Science & Tech

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded a $6.5 (over 4 years) grant to a team of Harvard University researchers to…

Direct-to-consumer advertising may not be giving big pharma such a big bang for their five billion bucks after all. Despite the billions spent on bringing drug marketing campaigns straight into…

Professor Leon Eisenberg, MD, will receive the Juan José López Ibor Award from the World Psychiatric Association on September 23, 2008, in Prague, Czech Republic.  The Award, named after Juan…

Work on flying robots, surgical tape modeled on gecko feet, energy tips gleaned from plants, new ways to grow stem cells, and dramatically smaller medical imaging equipment has landed five…

To support its goal of creating a new generation of leaders who have a broad perspective on the promotion of healthy child development and who recognize the need to bring…

Addressing and improving mental health outcomes for students is a particularly complex issue in urban public schools. Proposed solutions to critical situations are usually prepackaged suggestions from research conducted outside…

Julius B. Richmond, a seminal figure in the history of American public health and pediatrics, and the first national director of the Head Start program, who held professorial positions at…

Applied scientists at Harvard collaborating with researchers at Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, have demonstrated, for the first time, highly directional semiconductor lasers with a much smaller beam divergence…

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.

They were in a bind, no doubt about it.

Jonathan Zittrain is a man with a passion for cyberspace and a concern for its future.

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”…