Featured series 
Tag: biology
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Campus & Community
Pickles, prisms, and scientists
Celebrating its 11th year of public engagement, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ (SEAS) Holiday Lecture Series dazzled and delighted audiences on Dec. 8 with a show guaranteed to kindle curiosity about the natural world.
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Health
One million species, and counting
Just weeks after adding its millionth Web page, the online biology clearinghouse called the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has received a grant from the Sloan Foundation that will allow it to continue its mission of documenting every living plant and animal species on the globe.
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Science & Tech
A new view of DNA
A new imaging technique, developed by Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, is giving scientists their first three-dimensional view of the human genome, one that is already shedding new light on a number of what Liberman-Aiden calls the “central mysteries of biology.”
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Campus & Community
Sabeti named Young Global Leader
Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Pardis Sabeti has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
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Health
Making the worms turn
Biophysicist Aravinthan Samuel has developed new techniques to monitor and influence the behavior of roundworms to learn how their basic nervous systems work, a first step to understanding the circuitry in more complex creatures, like humans.
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Health
Guiding lights
In a scientific first that could shed light on how signals travel in the brain and how learning alters neural pathways, scientists at Harvard have created genetically altered neurons that light up as they fire. The work may also lead to speedier drug development.
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Health
Initiative challenges drug crisis
Taking aim at the alarming slowdown in the development of new and lifesaving drugs, Harvard Medical School is launching the Initiative in Systems Pharmacology, a comprehensive strategy to transform drug discovery by convening biologists, chemists, pharmacologists, physicists, computer scientists, and clinicians to explore together how drugs work in complex systems.
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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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Campus & Community
‘Truly inspirational’
The Harvard Foundation has named Maggie Werner-Washburne the 2011 Scientist of the Year.
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Health
Kidney close-up
Scientists at Harvard have created breathtaking three-dimensional images of an entire organ, moving a step closer to understanding the complex development of the kidney.
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Health
‘Circuits of sense and sensibility’
A Harvard biologist succeeds in mapping a neural network for learned olfactory behavior, using a roundworm model to trace the dislike of a particular smell to the reaction that avoids it.
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Health
Deep thinker
Scientists are advancing in their understanding of the biology of the deep sea, which still remains largely unexplored and mysterious, according to Associate Professor Peter Girguis.
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Health
Following the genomic road map
Harvard President Drew Faust hosted a panel discussion on the legacy of the Human Genome Project Feb. 22 at Sanders Theatre.
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Campus & Community
Project success
Project Success, a program operated by the Harvard Medical School Office for Diversity and Community Partnership, targets Boston and Cambridge high school students to participate in mentored summer research internships with Harvard researchers.
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Health
Nabokov’s blues
Ten years before his novel “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov published a detailed hypothesis for the origin and evolution of the Polyommatus blues butterflies. A team, led by a Harvard professor, is proving him right.
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Arts & Culture
He’s got a head start
In his new book, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman traces the human head’s perpetual makeover as it developed through the hominin fossil record.
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Science & Tech
The map of us
To mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Human Genome Map, Harvard President Drew Faust will host a panel discussion on the project next week (Feb. 22) in Sanders Theatre.
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Campus & Community
E.O. Wilson receives BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus and naturalist Edward O. Wilson has received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the ecology and conservation biology category.
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Science & Tech
Guiding discoveries to the public
Harvard’s Office of Technology Development tries to ensure that the public sees the benefits of Harvard’s research by licensing new technology to companies.
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Campus & Community
Deadline looms for two HMS fellowships
Two fellowships in Harvard Medical School’s media fellowship program are open for applications from reporters.
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Campus & Community
New Arboretum director hosts meet and greet
In his first month as the Arnold Arboretum’s new director, William Friedman is hosting two meet and greets and has established a Director’s Lecture Series.
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Campus & Community
Waves and the waggle dance
In a lecture, titled “Good Vibrations: How We Communicate” and hosted by Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Howard Stone, Dixon Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and a former Harvard faculty member, enticed children and their families into the world of physics and biology.
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Health
Female chimps treat sticks as dolls
Researchers at Harvard University and Bates College say female chimpanzees appear to treat sticks as dolls, carrying them around until they have offspring of their own. Young males engage in such behavior much less frequently.
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Health
Biology researcher’s on a roll
Florian Engert, a new professor of molecular and cellular biology in Harvard’s Bio Labs, works and plays hard.
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Campus & Community
Fakhri A. Bazzaz
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on October 19, 2010, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Fakhri A. Bazzaz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Biology, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Bazzaz was an ecologist who greatly influenced scientific thought and public policy on climate change.
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Campus & Community
Wild Harvard
Nature watchers around campus, open to the hard-to-see creatures nearby, deliver a message of attention and affection.
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Science & Tech
Termites as architects
The air exchange system inside termite mounds provides a natural example of how to harness intermittent winds.
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Health
Thinking like an octopus
A philosophy professor’s summer of diving in Sydney Harbour has gotten him thinking about what octopus intelligence might mean.
