Featured series 
Tag: Alvin Powell
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Health
A data bank to battle cancer
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are collaborating on a massive, long-term effort to collect and analyze tumor tissue from 10,000 cancer patients annually. The researchers hope the data will enable them to understand better how tumors behave, while providing opportunities to test new therapies.
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Health
Worming out of listening
A freshman seminar helps students to understand Darwin by reading his works and re-creating 10 experiments — including one showing that the wiggly creatures just don’t hear.
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Nation & World
A spotlight on China
Fund supports Harvard programs in everything from student activities to faculty research in rising Asian giant.
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Science & Tech
A road map to cleaner energy
A new report by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs recommends transforming the U.S. energy picture by nearly doubling funding for U.S. energy technology research and instituting incentives for adopting cleaner technologies, such as a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions.
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Science & Tech
From marsh to Yard
Students digging in Harvard Yard uncovered a major feature in the final days before the site had to be filled: a stone-lined trench that likely began the conversion of the marshy area to the high and dry land of today.
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Health
Actually, the star’s a turkey
Visiting Professor Pamela Diggle took listeners into the botanical roots of Thanksgiving dinner, illustrating how nature’s everyday trials forced plants to come up with unusual — and delicious — ways to survive.
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Arts & Culture
Lost in translation
Israeli author David Grossman spoke Tuesday about becoming immersed in his writing and his characters during a packed talk in the Science Center.
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Science & Tech
Growing strong
Steven Wofsy and Andrew Richardson discuss New England’s still-growing forests and their role as a buffer against the effects of climate change.
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Health
Cancer clues from another species
Researchers have decoded the genome of an unlikely ally in the fight against cancer and aging, the naked mole rat, to find clues on why it resists the disease and lives 10 times as long as ordinary mice.
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Science & Tech
America’s first time zone
The Harvard College Observatory built its foundation in the mid-1800s, after an epidemic of train wrecks prompted the railroads to seek a regional standard for greater accuracy and safety.
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Nation & World
Legacy of an Indonesian tsunami
A five-year follow-up study of children orphaned by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami says that older children and younger girls were most affected, with lower school achievement, higher rates of work outside the home for boys, and earlier marriage and work inside the home for girls.
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Campus & Community
Corporation committees up and running
A major conclusion of the Harvard Corporation’s 2010 governance review came to fruition earlier this fall, with the launch of committees on governance, finance, and facilities and capital planning, as well as a joint governing boards committee on alumni affairs and development.
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Science & Tech
Woods, yes, but as before, no
The stunning regrowth of New England forests over the past century marks a conservation victory, but an Arnold Arboretum forest expert says there’s no turning back the clock to pre-colonial times. Today’s forests are a blend of native New England plants and invasive species, growing on a human-altered landscape.
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Science & Tech
Weighing the risks of fracking
Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Energy, discussed the environmental risks and potential benefits of shale gas extraction in a Future of Energy talk sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
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Science & Tech
Fewer drops to drink
With water scarcity a growing worldwide worry, Harvard programs, faculty, staff, and students are exploring ways to protect precious supplies, both globally and on campus.
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Science & Tech
A tool to touch the sun
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Justin Kasper has designed an instrument that will peek out from behind a heat shield to touch the sun’s atmosphere on a NASA solar probe designed to get far closer to the sun than any before.
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Science & Tech
Molecules as motors
Scientists from around the world gathered at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Oct. 14 for a symposium on advancing efforts to study and design molecules as motors.
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Science & Tech
New sources near for biofuels
Researchers are making progress in creating a biofuels process that will allow the use of tough-to-digest cellulose produced by hardy grasses that can be grown on marginal land around the world, the head of the Energy Biosciences Institute said Oct. 13 during a presentation at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
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Nation & World
Wanted: Ways to battle corruption
The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics is offering $8,000 in prizes for novel ideas on how to monitor and undercut institutional corruption.
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Nation & World
7 billion, and climbing
U.N. official Babatunde Osotimehin says that educating women and girls worldwide is a critical step in slowing population growth.
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Health
Gauging the effects of the BP spill
Research into the effects of last year’s massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico highlights the flexibility of the community of microbes living in the ocean’s depths.
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Health
Where (tiny) form follows function
A professor studies how the structure of large proteins influences how we feel heat, examining how the proteins behave and interact with molecules around them.
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Science & Tech
Tracking the pollution amid the remote
A national research project led by Harvard scientist Steven Wofsy tries to fill in the blanks of understanding how the Earth’s atmosphere works by crisscrossing the globe by jet, measuring air changes.
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Nation & World
Roundtable airs immigration, research funding issues
A small group of business and higher education leaders met in Washington to discuss the importance of attracting the world’s best students, the economic stimulus provided by government-funded research, and the safeguards of intellectual property protection.
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Nation & World
Cantor: University research a key for jobs
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says that universities and businesses are key contributors to the innovation that drives economic growth in this country but that congressional attention to research funding will have to wait until broader budget talks are completed.
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Health
On the cusp of new transplant era
With the advent of new techniques and anti-rejection drugs, organ transplantation stands on the threshold of a new era, where once-radical surgeries such as face transplants will seem routine, says Bohdan Pomahac, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon and Harvard Medical School professor who led recent face transplant surgeries.
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Nation & World
Chile’s president pushes progress
Chilean President Sebastián Piñera said during a Harvard Kennedy School speech on Sept. 23 that he hopes to lead Chile into the ranks of fully developed nations by the end of the decade.
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Science & Tech
The return to recycling
Recycling was the norm before the Industrial Revolution’s creation of cheap consumer goods started to produce what eventually became the throwaway society, according to Susan Strasser, author of the book “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.”
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Health
Improving health care in China, U.S.
Health officials from China and the United States gathered at Harvard Medical School to examine common challenges and solutions as the two global giants seek to reform national health care systems to improve access and care, while lowering costs.
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Science & Tech
Developing fast, but sustainably
The Harvard Sustainability Science Program marked the beginning of its third phase Sept. 19 with a forum on issues facing the rapidly industrializing major nations of China, Brazil, and India.
