Featured series 
Tag: Alvin Powell
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Nation & World
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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Nation & World
Synthetic future
In the synthetic biology lab of Professor Pamela Silver, researchers are looking for ways to make biological engineering faster, cheaper, and more predictable.
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Nation & World
Using evolution to understand pollution
A tool rarely used to understand the impact of pollution on the natural world is evolution, an oversight that an environmental toxicologist says is robbing investigators of important information.
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Nation & World
The tangled web around spiders
A biologist with an affinity for spiders shared his passion, taking the audience on a tour of arachnids large and small and making a pitch for their conservation as natural pest control.
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Nation & World
Mercury pollution, still spreading
With mercury contamination from coal burning and other industrial processes spreading in the environment, a new book edited by a Harvard Medical School staff member offers an overview, touching on chemistry, biology, and public health.
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Nation & World
When microbes make the food
A Harvard Summer School class spurs learning through food, by examining how microbes — bacteria and fungi — can help as well as harm when they get into food, doing much of the work preparing cheeses, beer, soy sauce, and even chocolate.
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Nation & World
Alcohol abuse after weight loss surgery?
Experts on the use of bariatric surgery for the treatment of obesity gathered at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study earlier this month for a two-day seminar examining new evidence that stomach surgery for the treatment of obesity has unexpected side effects, including an increased incidence of alcohol abuse among patients.
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Nation & World
Mystery of Native Americans’ arrival
Research led by scientists at Harvard and University College London has shown that Native Americans arrived in three waves of migration, not one, as is commonly held and that at least one group returned home to Asia.
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Nation & World
New branch of science
Scientists from the Arnold Arboretum and the University of Colorado are working to define for the first time the complete microbiome of a tree.
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Nation & World
Images from long ago or far away
A new exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology traces the development of photography and its use in anthropology from the beginnings of both fields in the 1800s to the present.
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Nation & World
Balky states likely to join Medicaid expansion
Experts speaking at The Forum at Harvard School of Public Health discussed the health care reform law Friday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of its core but struck down drastic penalties for states that don’t participate in a major expansion of Medicaid.
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Nation & World
Win for Obama, but no let-up in debate
The U.S. Supreme Court decision on Thursday upholding the basis of national health care reform is far from the last word on the topic, Harvard faculty members said, and merely raises the curtain on act two: November’s general election.
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Nation & World
Add tai chi to reduce stress
Students are gathering in Harvard Yard on Tuesdays this summer to take free martial arts lessons, as part of the University’s campaign to encourage use of common spaces.
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Nation & World
Life partner
Researchers in the Harvard lab of Bauer Fellow Peter Turnbaugh are seeking to understand how the microbes that live in our intestines affect the drugs we take and the food we eat.
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Nation & World
Fertile minds
Wrapping up an arboretum internship, students from Norfolk County Agricultural High School visited Harvard Yard to learn about Harvard Landscape Services’ recent switch to organic methods and materials.
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Nation & World
Brigham team implants artificial heart
The first complete artificial heart transplant in New England was performed at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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Nation & World
With health rights denied, a patient had no hope
Those interested in health and human rights from around the world gathered at the Harvard School of Public Health this week for an executive education program intended to provide practical lessons in rights litigation and create a community for those who care about extending health care to all.
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Nation & World
Faust on forest foray
Harvard President Drew Faust toured scientific sites at the Harvard Forest last week in a visit that marked the first time in decades that a Harvard president visited the 3,500-acre experimental forest site.
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Nation & World
Using nature to inspire robotics
The annual symposium of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, held at Harvard Medical School, prompted a spirited discussion on robotics and medicine, with nature as a model.
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Nation & World
Training leaders for malaria fight
A group of mid-career officials gathered at Harvard Business School for an intensive course focused on educating a generation of leaders for the global campaign to eradicate malaria.
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Nation & World
A boost to international learning
Eight faculty led programs designed to give students international experience have received grants from the President’s Innovation Fund for International Experiences.
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Nation & World
A meeting of ministerial minds
At a moment of global opportunity for improving maternal and child health, the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Kennedy School’s Ministerial Leadership Program for Health launched the inaugural Ministerial Health Leaders’ Forum this week, inviting 16 officials from around the world to campus to share experiences and solutions and to create a network…
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Nation & World
A Milky Way cooling its jets
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ astronomers have detected for the first time jets of gamma rays extending thousands of light years from the Milky Way’s core, confirming expectations based on observations of other galaxies.
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Nation & World
Exercise reduces psoriasis risk
A study by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital adds to the list of medical problems that exercise eases, showing that vigorous activity reduces a woman’s risk of developing the skin condition psoriasis by 25 to 30 percent over the study subject who exercised the least.
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Nation & World
Fish in depth
The renovated fish gallery at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, open as of June 2, includes displays that explain both fish biology and the science being conducted on the topic at Harvard.
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Nation & World
Life lessons from an old worm
Research is uncovering the genetic roots of aging, peeling back the once common understanding that creatures simply “wore out” as they aged, and slowly revealing the mechanisms that control a process determined by our genes and that proceeds at different speeds for different species.
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Nation & World
The last dance between Venus and the sun
Before 2004, the most recent Venus transit occurred more than a century ago, in 1882, and was used to compute the distance from the Earth to the sun. On June 5, 2012, another Venus transit will occur. Scientists with NASA’s Kepler mission hope to discover Earth-like planets outside our solar system by searching for transits…
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Nation & World
Organizing for health care
Pedrag Stojicic, who is graduating from the Harvard School of Public Health, plans to apply his passion for organizing to problems in his Serbian homeland, including HIV/AIDS and physician corruption.
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Nation & World
Bridging the doctor-patient divide
Graduating Harvard Medical School student Katherine Johnson hopes to bridge barriers between doctors and patients by using her skills in the community as she begins her residency.
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Nation & World
Zakaria offers parting words
Delivering Harvard’s Commencement address, journalist Fareed Zakaria told members of the Class of 2012 to trust themselves as they journey into a world that is more peaceful and contains more opportunities than ever before.
