Featured series 
Tag: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Science & Tech
Some globular clusters may be leftovers from snacking galaxies
According to the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation, galaxies have grown larger over time by consuming smaller dwarf galaxies and star clusters. And sometimes, it seems that the unfortunate prey is not swallowed whole but instead is munched like a peach, stripped of its outer layers to leave behind only the pit. New findings by…
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Health
Which comes first, language or thought?
“Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.” Because languages differ in how they approach objects, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. That’s wrong,…
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Health
Stem cell science
“Stem-cell transplants are already performed every day in Harvard-affiliated hospitals — and around the world,” says Harvard Stem Cell Initiative codirector David Scadden, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. So-called bone-marrow transplants, which transfer tens of thousands of cells of many different…
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Health
Newly identified gene linked to brain development
Bilateral frontoparietal polymicrogyria (BFPP) is a recessive genetic disorder resulting in severely abnormal architecture of the brain’s frontal lobes, as well as milder involvement of parietal and posterior parts of the cerebral cortex, which is “the part of the brain that distinguishes humans from other species,” says the study’s senior author, Christopher A. Walsh, M.D.,…
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Campus & Community
The brains behind writer’s block
“It’s likely that writing and other creative work involve a push-pull interaction between the frontal and temporal lobes,” Harvard Medical School neurology instructor Alice Flaherty speculates. If the temporal lobe activity holds sway, an aspiring scribe may turn out 600 logorrheic pages. If the temporal lobes are restrained by frontal lobe changes, the result might…
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Campus & Community
Scientists pursue happiness
“When we try to predict what will make us happy we’re often wrong,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. “Researchers all over the world find the same predictable errors, whether the pursuit involves romance, a new car, or a sumptuous meal.” Gilbert uses the results of his study of election outcomes…
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Science & Tech
Have light, will not travel
Harvard researchers fired a short signal pulse of red laser light into a sealed glass cylinder containing a hot gas of rubidium atoms illuminated by a strong control beam. While the pulse was traveling through the rubidium gas, they switched off the control beam, resulting in the storage of a holographic imprint of the signal…
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Science & Tech
Tiniest droplets produced from triangular nozzles
Ultra-tiny taps – which could, in theory, create drops just 8 billionths of a millimeter in size – might prove a boon for technologies that employ sprays of costly materials. For instance, triangular taps could boost the resolution of ink-jet printers, which work by squirting fine droplets of ink onto surfaces. They could also cut…
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Science & Tech
Light propagates via wires more slender than its own wavelength
A research team led by Harvard’s Eric Mazur and Limin Tong, a visiting professor from Zhejiang University in China, reported on their work with nanowires in the Dec. 18, 2003 issue of the journal Nature. “You wouldn’t normally imagine that a baseball could pass through a garden hose, but these nanowires appear able to handle…
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Science & Tech
Lifeless suns dominated early universe
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as brilliant supernovae. Those very first stars began the seeding process in the universe, spreading vital elements like carbon and oxygen, which…
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Science & Tech
Raging storms of hot and cold gas
New observations with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), Hubble’s high-precision and ultra-sensitive spectrometer, show that the warm chromosphere of Betelgeuse extends out to more than 50 times its radius in visible light, a size five times larger than the orbit of Neptune. (The chromosphere is an inner layer of a star’s atmosphere, between the…
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Science & Tech
Young star caught speeding
Findings linking a speeding star to its birthplace provide direct observational support of theoretical simulations predicting that protostars can be tossed out of a young cluster. This is the first time that such a fast-moving young star has been seen outside of a cluster or binary system. Astronomers Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and…
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Science & Tech
Suns of all ages possess comets, maybe planets
Astronomers observed a comet puffing out huge amounts of carbon, one of the key elements for life. The comet also emitted large amounts of water vapor as the Sun’s heat baked its outer surface. When combined with previous observations suggesting the presence of evaporating comets near young stars like Beta Pictoris and old stars like…
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Science & Tech
Planetary survivor strategy: Outeat, outweigh, outlast!
Astronomers Myron Lecar and Dimitar Sasselov have found that planet formation is a contest, where a growing planet must fight for survival lest it be swallowed by the star that initially nurtured it. Of the first 100 stars found to harbor planets, more than 30 stars host a Jupiter-sized world in an orbit smaller than…
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Campus & Community
Picturing a universe that’s out of sight
Giovanni Fazio, a senior physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, directed the design and construction of a camera that is looking beyond the visible universe to see planets, stars, and galaxies being born. On Aug. 25, 2003, he waited for the ignition of a Delta rocket, with extra boosters strapped to it, to blast…
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Campus & Community
Surgery done on a single cell
A superprecise scalpel that can be used to operate on an individual cell is now a reality thanks to experimenters at Harvard University. “Ultrashort laser pulses [up to 1,000 a second] produce a spot as hot as the sun,” notes Eric Mazur, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics. “Normally, that kind of heat would vaporize…
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Campus & Community
Scholars resuscitate dead languages
The goal of a Harvard academic research project is to develop advanced computer technology that will help scholars mine myriad scientific texts in a variety of languages, but also to connect the dots between them. In this way, it can broaden the scope of scholarship, but also sharpen the scholar’s ability to probe deeply into…
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Campus & Community
Speedy solar storm reaches Earth
An Oct. 28, 2003 eruption created a monstrous solar flare – the third largest recorded since 1976 – and an associated coronal mass ejection, in which superheated gas, called plasma, streaks away from the sun at millions of miles an hour. When the plasma hits the Earth it can disrupt the planet’s magnetic field, triggering…
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Health
The links between creativity, intelligence, and mental illness
“Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked, particularly in artists, musicians, and writers,” notes Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist. “Our research results indicate that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought predispose people to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others.” Carson,…
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Campus & Community
Worth more than the paper they’re written on
According to Beth Simmons, a professor of government at Harvard, governments care what others think of them. They want to be admired and can be publicly embarrassed, just like like people can. Such traits help explain why governments would enter international agreements on areas of mainly domestic concern, such as civil rights, women’s rights, race…
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Campus & Community
Blocking the road to extinction
A widely cited estimate is that at current rates of deforestation, orangutans will be extinct in the wild in 20 years. But Assistant Professor of Anthropology Cheryl Knott, who heads the Gunung Palung Orangutan Project, believes all is not lost. For the past decade, Knott has helped humans understand orangutans, their treetop world, and their…
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Campus & Community
What can monks teach scientists?
People tested by Harvard Psychology Professor Stephen Kosslyn and his colleagues have found it difficult to hold a simple image in their minds for more than 10 seconds. However, Buddhists who excel at mental imagery claim that they can hold vivid three-dimensional images of complex objects, like a palace or deity, in their minds for…
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Health
Stages of memory described in study
“To initiate a memory is almost like creating a word processing file on a computer,” explains researcher Matthew Walker, instructor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “Once the file has been created, if you don’t hit the ‘save’ button before shutting off the computer it will be lost. Our…
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Science & Tech
Blue light special
Jet-setters and shift workers now sit in front of glaring white lights to readjust their body rhythms and avoid sleep and alertness problems. New experiments condcuted by Harvard University researchers suggest that they would be better off sitting in front of blue lights. The research also contradicts what many scientists believed for years, that the…
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Health
Wine molecule slows aging process
Called resveratrol, a wonder substance discovered by Harvard researchers seems to work in the same way as does drastic calorie cutting. Dramatic reduction of calories has been shown to increase the life span of mice, rats, and monkeys. Such diets are being tried in humans but results are not yet in. Severe dieting also cuts…
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Science & Tech
Seeing the hole truth
Folding is a big deal in biology. It not only changes a molecule’s shape but its function. Take the proteins made by genes. Folded one way, they can activate processes necessary for a healthy life. Folded another way, they can trigger the wild cell growth known as cancer. Now, using holes as tiny as 30…
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Science & Tech
“Winking star” started winking only recently
In 2002, astronomers at Wesleyan University announced that they had discovered a “winking” star that undergoes a regular, long-lasting (approximately 20 day) eclipse every 48 days. They theorized that those eclipses were caused by intervening blobs of material within a protoplanetary disk surrounding that young star. Harvard astronomer Joshua Winn and colleagues decided to examine…
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Science & Tech
Asteroid Juno has a bite out of it
Juno, the third asteroid ever discovered, was first spotted by astronomers early in the 19th century. It orbits the Sun with thousands of other bits of space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of the largest asteroids, at a size of 150 miles across, Juno essentially is a leftover building…