Science & Tech

Jeremy B.C. Jackson earned his first chops as a scholar by studying the ecological impacts of an event that unfolded over the last 15 million years: the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, dividing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and setting off profound evolutionary oceanic and terrestrial changes.

SUBHEAD By XXXXXXXXX Harvard News Office –> Jeremy R. Knowles, an eminent chemist and longtime leader of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, died April 3 at his home in…

The Harvard Foundation will present its 2008 Scientist of the Year Award to Stephanie D. Wilson, a NASA astronaut and 1988 Harvard College graduate, at this year’s annual “Albert Einstein Science Conference: Advancing Minorities and Women in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics.” Wilson will be honored for her outstanding work in engineering and space exploration with NASA.

As a sophomore at Harvard College in 1992, Salil Vadhan skeptically and rather grudgingly enrolled in an introductory departmental course that a friend had cajoled him into taking. The course was “Computer Science 121: Introduction to Formal Systems and Computation,” a class that he would revisit a little more than a decade later — as the professor.

Harvard scientists have unveiled a new laser-measuring device that they say will provide a critical advance in the resolution of current planet-finding techniques, making the discovery of Earth-sized planets possible.

Harvard scientists have unveiled a new laser-measuring device that they say will provide a critical advance in the resolution of current planet-finding techniques, making the discovery of Earth-sized planets possible.…

Harvard scientists have found that a common class of freshwater invertebrate animals called bdelloid rotifers are extraordinarily resistant to ionizing radiation, surviving and continuing to reproduce after doses of gamma…

Harvard Medical School (HMS) Dean Jeffrey Flier today announced that the school is taking steps to reduce the cost of a four-year medical education by an average of $50,000 for…

With the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period expiring in 2012, the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements hosted a workshop of leading thinkers Friday (March 14) to help determine what comes next.

Can green cities save a blue planet? That question was posed last week by Harvard climatologist Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment. The professor of Earth and planetary sciences and professor of environmental science and engineering was one of three technical experts who spoke at a conference March 5 — co-sponsored by Harvard and the city of Boston — on the regional impacts of global warming.

How did we get here? That’s not the first line in a hangover joke. It’s a question that has been asked for centuries about the origins of life on Earth. At Harvard last week, an A-list of astronomers, physicists, Earth scientists, and chemists met in the Radcliffe Gymnasium to look at this and other fundamental questions. (What is life? Are we alone in the universe?)

With the careers of a generation of young researchers threatened by five years of flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, Harvard President Drew Faust and leaders of six other…

 When the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC) gathered for its first meeting late last April, it was charged by not one, but two Harvard Presidents. Then President-designate and…

What might be Harvard’s oddest birthday party unfolded last week (Feb. 29-March 1). In a lecture hall at Maxwell Dworkin, 50 physicists gathered to share the latest research in spintronics, an emerging branch of their science concerned with the quantum spin states of electrons.

J. Craig Venter, the visionary biologist and intellectual entrepreneur who was a leading figure in the decoding of the human genome, will join Harvard University as a visiting scholar at…

In the public health field, there is an ongoing debate as to whether improvement in the overall health of the population is linked to increases or decreases in social inequities…

“This,” Joanna Aizenberg says slyly, picking up a latticed tube from her desk in Pierce Hall, “is a glass house you can throw stones at.” The tube, tapered to a close at one end and festooned with a cluster of curious white fibers at the tip, resembles an upturned dog’s tail. It is, in fact, the skeleton of a deep-sea sponge, she reveals, made entirely out of a natural glass. The tube acts as a kind of high-rise apartment building for shrimp that live symbiotically in the sponge’s tissue.

Disagreement over the public health impact of global warming emerged in a symposium Monday morning (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The colloquium, titled “Sustaining Human Health in a Changing Global Environment,” addressed what hazards can be expected as a result of rapid and continuing climate change. For additional AAAS coverage, page 9 http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/topics/harvard-aaas-news

Disagreement over the public health impact of global warming emerged in a symposium this morning at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The colloquium,…

The brain stem plays a greater role in speech perception than previously thought, according to Jackson T. Gandour, a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences at Purdue University. “We…

Countries that do not comply with environmental treaties should be hit hard in their pocketbooks, MIT professor Lawrence Susskind said at a special lecture delivered today at the AAAS Meeting…

Shark-eating humans are putting pushing this finned species to the brink of extinction, Julia Baum today warned during a presentation at the AAAS annual meeting in Boston. A member of…

Researchers have identified a key reason why people make mistakes when they try to predict what they will like. According to the findings presented Sunday at the annual meeting of…

The public should not be asked to decide which science programs should receive public funding, says Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State…

It’s getting harder and harder to blame the sun for causing the gradual increase in global temperatures that are now being seen in the climate record, scientists said today. In…

The United States must renew its resources in tracing unidentifiednuclear materials, specialists say. Michael May, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and the head ofa panel of nuclear forensic experts…

Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), who for 10 years has directed the renewal and expansion of the former division and its transition…

Religion greatly influences the American public’s views of technology, says Dietram Scheufele, a professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Presenting new survey results…

Global warming is endangering marine life in Antarctic waters for the first time in millions of years, said specialists participating on a panel at the American Association for the Advancement…

The huge load of data now coming from modern computer systems is so overwhelming that new methods must be devised to allow people to visualize the world in more understandable…