Featured series 
Tag: Alvin Powell
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Health
A transplant makes history
In 1954, Harvard surgeons at the Brigham performed the first successful organ transfer, a kidney exchanged between twins, opening a major medical field, and giving life and hope to thousands of patients.
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Science & Tech
Scientific research, artfully shown
Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have embarked on an exploration unusual for space scientists — one involving art. A project probes how the presentation of images of space affects viewers’ appreciation and understanding of what’s happening in the pictures.
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Science & Tech
Intuitive? Try God
Harvard researchers exploring the roots of religion have found that intuitive thinking leads to belief in God, while more reflective thinking points toward atheism.
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Science & Tech
Data may not compute
The Dataverse Network Project, spearheaded by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, provides archival storage for research projects whose records are on outmoded technology formats.
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Science & Tech
Guarding the forests
The regeneration of the region’s forests during the last 150 years is an environmental gift that New Englanders shouldn’t squander with thoughtless development, the director of the Harvard Forest said in a talk at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
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Campus & Community
Digging the rain
A ceremony under soggy skies on Sept. 8 kicked off the semester’s exploration of the archaeology of Harvard Yard. The event included speeches from University officials, and Native Americans from the Harvard community and the region.
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Nation & World
‘Why do they hate us?’
The 9/11 terrorist attacks caused Americans to awaken to the disdain for the nation held by some overseas. It also brought harsh attention to U.S. Muslims and mobilized the nation toward actions it may one day rue, experts said at a panel discussion.
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Health
Giving hybrids some respect
Harvard researchers have used genetic analysis to confirm that the Appalachian tiger swallowtail butterfly arose through hybridization of two other species, the Canadian and Eastern tiger swallowtails, highlighting a rare case of speciation through hybridization in animals.
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Nation & World
In praise of ordinary people
Officials should not forget the important role that ordinary citizens play in the critical hours after a disaster, authorities on disaster response told the Forum at Harvard School of Public Health, during a discussion of how that has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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Science & Tech
With the Earth as teacher
Students in Earth and Planetary Sciences kicked off their academic year early, spending a late-August week in paradise, observing Hawaii’s volcanoes, green and black sand beaches, and overarching geologic splendor.
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Health
The efficient caveman cook
Harvard researchers say the rise of cooking likely occurred more than 1.9 million years ago and bestowed on human ancestors a gift of time in the form of hours each day not spent eating.
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Science & Tech
Electrical conductor sparks interest
Harvard and Stanford chemists have created and purified an organic semiconductor with excellent electrical properties, simultaneously confirming a screening process being used to find new photovoltaic materials.
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Health
Strength in numbers
Harvard researchers have created an analogue of what they think the first multicellular cooperation might have looked like, showing that yeast cells — in an environment that requires them to work for their food — grow and reproduce better in multicellular clumps than singly.
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Campus & Community
Digging in the Yard, it’s child’s play
Summer school students unearthed a variety of artifacts during their archaeology class in Harvard Yard, the most unusual of which was a fragment of a doll’s face from the 1800s.
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Nation & World
Strong evidence
The work of a Harvard history professor has bolstered the case of a group of elderly Kenyans who are seeking reparations from the British government for rape, castration, beatings, and other abuses that they say occurred during colonial-era efforts to suppress Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising.
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Science & Tech
Gauging forest changes
Harvard scientists are leading an international collaboration that aims to coordinate research, data collection, scientist training, and analysis of information gleaned from two networks of forest plots, one through the Harvard-affiliated Center for Tropical Forest Science and the second created by Chinese scientists.
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Nation & World
Tanzania-HSPH AIDS clinic opens
U.S. and Tanzanian government officials opened a new research and treatment center for Tanzania’s sickest AIDS patients Friday (July 22), to be operated by Tanzanian health officials in partnership with the Harvard School of Public Health.
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Science & Tech
They dig the past
Harvard Summer School students broke ground June 29 for the biennial archaeology class investigating the long history of Harvard Yard. Students will resume the search for traces of the Harvard Indian College, where the College’s first Indian students lived and studied.
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Health
Gray gets stamp of approval
The U.S. Postal Service unveiled a new postage stamp honoring Asa Gray, founder of Harvard’s Herbaria and the man considered the founder of American botany, in a ceremony at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
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Health
New hope against diabetes
Results from a phase 1 drug trial by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers showed that a decades-old tuberculosis drug knocked out the autoimmune cells that attack diabetic patients’ insulin-producing cells, followed by indications that pancreatic function was improving, albeit transiently.
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Health
A focus on battling tuberculosis
Scientists from around New England gathered at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to discuss the latest research and findings about tuberculosis at the Fifth Annual New England Tuberculosis Symposium.
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Health
Where there’s smoke, there’s ire
Speakers at a Harvard School of Public Health conference on smoking hailed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s work to give the Food and Drug Administration new regulatory power over tobacco products and said, if wielded properly, it could prove a key weapon for better health.
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Health
For love of the creepy, crawly
Biologists from around the world are on campus this week for an international conference on invertebrate morphology sponsored by the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
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Health
Clues on how flowering plants spread
Researchers at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum have highlighted female competition among plants, saying it is a new factor that could have driven the mystifying diversity of flowering plants.
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Science & Tech
History shines through the glass
Researchers are examining the Harvard Semitic Museum’s collection of ancient glass for clues about the people who made it and their interactions with other societies through trade.
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Health
New face for chimp-attack victim
A Connecticut woman who was badly disfigured when she was mauled by a pet chimpanzee in 2009 received a full face transplant during surgery at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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Science & Tech
Finding the genetic trail
Harvard Medical School researchers have traced the influence of genes from sub-Saharan Africa in European, Middle Eastern, and Jewish populations, quantifying the intermingling that occurred over many generations.
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Health
No cheeks, no problem
Harvard biologist Alfred W. Crompton shows that dogs drink not with a messy scoop of the tongue, but in a way similar to that of cats — by using adhesion and inertia to pull water from the bowl into their mouths.
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Science & Tech
A supernova that’s super different
A researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has uncovered a new way that stars end their lives, in a bright, fast explosion that appears different from the known characteristics of the stellar cataclysms called supernovas.
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Campus & Community
A difficult journey, a brighter future
In her Commencement address, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf says her Harvard graduate studies put her on the path to the success. She urged degree recipients to be fearless and to embrace their failures as they forge their paths in life.
