Featured series 
Month: February 2009
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Arts & Culture
Isolating creativity in the brain
How — exactly — does improvisation happen? What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process?
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Science & Tech
Global temp analysis clarifies warming details
An analysis of global temperatures between 1850 and 2007 has illuminated some climate change details, showing that winter temperatures have risen more rapidly than summer temperatures and that the seasons are coming nearly two days earlier than they were 50 years ago.
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Health
Wilson receives NCSE’s Lifetime Achievement Award
Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE).
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Health
Two reasons to fete Darwin
Small is beautiful. Small may also be powerful. Judging from a copy on display at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the book that changed the world is only 8 inches high and 5 1/2 inches wide.
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Health
Gene therapy demonstrates benefit in patients with rheumatoid arthritis
Researchers have reported the first clinical evidence that gene therapy reduces symptoms in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an important milestone for this promising treatment . Described in the February issue of the journal Human Gene Therapy, the findings stem from a study of two patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis conducted in Germany and led…
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Health
Blavatnik Family Foundation gives Harvard $10M
The Blavatnik Family Foundation, headed by Len Blavatnik, M.B.A. ’89, has given Harvard University two gifts totaling $10 million in support of its scientific and technological research. Half the gift will go to the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to support cancer vaccine research, and half will go to the…
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Health
Neural mapping paints a haphazard picture of odor receptors
Despite the striking aromatic differences between coffee, peppermint, and pine, a new mapping of the nose’s neural circuitry suggests a haphazard patchwork where the receptors for such disparate scents are as likely as not to be neighbors.
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Health
$100 million gift to launch innovative search for AIDS vaccine
Medical School Professor Bruce Walker has been selected as the founding director of a unique new $100 million effort to finally develop a vaccine that can halt the global HIV/AIDS pandemic that, if it continues unchecked, is predicted to claim an additional 70 million lives by 2020.
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Science & Tech
Riding — and reading — the Earth tide
Once a day, Miaki Ishii rides the Earth tide, rising slowly — along with her desk, chair, and entire office — 20 to 30 centimeters before sinking back again.
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Campus & Community
HKS, Stanford collaborate on poverty project
A new collaborative effort bringing together faculty and scholars from Harvard and Stanford universities is being launched to evaluate — and develop — national policy on poverty and inequality in America. The Collaboration for Poverty Research (CPR) will tap the vast intellectual resources of both institutions, leveraging their combined power to focus attention and garner…
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Campus & Community
Howell Jackson named as prospective acting dean of Harvard Law School
Howell Jackson has agreed to serve as the acting dean of Harvard Law School (HLS), subject to the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Dean Elena Kagan’s nomination to serve as U.S. Solicitor General, President Drew Faust announced today. Jackson, the James S. Reid Jr. Professor of Law, served as the School’s vice dean for budget from…
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Campus & Community
Financial aid leads to a record applicant pool at Harvard College
More than 29,000 students have applied to Harvard for entrance next September, exceeding last year’s record of 27,462 and the previous record of 22,955, set the year before. In the face of an unprecedented economic downturn, financial aid has proven to be a crucial element in encouraging so many students to apply.
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Arts & Culture
‘Nation-shaking’ racial, ethnic changes
Real earthquakes are slow to build and fast to erupt. Other, metaphorical, quakes, can follow the same pattern — and be just as earthshaking.
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Campus & Community
Not the same old Crimson
By the spring of 2007, change was inevitable for the Harvard men’s basketball team. After posting five straight losing seasons — one of which was the worst in program history (4-23 in the 2003-04 season) — it was time for a fresh start.
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Health
The Improvising Brain
What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment…
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Health
Scientists uncover new class of mammalian genes with key functions
A research team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has uncovered a vast new class of previously unrecognized mammalian genes that do…