Researchers compile dictionary of vocalizations suggesting the animals use equivalent of word compounds, phrasings to communicate complex social situations
Research presented at a recent astronomical conference is being hailed as ushering in a new era in the search for Earth-like planets by showing that they are more numerous than previously thought and that scientists can now analyze their atmospheres for elements that might be conducive to life.
Lasers are often considered to be highly directional light sources: their beams are able to propagate over long distances without substantial spreading. This, however, is not always the case. Semiconductor…
Susan Carey, a Harvard psychologist whose work has explored fundamental issues surrounding the nature of the human mind, has been awarded the 2009 David E. Rumelhart Prize, given annually since…
David C. Parkes, a leader in research at the nexus of computer science and economics, has been appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and…
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $1.2 million grant to an interdisciplinary team of Harvard researchers to study surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for the first…
They were in a bind, no doubt about it. Wearing little but cotton shorts, the four men huddled on a streambank deep in the Bornean rainforest. Water dripped from their…
Scientists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), collaborating collaborating with researchers from the German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen, have developed a new technique for fabricating…
The ability to map numbers onto a line, a foundation of all mathematics, is universal, says a study published in the journal Science, but the form of this universal mapping is not linear but logarithmic.
The latest engineering feat to emerge from the laboratories at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been largely accomplished with the aid of kitchen mixers. Researchers have whipped up, for the first time, permanent nanoscale bubbles — bubbles that endure for more than a year — from batches of foam made from a mixture of glucose syrup, sucrose stearate, and water.
A new analysis of the Martian rock that gave hints of water on the Red Planet — and, therefore, optimism about the prospect of life — now suggests the water was more likely a thick brine, far too salty to support life as we know it. The finding, by scientists at Harvard University and Stony Brook University, is detailed this week in the journal Science.
There’ll be fewer bats in backyards across the Northeast this summer after a mysterious ailment drove starving bats from their caves in the dead of winter in a futile, desperate search for insects in the region’s frozen, bug-free landscape.
On April 9, the sun erupted and blasted a bubble of hot, ionized gas into the solar system. The eruption was observed in unprecedented detail by a fleet of spacecraft, revealing new features that are predicted by computer models but difficult to see in practice.
Snake bites, lightning strikes, hypothermia, tick bites, and avalanche injuries are not mishaps you ordinarily associate with Harvard Medical School (HMS), or with life in Boston.
A new analysis of the Martian rock that gave hints of water on the Red Planet — and, therefore, optimism about the prospect of life — now suggests the water…
With the end of the academic year fast approaching, the temptation to purge all obsolete office and school materials is stronger than ever. But to maintain Harvard’s impressive 50 percent recycling rate, Harvard’s University Operations Services (UOS) wishes to remind the community to continue recycling all materials whenever possible. All old documents, books, folders, magazines, catalogs, cardboard, and boxes are recyclable; and after receptions, meetings, and parties, bottles, cans, cups, and containers can be recycled.
Costa Rica’s environment minister outlined the Central American nation’s plans to become carbon neutral by 2021 through green reforms in energy, transportation, government, and private industry sectors.
A team composed of Harvard students and alumni was among the winners of the World Bank’s Lighting Africa 2008 Development Marketplace competition, held in Accra, Ghana, from May 6 to 8, 2008. The team’s innovation, microbial fuel cell-based lighting systems suitable for sub-Saharan Africa, netted the Harvard group a $200,000 prize.
Spanning topics as diverse as cancerous tumors and the overfishing of grouper in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a new journal aims to highlight the serious scientific research regularly undertaken…
Embryonic stem cell research will likely have a more sympathetic ear in the White House after November’s presidential election, but a panel of speakers said last night that an era…
In investigating the intricacies of the body’s biological rhythms, scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have discovered the existence of a “food-related clock” which can supersede the “light-based”…
Eight Harvard faculty members this week were elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The three women…
Malcolm Hyman, a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, addressed a group of 20 listeners at the Barker Center about the theoretical challenges ahead for humanities computing — a fast-growing corner of scholarship in the classics, modern literature, and the arts that looks to computer science for analytical help.
The chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming struck an optimistic tone about the planet’s climate crisis Monday (April 21), saying that an energy revolution is in the offing if government can just get the policy right.
The chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming struck an optimistic tone about the planet’s climate crisis last night, saying that an energy revolution…
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.
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