Featured series 
Year: 2012
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Campus & Community
Maskin named University Professor
Eric S. Maskin, a Nobel laureate whose work has had widespread impact on economics and aspects of political science, has been named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest honor for a faculty member.
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Science & Tech
Super gel
A team of experts in mechanics, materials science, and tissue engineering at Harvard has created an extremely stretchy and tough gel that may suggest a new method for replacing damaged cartilage in human joints.
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Science & Tech
‘Thou shall be inventive’
Chef-mixologist Dave Arnold and kitchen science author Harold McGee kicked off the third season of the “Science and Cooking” lecture series, looking at both the history and versatility of food.
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Campus & Community
A warm welcome, and a challenge
Forced indoors by rain, College freshmen gathered in Sanders Theatre and the Memorial Church to become formal members of the Class of 2016 at Harvard’s annual convocation.
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Health
Mapping a genetic world beyond genes
Most of the DNA alterations that are tied to disease do not alter protein-coding genes, but rather the “switches” that control them. Characterizing these switches is one of many goals of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project.
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Campus & Community
Fresh year, new minister
The Rev. Jonathan L. Walton debuts as Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, telling his listeners to take actions that make a difference, based on their faith.
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Campus & Community
New beginnings
In her traditional annual remarks at the first fall Morning Prayers, Harvard President Drew Faust found common ground between the secular and the religious, “the ineffable and the immediate,’’ and reminded listeners of “the need to serve both.”
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Nation & World
An app aimed at transparency
Super PAC App, the brainchild of recent Harvard Kennedy School graduate Jennifer Hollett and her MIT classmate, gives voters information on the big-money donors behind this season’s campaign ads in real time.
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Campus & Community
Lessons that lead toward peace
The new dean of Harvard Divinity School, David Hempton, delivered a moving convocation address that recalled the violence from his past, and offered hope for the future.
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Health
Forward thinking on HIV
A research team led by Martin Nowak has developed a technique for modeling the effects of various HIV treatments and for predicting whether the treatments will cause the virus to develop resistance.
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Campus & Community
HUPD annual report available
Harvard’s annual security report, prepared in compliance with The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (the “Clery Act”), is titled “Playing it Safe” and can be found on the HUPD’s website.
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Arts & Culture
At 50, a building still dares
A new art exhibit opens a yearlong celebration of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, which turns 50 in May.
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Health
Bringing the psych lab online
A team of researchers from Harvard and Wellesley College shows that data gathered from online volunteers can be just as good as data collected in the lab.
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Health
Tapping the body to fight disease
Researcher Biju Parekkadan is developing devices that employ cell therapy to help people with organ failure.
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Science & Tech
Clues in the cucumber’s climb
Harvard researchers, captivated by a strange coiling behavior in the grasping tendrils of the cucumber plant, have characterized a new type of spring that is soft when pulled gently and stiff when pulled strongly.
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Campus & Community
College announces investigation
The Harvard College Administrative Board is investigating allegations that a significant number of students enrolled in an undergraduate course last semester may have inappropriately collaborated on answers, or plagiarized their classmates’ responses, on the final exam for the course.
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Arts & Culture
Let them both eat cake
For the first time, Harvard’s American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) and the Yale Repertory Theatre (Yale Rep) are collaborating on a stage production: the world premiere of “Marie Antoinette.”
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Nation & World
More than words
Nieman Foundation welcomes 24 new fellows, including some who tell their gripping stories using tools beyond words.
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Nation & World
Guides to the gallows
The Harvard Law School Library’s “Dying Speeches” collection of English crime broadsides — street literature sold at public executions — is one of the largest in the world and the first to be completely digitized.
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Arts & Culture
‘From Austen to Zola’
Works from Amy Lowell’s collection are showcased in “From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector,” Houghton Library’s fall exhibition. This exhibit opens on Sept. 4 and will run through Jan. 12, 2013.
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Campus & Community
HLS Professor Roger Fisher dies
Roger D. Fisher ’43, LL.B. ’ 48, co-author of the perennial best-selling book “Getting to Yes” and the Williston Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard University, died Aug. 25 in Hanover, N.H. He was 90 years old.
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Campus & Community
A moving experience
More than 1,600 undergraduates took the first step yesterday to making Harvard their home for the next four years, as they began arriving early in the morning for the ritual of freshman move-in day.
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Science & Tech
Perfecting optics
Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without imparting the distortions of conventional lenses.
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Arts & Culture
Seeds of inspiration
An artist and curatorial associate at Arnold Arboretum fuses material she has gathered during her 25-year Harvard career into evocative works of art. Hardy Brown’s first solo exhibit at the Arboretum, “Ex Herbario: Recent Works by Susan Hardy Brown,” is now on view at the Hunnewell Visitor Center through Sept. 16.
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Science & Tech
Merging the biological, electronic
For the first time, Harvard scientists have created a type of cyborg tissue by embedding a 3-D network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues.
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Nation & World
School vouchers’ greatest impact
A new study on the impact of school vouchers on college enrollments shows that the percentage of African-American students who enrolled part time or full time in college by 2011 was 24 percent higher for those who had won a school voucher lottery and used their voucher to attend a private school.
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Science & Tech
Listening for clues
Baby songbirds learn to sing by imitation, just as human babies do. So researchers at Harvard and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, have been studying the brains of zebra finches — red-beaked, white-breasted songbirds — for clues to how young birds and human infants learn vocalization on a neuronal level.
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Campus & Community
Where sand and sun meet science
The annual Rhino Cup volleyball league stokes the competitive fires of Harvard’s biological community, drawing researchers out of the lab and onto the sandy volleyball court in the courtyard of the Biological Laboratories.
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Health
Vitamin D’s impact on infection
A study led by Harvard researchers of Mongolian schoolchildren supports the possibility that daily vitamin D supplementation can reduce the risk of respiratory infections in winter.
