spread among friends.

Developed by Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, WorldMap allows scholars to create, share, and publish maps and other geospatial data.

Dr. Eric Chivian from Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, named by Time Magazine in 2008 as “one of the most influential people in the world” and a recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Eric Chivian. December 8, 2011

Professor Rebecca Henderson from Harvard Business School is the Co-Director of their Business and Environment Initiative and recently named the John and Natty McArthur University Professor December 8, 2011

Christoph Reinhart is from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Associate Professor of Architectural Technology and the leader of Harvard’s Sustainable Design Research Initiative December 8, 2011

Professor Robert Kaplan from the Harvard Business School is a professor of Management Policy December 8, 2011

Richard Lazarus from Harvard Law School, is the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law December 8, 2011

James McCarthy is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and a co-chair with the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change December 8, 2011

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Harvard Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers confirms that changes in the orientation of the Earth’s spin axis have contributed to periods of major deglaciation in the past million years.

A team led by Harvard researcher Charles Lieber has for the first time succeeded in creating a device that opens the door to using tiny holes called nanopores in an electrically charged membrane to quickly and easily sequence DNA.

Harvard astronomers, working as part of NASA’s Kepler mission, have detected the first Earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star, a milestone in the hunt for alien worlds that brings scientists one step closer to their ultimate goal of finding a twin Earth.

Harvard Medical School Instructor Stephanie Kayden’s educational life came full circle this semester, when she taught a humanitarian studies course in Emerson Hall, where, as an undergraduate philosophy concentrator she honed her own reasoning skills years ago.