Year: 2004

Researchers have found a family of molecules that play a key role in the formation of synapses, the junctions that link brain cells, called neu-rons, to each other. The molecules initiate the development of these connections, forming the circuitry of the mammalian nervous system.

At the annual Mid-Summer Celebration of the 12 day camps run by Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), a student-led non-profit at Harvard College, Wednesday evening (Aug. 4), old-fashioned summertime fun took on a distinctly urban flavor. As campers from Boston and Cambridge ran sack races, tossed rings and softballs, slurped watermelon, and smeared their faces…

The world’s first quantum network, integrated with the Internet, is now operating in the Boston area. Its developers hope that the messages it sends will be secure from hackers and eavesdroppers for as long as imagination now extends.

Balloons waved, jazz standards played, and Cambridge seniors danced on the steps of the Memorial Church during Wednesday’s (Aug. 4) 29th Annual Senior Picnic in Harvard’s Tercentenary Theatre.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have found that the content of human DNA and genes, originally thought to be very similar among all human beings, differs significantly. This unexpected finding could one day provide researchers with the insight necessary to understand how disease development differs among individuals and…

Howard A. Frank, co-developer of the heart pacemaker and clinical professor of surgery emeritus at Harvard Medical School, died from complications of a stroke at his Brookline, Mass., home on June 27. He was 89.

The impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers, if managed properly, can transform the nature of American society through an explosion in volunteerism that rejuvenates the societal ties that bind the nation together.

The John Harvard Mall, a hilltop park in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, is now restored and designed to be safer for Boston residents and their children, thanks to a partnership between the city of Boston and Harvard University.

Researchers at the Harvard-affiliated Forsyth Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil have successfully used tissue-engineering techniques to regenerate rat tooth crowns.

On Sunday, June 20, hundreds of fathers, including Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, celebrated Father’s Day with a walk to fight cancer.

It’s like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first.

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan (Maha for short) studies the obvious but ignored – how do flags flutter, worms wiggle, fabrics fold. ‘There’s a certain joy in trying to discover the sublime in the mundane,’ says the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Harvard University.

For those of you who want to live longer, you’re getting closer to having your cake and eating it. You can even add a glass of wine.

Ground was broken July 14 for the new long-term home of the Broad Institute at 7 Cambridge Center on the corner of Main and Ames streets. The institute will serve as the vital center of a relatively new collaboration intended to bring the power of genomics to bear on the understanding of disease and to…

The international community has not succeeded very well at stopping incidents of genocide. From Armenia to Rwanda, efforts at intervention have generally been either nonexistent or too little and too late.

Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin have given $5 million to support the Harvard University Library’s Open Collections Program, which enables the University to make research materials from libraries across Harvard freely available over the Internet.

P S A are frightening letters for those diagnosed with prostate cancer, some 230,000 men every year. They stand for prostate-specific antigen, a protein the body secretes in excess when a man has the malignancy. It is used as a marker to both diagnose the disease and to detect its recurrence after surgery or radiation.…

A 23,000-year-old hunter-gatherers’ camp submerged under the Sea of Galilee for millennia has provided Harvard researchers with new information about early human diets, showing that grains were staple foods 10,000 years earlier than previously thought and shedding new light on agriculture’s roots.

Researchers from Brigham and Womens Hospital (BWH) found that women currently taking thyroid hormones need to increase their dose early in a pregnancy – on average, by eight weeks gestation – to prevent maternal hypothyroidism and possible harm to the fetus. These findings, which will be published in the July 15 issue of The New…

Sidney Verba, the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library, has appointed Megan Sniffin-Marinoff to the position of Harvard University archivist. Sniffin-Marinoff, who currently serves as librarian and deputy director of Radcliffes Schlesinger Library, succeeds former University archivist Harley P. Holden, who held the position from 1971 until his retirement late…

George Francis Fabyan Lombard, a former senior associate dean and professor of human relations at Harvard Business School (HBS) for 41 years, died at his home in Weston on June 17. He was 93.

The Kennedy School of Governments Institute of Politics (IOP) recently announced its selection of a diverse and experienced group of individuals for resident fellowships this fall. The fellows will join the IOP beginning in mid-September, and will lead weekly, not-for-credit study groups on a range of political topics. Fellows interact with students, participate in the…

The United States government through its Agency for International Development (USAID), Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI), and the Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation have joined hands with the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (GFDRE) to support fiscal decentralization in Ethiopia. The donors and the GFDRE have collectively pledged $13.6 million to support roll-out…

Harvard Extension School biochemistry instructor Cheryl Wojciechowski and faculty aid and A.L.M. candidate Luke McKneally are creating a kiosk display on obesity and diet for the Current Science and Technology Center at the Museum of Science, Boston. Supersized America claims that obesity may soon surpass tobacco as the leading cause of health problems facing America.

The lives of single mothers and their families improved in the post-welfare reform age, despite the negative impacts of the 2001-02 recession. Thats the finding in a new study authored by Wiener Center Research Fellow Scott Winship and Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy Christopher Jencks, both at the Kennedy School.