Examining urban heat vulnerability, GSD assistant professor of urban planning Joyce Klein Rosenthal recently published “Intra-Urban Vulnerability to Heat-Related Mortality in New York City” in the journal Health and Place. Unlike past research on this topic, Klein Rosenthal’s approach was very fine-grained, analyzing findings from specific New York City neighborhoods, as well as socioeconomic and demographic factors and the role…

Two new studies are weighing in on the ongoing debate about whether the best diet is low-fat or low-carbohydrate, but Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) nutrition expert Frank Hu says that no one diet can claim to be best for everyone. One new study found that a group of low-carb dieters lost about 12 pounds over the course of a year — four…

HarvardX for Allston is a new educational initiative which brings HarvardX content and edX online courses to the Allston-Brighton community and general public by offering programs that integrate the latest in virtual education technologies with opportunities for in-person interactions and discussion. The endeavor, part of the University’s community benefits program for the Allston-Brighton community in…

In the years since a 2011 study found that early treatment with antiretroviral drugs could reduce HIV transmission between couples in which one partner has the virus and the other does not, “Treatment as Prevention” (TasP) has become a major focus for attention in the global fight against AIDS. But more work is needed to know how to…

In 2002, Harvard opened another online door to its vast collections via the Open Collections Program, an early effort to design web-accessible collections to support research, teaching and learning for anyone with internet access. The initiative posted 2.3 million pages of materials from across Harvard’s libraries online, which are still regularly used by researchers. With initial…

Old habits may die hard, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. David Gordon Lyon, founder of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Hollis Professor of Divinity and Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages began keeping a diary in 1870 as an undergraduate and continued throughout the rest of his life. The 38 notebooks Lyon filled…

The Parker Quartet will present its first concert as Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at the Harvard on Friday, September 26 at 8 p.m. in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall. The concert features Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5, Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit, and Dvořák’s String Quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105. The renowned Quartet (Daniel…

Judith D. Singer, senior vice provost for Faculty Development and Diversity and the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education, is the recipient of the 13th annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences, The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced last week. Singer is an internationally renowned statistician…

HarvardX invites creative coders everywhere to a learning technology challenge. The mission is to create an interactive visualization of the binomial distribution suitable for students who are learning the topic of probability. Possible approaches include interactive line or bar graphs, coin-flip or dice-roll simulations, combinations of these, or something completely different. Winners will see their work appear in…

Jonathan Haber, the lifelong learner behind Degree of Freedom and author of MOOCs: The Essential Guide, has been appointed the inaugural HarvardX Visiting Fellow. He begins his six month appointment in September. Haber will immerse himself in the organization, focusing in particular on helping the learning and research teams develop better, more robust, and effective online assessments. In…

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports no known cases of Ebola transmission in the United States, a Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH)/SSRS poll released August 21, 2014 shows that four-in-ten (39 percent) adults in the U.S. are concerned that there will be a large outbreak in the U.S., and a quarter (26 percent) are concerned…

In only two months as an intern in a lab at Harvard School of Public Health, Erika Espinosa believes she learned more than she could have in a semester of undergraduate courses. The Summer Program in Biological Sciences in Public Health (BPH), Espinosa said, “taught me the real definition of hard work” as she performed molecular…

When she was running for a seat in Japan’s house of representatives, Mayuko Toyota, SM ’02, one day found herself standing in the rain on crutches, giving a speech at a common venue for politicking in that country: outside the train station. “I might have looked miserable,” she said, explaining that an injury had her hobbling around…

The U.S. spends more than $2.8 trillion on health care each year, and some estimate that 30% of that price tag may be waste. To promote more effective use of health care resources, a group of national organizations representing medical specialists are working to identify procedures and tests that may be overused. The Choosing Wisely initiative, sponsored by the American Board of…

For the past year, Harvard Law students in the Education Law Clinic have travelled back and forth to the Massachusetts State House to lobby state legislators to pass an Act Relative to Safe and Supportive Schools. On August 13, all that work paid off, when Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed the Safe and Supportive Schools…

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Emily Balskus has been named an Innovator Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. Each year since 1999, editors of the review have selected exceptionally talented young innovators whose work they believe has the greatest potential to transform the world. Balskus uses a variety of approaches, including advanced DNA sequencing,…

Conventional wisdom holds that the cytoplasm of mammalian cells is a viscous fluid, with organelles and proteins suspended within it, jiggling against one another and drifting at random. However, a new biophysical study led by researchers at Harvard University challenges this model and reveals that those drifting objects are subject to a very different type…

Harvard’s popular Science & Cooking lecture series will return on Sept. 8, bringing world-class chefs and eminent food experts to campus for weekly talks and demonstrations that are open to the public. Most of the guests and topics this year will be entirely new, as the series welcomes for the first time the internationally renowned…

A follow-up study led by a joint team of Harvard and MIT researchers explores the promise and perils of de-identifying learner data from MOOCs (massive open online courses) and offers recommendations of how to balance privacy with open data. The dataset (made available in May) contains the original learning data from the 16 HarvardX and MITx courses…

Women who consume higher amounts of caffeine may have a lower risk of developing tinnitus — a steady ringing in the ear — than women who consume less, according to a new study by a Harvard School of Health (HSPH) researcher and colleagues. Most of the 65,000 women in the 18-year study got their caffeine from coffee; those…

Physics graduate students Erik Bauch and Georg Kucsko have developed an online tool, Open Rev., for collaborative annotation of scientific publications. Open Rev. enables open discussion about scholarly works, independent of publishers, on a free platform that is easily accessible. Users can upload a paper, highlight specific sections and generate related questions, which are then…

Graduate School of Design alumna Amale Andraos has been appointed dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). An associate professor at GSAPP and a principal at the New York-based firm WORKac, Andraos is a leading voice on urbanism and globalization, and related environmental and social concerns. She has worked on such…

The Harvard University Archives and Schlesinger Library opened their doors to a display of food-related items. While recipes abounded, a few items took the cake, including Julia Child’s Emmy award, a sketch of an epic 1818 Harvard dining hall food fight and china used at Harvard in the 19th century. The Archives’ display was but…

The Judaica Division’s latest publication — “Harvard Judaica in the 21st Century” by Charles Berlin — was recently published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Division. In 1962 the Division was established with the appointment of Charles Berlin, Lee M. Friedman Bibliographer in Judaica and Head of the Division. Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost, noted in his…

Tozzer Library returned to an entirely rebuilt and redesigned space following two years in temporary quarters. The original Tozzer Library building  was almost completely demolished and rebuilt and enlarged to reunite Harvard’s anthropological community for the first time in over 50 years. Tozzer is connected to the Peabody Museum, where some Anthropology Department offices continue…

A film by pioneering director Robert J. Flaherty — which film historians believed to have been lost — was rediscovered at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The short film “Oidhche Sheanchais” (“A Night of Storytelling”) was created by Flaherty in 1935 during the production of his now-classic film “Man of Aran.” The nitrate print of “Oidhche Sheanchais” was…

Today, more people than ever have health insurance. In the U.S., millions have signed up for coverage since the 2008 passage of the Affordable Care Act. Globally, there’s a high level of interest in establishing universal health coverage in countries without it. It’s expected that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—a set of new worldwide goals for 2015 and beyond—will…

In St. Louis, Missouri, Delmar Boulevard marks a sharp dividing line between the poor, predominately African American neighborhood to the north and a more affluent, largely white neighborhood to the south. Education and health also follow the “Delmar Divide,” with residents to the north less likely to have a bachelor’s degree and more likely to…

The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on supporting innovative early career researchers, awarded 16 new Damon Runyon Fellows at its May 2014 Fellowship Award Committee meeting, including Harvard’s Avinash Khanna and Sungwook. The recipients of this prestigious, four-year award are outstanding postdoctoral scientists conducting basic and translational cancer research in the…

The American Philosophical Society (APS) recently elected 28 new members, including three Harvard faculty members: Richard J. Tarrant, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Rem Koolhaas, professor in practice of architecture and urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.   An…