Featured series 
Year: 2007
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Health
Researchers better understand biological clock
Researchers at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have discovered that a simple circadian clock found in some bacteria operates by the rhythmic addition and subtraction of phosphate groups at two key locations on a single protein. This phosphate pattern is influenced by two other proteins, driving phosphorylation to oscillate according to…
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Nation & World
How Sputnik changed U.S. education
Education experts said Oct. 4 that the United States may be overdue for a science education overhaul like the one undertaken after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite 50 years ago, and predicted that a window for change may open as the Iraq war winds down.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard scientists predict the future of the past tense
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.”
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Nation & World
JFK and the Cuban missile crisis — a new assessment
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 has been called the “single most serious moment in human history.” During the 40 years of the Cold War, it was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war.
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Health
Mahzarin Banaji looks at biology of bias
Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist, studies how people think, and how they think they relate to one another. She’s an expert in the little secrets we all have: those implicit attitudes — sometimes prejudicial — regarding race, age, gender, and similar territories of otherness.
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Arts & Culture
Redesigned Hasty Pudding Theatre is now New College Theatre
Harvard’s newest space dedicated to the performing arts, the New College Theatre — formerly the site of the Hasty Pudding Theatre, located at 10-12 Holyoke St. — will open this fall under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and managed by the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA).
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Arts & Culture
Manuscript discovery brings medieval music to life
Medieval history comes to life at Harvard University on Oct. 18, when students and guest musicians collaborate in the North American premiere of an 800-year-old chant repertory from Harvard’s Houghton Library.
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Health
Biologists remember landmark theory
Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.
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Arts & Culture
Harvey Mansfield on politics, the humanities, and science
Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what…
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Health
Data on life expectancy show many countries clustered in high mortality ‘traps’
Growing recognition of the importance of health as a contributing factor to economic development and societal change has prompted the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to add a new subsection on sustainable health to its existing section on sustainable Development.
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Campus & Community
Police reports
Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending Oct. 8. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.
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Health
At HMOs, Medicaid patients fare worse than others
Once viewed as a panacea to the nation’s health care problems, HMOs have fallen out of favor. Commercially insured patients who flooded into HMOs, or managed care, in the early 1990s left in droves by the end of the decade. Medicaid patients, however, don’t always have the luxury of choosing their health plans, and the…
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Campus & Community
In brief
“Legends in Queer Performance: Can Theater Change the World?” The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics is now accepting applications from graduate students for its 2008-09 fellowship in ethics.
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Campus & Community
Initiative is designed to underscore importance of republicanism
Daniel Carpenter’s new educational initiative will reaffirm the significance of the history of republicanism and its influence on the American political system. Carpenter is supported by an $875,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to launch a program at Harvard regarding American political history and political thought.
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Nation & World
Treating workers like people: A history
“The Human Relations Movement: The Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments (1924-1933),” the first in a series of exhibits to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School (HBS), is on view through Jan. 17 at the School’s Baker Library.
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Nation & World
Labor and management, together at last
Harvard University hosted “The Future of Labor Forum” last week (Oct. 2), a first-ever conference that brought together prominent voices from the sometimes adversarial worlds of management, unions, government, and the academy.
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”
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Nation & World
‘Who is the human in human rights?’
What does it mean to be human? Are all people the same, and if so, entitled to an identical set of rights and treatment? Or, in the age of globalization, do wide-ranging cultural, moral, religious, and political beliefs and behaviors make the definition of humans — and therefore human rights — contingent, that is dependent…
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Campus & Community
President’s office hours 2007-08
President Drew Faust will hold office hours for students and staff in her Massachusetts Hall office on the following dates:
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Campus & Community
FACULTY COUNCIL
At its third meeting of the year on Oct. 10, the Faculty Council held a discussion about the role of nonmembers of the Faculty and expectations of access and confidentiality in the regular meetings of the Faculty.
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Campus & Community
Crimson with a touch of green
When Drew Faust is inaugurated as Harvard’s 28th president this week, there will be more than a touch of green to go with the crimson.
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Campus & Community
University inaugurates Drew Faust
It’s happened only 28 times in 371 years, so when a new Harvard president is inaugurated, the occasion is bound to be a memorable one. And the installation of Drew Faust, scheduled for Oct. 12, is shaping up to be one of the most memorable ever.
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Campus & Community
Memorial services
The date of the memorial service for Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Isidor Straus Professor of Business History Emeritus, has been changed from Sept. 28 to Oct. 19. A memorial service for Wilga M. Rivers, professor of Romance languages and literatures emerita, will be held in Appleton Chapel of the Memorial Church on Oct. 17 at…
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Arts & Culture
Morrison reads at the Memorial Church
The historical two-day celebration of Drew Faust’s inauguration as the president of Harvard began Thursday (Oct. 11) on a literary note. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison read from a work-in-progress…
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Arts & Culture
From jazz to samba to ‘Hill Street Blues’
A muster of remarkable musicians who also happen to be Harvard graduates gathered in Sanders Theatre Thursday night (Oct. 11) to serenade the soon-to-be inaugurated University President Drew Faust. The…
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Campus & Community
University is accountable to past, future
Gusts of wind shook raindrops from the trees and fluttered the fall’s first yellow leaves onto the heads and shoulders of the Tercentenary Theatre crowd below, but in spite of…
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Arts & Culture
‘Ethiojazz’ sets feet to tapping
A masinko is about as simple as a stringed instrument can get — a wooden box with a neck protruding from one corner and a single string stretched across its face. The one Setegn Atanaw plays is the amplified version, airbrushed in red and yellow like a Fender Stratocaster.
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Arts & Culture
Provocative Civil War exhibit at Fogg to coincide with inauguration
An exhibition opens at the Fogg Art Museum this Saturday (Oct. 6) that will have lots of people talking.
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Campus & Community
Police reports
Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending Oct. 1. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.