A new report by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs recommends transforming the U.S. energy picture by nearly doubling funding for U.S. energy technology research and instituting incentives for adopting cleaner technologies, such as a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions.
Students digging in Harvard Yard uncovered a major feature in the final days before the site had to be filled: a stone-lined trench that likely began the conversion of the marshy area to the high and dry land of today.
A postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, Christopher Golden, is the lead author of a paper. It says that in societies where people rely on bush meat for important micronutrients, people’s lost access to wildlife could hurt children’s health
A group of researchers is working to map how the brain is wired in an effort to pinpoint the causes of — and potential treatments for — schizophrenia, autism, and a host of other disorders.
By nestling quantum dots in an insulating egg-crate structure, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have demonstrated a robust new architecture for quantum-dot light-emitting devices (QD-LEDs).
Nice guys can finish first — a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that complex social networks like those of everyday life encourage members to be friendlier and more cooperative, with the possible payoff coming in an expanded social sphere. The study said selfish behavior can lead to an individual being shunned from the group and left — literally — on his or her own.
The Harvard College Observatory built its foundation in the mid-1800s, after an epidemic of train wrecks prompted the railroads to seek a regional standard for greater accuracy and safety.
In a new paper, Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Edwin Turner of Princeton University suggest a new technique for finding aliens: Look for their city lights.
A new chemical process developed by a team of Harvard researchers may increase the utility of positron emission tomography (PET) in creating real-time 3-D images of chemical processes occurring inside the human body.
Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan students put IBM’s groundbreaking, “Jeopardy!”-winning computer to the test in a live match-up on Oct. 31. But outsmarting Watson, it turns out, is a not-so-elementary task.
Though it won’t be completed until 2013, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope observatory under construction in northern Chile, is already the most powerful and complex such facility ever built, and four astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are among those first in line to use it.
The stunning regrowth of New England forests over the past century marks a conservation victory, but an Arnold Arboretum forest expert says there’s no turning back the clock to pre-colonial times. Today’s forests are a blend of native New England plants and invasive species, growing on a human-altered landscape.
Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Energy, discussed the environmental risks and potential benefits of shale gas extraction in a Future of Energy talk sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
With water scarcity a growing worldwide worry, Harvard programs, faculty, staff, and students are exploring ways to protect precious supplies, both globally and on campus.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Justin Kasper has designed an instrument that will peek out from behind a heat shield to touch the sun’s atmosphere on a NASA solar probe designed to get far closer to the sun than any before.
Prescription data stripped of identify information seems not so anonymous after all. Researcher Latanya Sweeney aims to make such personal data more secure and to provide recourse for people who are harmed by privacy breaches.
Scientists from around the world gathered at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Oct. 14 for a symposium on advancing efforts to study and design molecules as motors.
Researchers are making progress in creating a biofuels process that will allow the use of tough-to-digest cellulose produced by hardy grasses that can be grown on marginal land around the world, the head of the Energy Biosciences Institute said Oct. 13 during a presentation at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate.
Allan M. Brandt Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine, Harvard Medical School Professor of the History of Science, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
A national research project led by Harvard scientist Steven Wofsy tries to fill in the blanks of understanding how the Earth’s atmosphere works by crisscrossing the globe by jet, measuring air changes.
All three winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics have connections to Harvard — including two whose Ph.D.s launched them into their winning notion of an accelerating universe and the puzzle of dark matter.
Featured series 
