The roiling cores of many active galaxies are difficult to see in detail because of surrounding gas and interstellar dust. Smithsonian astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006, however, a first-time measurement…
A safety group at Harvard University has looked into the behavior of those in training in hospitals and found that overworked interns made 36 percent more serious medical errors and…
Astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006 that they have found the first sample of intermediate-mass black holes in active galaxies – a discovery that will help in understanding the early universe.…
Astronomers announced Jan. 11, 2006, that they have found the next Orion Nebula. Known as W3, this glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia has just begun to shine with…
To peer into the galactic center of our own Milky Way galaxy, astronomers Silas Laycock and Josh Grindlay used the unique capabilities of the 6.5-meter-diameter Magellan Telescope in Chile. By…
Observations by two astronomers confirm one important theory about how a black hole’s extreme gravity can stretch light. The data also paint an intriguing image of how a spinning black…
By a score of 135 to zero, scientists using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have compared suspected neutron stars and black holes and found that the black holes behaved as…
Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) is a challenging stargazing target for amateur astronomers. It is one of the closest planetary nebulas – a type of nebula formed from gas ejected by…
A paper presented to the annual Allied Social Sciences Association meeting in Boston, in a session jointly sponsored by the American Economic Association and the Economists for Peace and Security,…
Texas, Alaska, Russia, the Middle East – these are the regions one is likely to think of when asked to name the world’s top oil- producing areas. Galicia, an area…
Guy Stuart, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, is the author of a new study, “Boston at the Crossroads: Racial Trends in the Metropolitan…
A new type of drug profiling will be useful in identifying the biological targets of experimental compounds and predicting drug toxicity. “This work brings microscopy into the ‘omics’ era,” said…
Astronomers have gained an important clue to guide their hunt for extrasolar worlds. And that clue points to the unlikeliest of places — our own backyard. “It’s possible that some…
Reporting in the Nov. 11, 2004, issue of Nature, astrophysicists J. Stuart B. Wyithe (University of Melbourne) and Abraham Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) have calculated the size of cosmic…
A scenario in which exploding stars kill all life within the center of our galaxy is detailed by stronomer Antony Stark (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues in the October…
For many parents, educators, and policy-makers in the United States, charter schools – innovative public schools that are free from much bureaucratic oversight but must “compete” for students in order…
Sixty-eight million light-years away, the Antennae galaxies are locked in a dance of death, with stars being ripped from their orbits and spiral arms being shredded into streamers that dangle…
When the Chinese government dictated that families limit themselves to one child each, it was a huge change: Chinese women averaged six births a piece in 1970, and parents traditionally…
Laura Nasrallah’s newest book, “An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity,” argues that, in early Christian communities, dreams, visions, and prophecies were often central to communication and…
A newfound planet detected by a small, 4-inch-diameter telescope demonstrates that we are at the cusp of a new age of planet discovery. Soon, new worlds may be located at…
According to the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation, galaxies have grown larger over time by consuming smaller dwarf galaxies and star clusters. And sometimes, it seems that the unfortunate prey…
New research from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University shows that in a region where median home prices now exceed $400,000, affordability alone does not explain the continued patterns…
Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Harris argues that children as young as preschool age can discern whether or not they’re hearing the truth, even in a domain for…
Harvard researchers fired a short signal pulse of red laser light into a sealed glass cylinder containing a hot gas of rubidium atoms illuminated by a strong control beam. While…
Ultra-tiny taps – which could, in theory, create drops just 8 billionths of a millimeter in size – might prove a boon for technologies that employ sprays of costly materials.…
A research team led by Harvard’s Eric Mazur and Limin Tong, a visiting professor from Zhejiang University in China, reported on their work with nanowires in the Dec. 18, 2003…
If you’re anything other than a middle-aged white guy, your appearance matters profoundly in physics, where appearances aren’t supposed to matter, found Graduate School of Education researcher Maria “Mia” Ong.…
New observations with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), Hubble’s high-precision and ultra-sensitive spectrometer, show that the warm chromosphere of Betelgeuse extends out to more than 50 times its radius…
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they…
Findings linking a speeding star to its birthplace provide direct observational support of theoretical simulations predicting that protostars can be tossed out of a young cluster. This is the first…
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