Science & Tech

Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, Harvard College student Derek Slater and Mike McGuire, Gartner research director, found that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively…

You may not have noticed, but the smallest revolution in world history is under way. Laboratories and factories have begun to make medical sensors and computer-chip components smaller than a…

Translation, the synthesis of protein from an mRNA template, has long been considered a benign sequela to transcription. After all, dysregulation of transcription causes a multitude of human disorders, including…

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a remarkably small brown dwarf surrounded by a dusty disk. The brown dwarf contains only about eight times the mass of Jupiter,…

In a 1936 paper, Albert Einstein described how the gravitational field from a massive object can warp space and thereby deflect light. In special cases, the light from a distant…

A new infrared image of the reflection nebula NGC 1333, located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, reveals dozens of stars like the Sun but much younger.…

Despite assurances from cigarette makers that they no longer target the youth market, Harvard School of Public Health researchers found that new brands are being marketed to young smokers and…

When asked how well they understand the new Medicare drug benefit, more than six in 10 seniors (61 percent) say ‘not too well’ or ‘not at all,’ while more than…

Captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared eyes, a new majestic image resembles the iconic “Pillars of Creation” picture taken of the Eagle Nebula in visible light by NASA’s Hubble…

Hubble’s iconic images include many shots of cosmic clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. For example, the famous “Pillars of Creation” mark the birthplace of new stars within the…

The Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, along with co-sponsors Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme, has released a study showing that climate…

Edward O. Wilson has learned a great deal about life by studying ant societies. In this knowledge, he finds parallels between the social interactions of insects and those of birds,…

A flurry of high-profile scientific manuscripts published in October 2005 describe both the content and uses of HapMap, a catalog that maps human genetic variation and relates it both to…

A study warns that if advisories cause fish consumption in the general public to drop out of fear about the effects of mercury, substantial nutritional benefits could be lost. The…

In an exercise that demonstrates the power of a multiwavelength investigation using diverse facilities, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have deciphered the true nature of a mysterious…

As gas is pulled into a black hole by its strong gravitational force, the gas heats up and radiates. That radiation can be used to illuminate the black hole and…

Mikhail Lukin thinks that devices based on quantum science are at the same stage as radios were about 100 years ago. To catch up, the recently tenured professor of physics…

In experiments, 5-year-olds, who had no real experience using number symbols, “added” two arrays of dots and compared them to a third array. When researchers replaced the third array of…

The first stars are so distant and formed so long ago that they are invisible to our best telescopes. Until they explode. Hypernovas (more powerful cousins of supernovas) and their…

Newborn stars are difficult to photograph. They tend to hide in the nebulous stellar nurseries where they formed, enshrouded by thick layers of dust. Now, Smithsonian astronomer T.K. Sridharan (Harvard-Smithsonian…

One-third (34 percent) of Katrina evacuees in a survey reported that they were trapped in their homes and had to be rescued. Half (50 percent) of those who were trapped…

A speeding, superdense neutron star somehow got a powerful “kick” that is propelling it completely out of our Milky Way Galaxy into the cold vastness of intergalactic space. Its discovery…

The most massive stars in our galaxy weigh as much as 100 small stars like the Sun. How do such monsters form? Do they grow rapidly by swallowing smaller protostars…

A new technique, admixture mapping, takes advantage of the higher-risk genetic segments from one population that show up in the other through generations of racial mixing. The presence of higher-risk…

In a series of experiments on sterile female mice, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers were able to restore egg production by transplanting bone marrow from fertile mice. The researchers believe…

Writing in the July 28, 2005 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, John Halamka, M.D., chief information officer at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School and an emergency room…

In the early 1970s Folkman refined his theory that tumors have the capability to grow their own blood vessels, thereby obtaining the nourishment they need to keep growing in a body. Folkman never quit thinking about why this happens and how he might use that information to treat cancer patients.

“Based on this study’s results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, the best model for violence may be that of a socially infectious disease,” says Felton Earls, MD,…

Astronomer Scott Gaudi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believes that microlensing has the potential for wide use in the future: “With improving technologies and techniques, the first Earth-sized planet…

Cullen Blake, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author on the paper, said that the simultaneous observation of infrared light with a gamma-ray burst was…