Featured series 
Tag: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Campus & Community
Students search for Thompson Island’s hoppers
Education met hands-on science on Boston Harbor’s Thompson Island on Oct. 9, 2006, as roughly 100 Harvard undergraduates fanned out from beach to beach collecting insects to be included in a new database of Harbor Island insect life. The students, part of biology professors Brian Farrell and Missy Holbrook’s OEB 10 class, “Foundations of Biological…
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Science & Tech
Three-dimensional, miniature endoscope opens new diagnostic possibilities
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have developed a new type of miniature endoscope that produces three-dimensional, high-definition images, which may greatly expand the application of minimally invasive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. In the Oct. 19, 2006, issue of Nature, the team from the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at MGH describes their prototype device and a…
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Campus & Community
U.S. lagging in adoption of electronic health records
With fewer than one in 10 doctors making full use of electronic health records and as few as 5 percent of hospitals using one form of them, the U.S. health care industry is way behind in adopting new systems that can improve patient care and reduce medical mistakes, according to a new report co-authored by…
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Campus & Community
Spring in your step helps avert disastrous stumbles
From graceful ballerinas to clumsy-looking birds, everyone occasionally loses their footing. New Harvard University research suggests that it could literally be the spring, or damper, in your step that helps you bounce back from a stumble. The work, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds new light on…
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Health
Study shows benefits of eating fish greatly outweigh risks
Many studies have shown the nutritional benefits of eating fish (finfish or shellfish). Fish is high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids. But concerns have been raised in recent years about chemicals found in fish from environmental pollution, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins. That has led to confusion among the public – do the risks…
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Campus & Community
Important signal uncovered in brain development
Nobody has counted them, but the best estimates put the number of human brain cells in the trillions. The best known among them, called neurons, do the heavy thinking and remembering. Each of these cells can connect to 10 or more others, forming a vast network of feelings, thoughts, memories, prejudices, and PINS. But neurons…
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Campus & Community
Bloxham named FAS divisional dean
Geophysicist Jeremy Bloxham has been named dean for the physical sciences in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Dean Jeremy R. Knowles announced Aug. 10.
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Science & Tech
Strange new planet baffles astronomers
Using a network of small automated telescopes known as HAT, Smithsonian astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known world. This new planet, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of a pair of distant stars 450 light-years away in the constellation Lacerta. “We could be looking at an entirely new class of planets,” said Gaspar…
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Health
Beetles’ past tells volumes about tropical evolution
Experts seeking to explain the amazing diversity of the tropical rain forest have typically done so in two ways, viewing forests as either “evolutionary cradles” that encourage the rapid development of new species, or as “evolutionary museums” that allow species to accumulate over time. New work by Harvard researchers on tropical beetles indicates that both…
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Science & Tech
Tilting at ice ages
Here’s a story to cool you off on a hot summer day. One of the major mysteries of ice ages may have been solved by a Harvard climatologist.
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Science & Tech
Cosmic blast announces a future supernova
It’s one thing to theorize about an exploding star the size of our sun, it’s another to look up in the sky and watch one getting ready to blow. Astronomers are now doing this. On Feb. 12, a star known as RS Ophiuchi, some 8,000 trillion miles away, erupted in an explosion so bright it…
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Science & Tech
Jupiter’s ‘big brother’ has moon-forming dust disk
Earth’s moon was created by an early collision with another large planetary body. It was a “chip off the old block.” Mars captured its asteroidal moons as they passed by. But Jupiter made its own moons out of dust and gas remaining from its formation. Now, observations by astronomer Subhanjoy Mohanty of the Harvard- Smithsonian…
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Campus & Community
‘Face-blindness’ disorder may not be so rare
Researchers at Harvard University and University College London have developed diagnostic tests for prosopagnosia, a socially disabling inability to recognize or distinguish faces. They’ve already used the new test and a related Web site (http://www.faceblind.org) to identify hundreds of “face-blind” individuals, far more than scientists had identified previously. The researchers, led by Ken Nakayama and…
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Campus & Community
Laser advance could open up new markets
Applied scientists from Harvard University have, for the first time, demonstrated high-power continuous wave (cw) room-temperature quantum cascade (QC) lasers made by a well-established mass production semiconductor synthesis technique. The breakthrough could soon lead to the large-scale commercialization of QC lasers and open up new markets for laser-based chemical sensors. The new generation of QC…
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Campus & Community
HMS researchers isolate nerve growth compound
Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston have isolated a molecule that stimulates the regrowth of damaged adult nerve fibers, providing new hope for those suffering from nerve damage and from neurodegenerative diseases. Adult nerve fibers in the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerve – all parts of the central nervous system –…
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Campus & Community
Bad times make for more accurate memories
Pleasurable experiences are more fun to relive than negative ones, but a new study by psychologists at Harvard University reveals that memories of good times can be less accurate than those of bad times.
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Campus & Community
Geography center launched
Those of us who remember grammar-school geography lessons as a tedious affair involving a pink and green window shade map and a chalky wooden pointer would probably never guess that, in fact, it is estimated that 80 percent of all data contains a spatial component. That point was made clearly and colorfully at the launch…
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Campus & Community
Engineering Idol
The winner of this year’s ES100-100hf senior engineering design project course competition aimed straight for the heart by recording an electrical “ballad.” The runners-up (a tie for second), meanwhile, worked themselves to the bone and relied on “heavy metal” riffs. All three, narrowed down from a group of more than a dozen talented Harvard seniors,…
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Campus & Community
Wakeley examines ancestral lines
John Wakeley is devising new ways to trace the evolutionary road taken by humans and the creatures with whom we share planet Earth by creating new models that examine how DNA has changed over time. A theoretical population geneticist, Wakeley’s research focuses on how our DNA changes as it is passed from generation to generation.…
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Campus & Community
Sweeping changes in life sciences education approved
Professors at Harvard University have overwhelmingly approved a plan that will reinvent the experience of the University’s undergraduate life sciences students, broadening degree options to better track modern biology and its related fields as it is practiced by scientists while boosting student advising and strongly encouraging undergraduate research. Following a Tuesday (April 18) vote by…
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Campus & Community
Eating plants that grow on plants
Parasitic plants are not just a biological curiosity. Every year, parasitic plants damage farmers’ fields, particularly in Africa. Kristin Lewis, a junior fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard, is learning more about plants and their parasites. For instance, in Africa, seeds of parasitic plants blow in from surrounding environments or are deposited in bird…
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Campus & Community
‘Wintering-over’ at the South Pole
They came to the South Pole, enduring months of bitter cold, darkness, and isolation, to peer at the galaxy’s center through clear, dry skies. And in December, they – scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) – declared “mission accomplished.” After 11 years, the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory, AST/RO, was dismantled last…
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Campus & Community
Evolution follows few possible paths to antibiotic resistance
Darwinian evolution follows very few of the available mutational pathways to attain fitter proteins, researchers at Harvard University have found in a study of a gene whose mutant form increases bacterial resistance to a widely prescribed antibiotic by a factor of roughly 100,000.
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Health
Dominican insects, digitized
It’s the brilliant colors and otherworldly shapes of the Dominican insects that catch the eye and draw a viewer in. It’s the alien forms magnified for all to see clearly that keeps one standing before the images hung at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, studying them. The digital images are one-third of the center’s show…
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Science & Tech
Global warming yields ‘glacial earthquakes’ in polar areas
Seismologists at Harvard University and Columbia University have found an unexpected offshoot of global warming: “glacial earthquakes” in which Manhattan-sized glaciers lurch unexpectedly, yielding temblors up to magnitude 5.1 on the moment-magnitude scale, which is similar to the Richter scale. Glacial earthquakes in Greenland, the researchers found, are most common in July and August, and…
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Science & Tech
Blogging from the Ugandan forest
A Web log, or blog, co-written by Harvard researcher Ian Gilby, working in Uganda’s Kibale Forest, makes vivid the family lives of chimpanzees. The blog, on the Anthropology Department Web site, also provides an unusual glimpse into the daily life of a field scientist. The blog was the brainchild of Alex Georgiev, a graduate student…
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Campus & Community
Molecule by molecule, new assay shows real-time gene activity
Chemists at Harvard University have developed the first technique providing a real-time, molecule-by-molecule “movie” of protein production in live cells. Their direct observation of fluorescently tagged molecules in single cells – providing striking real-time footage of the birth of individual new protein molecules inside – greatly increases scientists’ precision in probing genetic activity. Using the…