Science & Tech

In 1973, Shirley Ann Jackson became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Decades – and 38 honorary degrees – later, Jackson is the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Her resume includes time as a university researcher (in theoretical elementary particle physics); a corporate scientist (at AT&T Bell Laboratories); and a government regulator (as chairwoman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1995 to 1999).

For almost a century, one of the staples of crime stories has been the wires, cuffs, and jiggling recording needle of the polygraph machine. In its time, the “lie detector” was hailed as a way to measure the telltale physiological signs of deception, including hard breathing, high blood pressure, and excess perspiration. But in truth, the polygraph was never very accurate, hitting the mark only about 85 percent of the time – and meanwhile creating a lot of “false positives.” As many as 25 percent of people telling the truth during a polygraph exam come out looking like liars.

The head of the world’s largest oil company said that renewable sources can’t meet the world’s growing energy needs so research dollars should be aimed at both developing renewable sources and at making fossil fuels cleaner.

Scientists from the eight nations bordering the Arctic recently enlisted representatives of the region’s native peoples to help assess climate change there. What they found put a human face on a debate often involving distant projections and abstract numbers. Less snow, less sea ice, freezing rain in winter, and the appearance of mosquitoes and robins, creatures so foreign the native residents have no word for them.

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

They are odds and ends of lives long past, lived in the cold and ice of the world’s polar regions. They are bits and pieces that give a feeling as…

The Harvard Graduate School of Education on Dec. 6, 2006, launched a new Web site aimed at connecting the research of its faculty with educators in the field. The Usable…

Astronomers have discovered the first negatively charged molecule in space, identifying it from radio signals that were a mystery until now. While about 130 neutral and 14 positively charged molecules…

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have developed a new type of miniature endoscope that produces three-dimensional, high-definition images, which may greatly expand the application of minimally invasive diagnostic and therapeutic…

The Andromeda galaxy, the closest large spiral to the Milky Way, appears calm and tranquil as it wheels through space. But appearances can be deceiving. Astronomers have new evidence that…

International Space Station designers thought of everything concerning astronaut comfort while sleeping. There are sleeping bags, straps to hold astronauts against the wall, and, according to NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson, there’s even a strap to hold their heads to the pillow against the weightlessness of space. Wilson, who graduated from Harvard in 1988, returned to campus on Sept. 14 to share her space experiences in an hour-long talk that mixed the technical accomplishments of her space shuttle flight and colorful details of life in space.

Education meets hands-on science as roughly 100 Harvard undergraduates fan out from beach to beach collecting insects for a new database of Harbor Island insect life.

On the second floor of the Peabody Museum, in a darkened room painted flat black, Harvard geologist John Shaw slips on a pair of futuristic goggles as he sits before a 23-foot-wide wrap-around screen.

Using a network of small automated telescopes known as HAT, Smithsonian astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known world. This new planet, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of…

Only a few people think deeply about electrons. One is Gerald Gabrielse, Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard University. In the past 20 years, he has discovered new things about them, things that even Albert Einstein never knew. And he’s trained a half-dozen young Ph.D.s in the business of how subatomic particles make the universe what it is.

An innovative solution for the man-made carbon dioxide fouling our skies could rest far beneath the surface of the ocean, say scientists at Harvard University. They’ve found that deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for this gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, and estimate that seafloor sediments within U.S. territory are vast enough to store the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions for thousands of years to come.

Here’s a story to cool you off on a hot summer day. One of the major mysteries of ice ages may have been solved by a Harvard climatologist.

It’s one thing to theorize about an exploding star the size of our sun, it’s another to look up in the sky and watch one getting ready to blow. Astronomers…

Earth’s moon was created by an early collision with another large planetary body. It was a “chip off the old block.” Mars captured its asteroidal moons as they passed by.…

A seldom-studied mental illness called Intermittent Explosive Disorder, characterized by recurrent episodes of angry and potentially violent outbursts — seen in cases of road rage or spousal abuse — has…

Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly 1,000 years before…

Adolescents who sign a “virginity pledge” and then go on to have premarital sex are likely to disavow having signed such a pledge, according to an analysis of survey data…

The prevalence of obesity in the U.S. states has been greatly underestimated. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed data from health surveys, which are used to estimate…

A rare genetic defect in a family has helped researchers identify a key signaling component in T cells. The newly identified protein, Orai1, may be a piece of a long-…

Harvard scientists have solved the puzzle of how to generate a special form of wave in small electronic devices, allowing the electrical equivalent of the pulses of light that carry…

Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years…

According to a study led by Associate Professor Kimberly Thompson of the Kids Risk Project at Harvard School of Public Health, 81 percent of a random sample of “mature”-rated video…

Researchers report they have created pigs that produce omega -3 fatty acids, which are known to improve heart function and help reduce the risks for heart disease, representing the first…

Researchers have detected the lasting benefits of early childhood education 15 years after the program ended. What may have seemed like three years of fun and games at the time…

Seismologists at Harvard University and Columbia University have found an unexpected offshoot of global warming: “glacial earthquakes” in which Manhattan-sized glaciers lurch unexpectedly, yielding temblors up to magnitude 5.1 on…