Featured series 
Tag: FAS
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Science & Tech
Reputation as a lever
Using enrollment in a California blackout prevention program as an experimental test bed, a team of researchers showed that although financial incentives boosted participation slightly, making participation in the program observable produced a threefold increase in sign-ups.
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Health
Learning through doing
As part of Professor Gonzalo Giribet’s Biology of Invertebrates class, students make closely observed, highly detailed sketches of animals they study in the lab.
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Nation & World
Reflections on justice delayed
Harvard History Professor Caroline Elkins discusses last week’s $30 million settlement in the long-running Mau Mau case, in which the British government apologized for colonial-era atrocities during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion.
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Arts & Culture
Diane Paulus, on her big night
In a question-and-answer session on Monday, A.R.T. director Diane Paulus discussed her revival of the musical “Pippin,” which won four top honors at the Tony Awards.
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Arts & Culture
A ‘Pippin’ of a night
Diane Paulus, artistic director at the American Repertory Theater (ART), took home the coveted Tony Award for best direction of a musical for her restaging of the musical “Pippin.”
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Campus & Community
Rebuilding walls of sound
A group of students is working to rebuild Quad Sound Studios in the basement of Holmes Hall.
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Nation & World
Take my passport, please
Patrick Harlan ’93 drifted into Japan on a Glee Club trip the summer after he graduated from Harvard and quickly found his way to the stage, becoming a well-known comedian and a regular face on Japanese television. Harlan talked to the Gazette about his offbeat journey.
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Arts & Culture
Mapping the future
To reverse a decades-long decline in arts and humanities concentrators at Harvard College, three reports from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences propose new courses, art spaces, a networked curriculum, and other steps to bolster the field on campus.
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Health
Mouthful of clues
Harvard researchers have demonstrated that the levels of barium in teeth correspond with breast-feeding. Importantly, they said, the barium levels can remain in fossils that are thousands of years old. This provides new opportunities to study breast-feeding behavior among Neanderthals and early humans.
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Campus & Community
A distance-learning pioneer
As the new dean of Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, Huntington D. Lambert is charged with continuing to blend technology with teaching and learning to serve highly motivated students who invest their time to advance their education through the Extension School, Summer School, Professional Development Programs, and the Institute for Learning in Retirement.
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Campus & Community
Two named Abramson winners
Selim Berker, an assistant professor of philosophy, and Joshua Greene, the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, are this year’s winners of the Roslyn Abramson Award, given annually to assistant or associate professors for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
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Campus & Community
Five named College Professors
Five faculty members have been awarded Harvard College Professorships: Joseph D. Harris, Steven R. Levitsky, Michael Puett, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Maryellen Ruvolo. The Harvard College Professorships are five-year appointments. They provide faculty with extra support for research or scholarly activities and a semester of paid leave or a summer salary.
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Campus & Community
New investigators named
Adam Cohen, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics, and Hopi Hoekstra, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and molecular and cellular biology, are among the 27 scientists nationwide to be appointed as investigators by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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Campus & Community
Style and substance
The culmination of the Harvard Horizons initiative was a symposium in which eight Ph.D. students each offered five-minute presentations, styled on the popular TED talks, about a specific aspect of their current research.
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Health
‘Brainbow,’ version 2.0
Led by Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, a group of Harvard researchers has made a host of technical improvements in the “Brainbow” imaging technique.
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Health
Mourning that vexes the future
In a new paper, Professor of Psychology Richard McNally and graduate student Don Robinaugh say that while people suffering from complicated grief — a syndrome marked by intense, debilitating emotional distress and yearning for a lost loved one — had difficulty envisioning specific events in their future, those problems disappeared when they were asked to…
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Science & Tech
The nearness of you
In research described earlier this year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Elinor Amit, a College Fellow in psychology, along with two collaborators, Cheryl Wakslak and Yaacov Trope, showed that people increasingly prefer to communicate verbally (versus visually) with people who are distant (versus close) — socially, geographically, or temporally.
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Health
Lower health care costs may last
A slowdown in the growth of U.S. health care costs could mean a savings of as much as $770 billion on Medicare spending over the next decade, Harvard economists say.
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Science & Tech
Projectile learning
Students in Matthew Liebmann’s “Encountering the Conquistadors” class recently got a feel for prehistoric life, trying their hands at an ancient weapon called the atlatl.
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Arts & Culture
Digitizing a movement
A team of Harvard scholars is cataloging, and transcribing, and digitizing thousands of 18th- and 19th-century anti-slavery petitions held in the Massachusetts State Archives.
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Science & Tech
Understanding student weaknesses
As part of an unusual study that surveyed 181 middle school physical science teachers and nearly 10,000 students, researchers found that the most successful teachers were those who knew what students would get wrong on standardized tests.
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Science & Tech
Seeking fairness in ads
Latanya Sweeney, Harvard professor of government and technology in residence, wants to add a new factor to the weighting Google uses when delivering online ads, one that measures bias. In a new paper, she describes how such a calculation could be built into the ad-delivery algorithm Google uses.
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Campus & Community
Raj Chetty awarded Clark Medal
Harvard Professor of Economics Raj Chetty has been awarded the 2013 John Bates Clark Medal in recognition of his work, which combines empirical evidence and theory to inform the design of more effective government policies on everything from taxation to unemployment to education.
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Health
The motivation to move
Using an unusual decision-making study, Harvard researchers exploring the question of motivation found that rats will perform a task faster or slower depending on the size of the benefit they receive, suggesting they maintain a long-term estimate of whether it’s worthwhile for them to invest the energy.
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Arts & Culture
Writing as discovery
Professor Jill Lepore delivered the third and final presentation in Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds’ book talks in the Widener Library rotunda. The series was designed to bring students and faculty together outside of the classroom.
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Science & Tech
Warmth across 600 years
Harvard researchers are adding nuance to our understanding of how modern and historical temperatures compare.
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Science & Tech
Online learning: It’s different
By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreased by half, note-taking tripled, and overall retention of the material improved, said Daniel Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, and Karl Szpunar, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology.
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Arts & Culture
Humanities in the digital age
A panel of experts discussed the study of humanities in the digital age, and how humanists’ skill set is well-suited for careers in this advancing world of technology. The discussion was part of a series supported by the FAS Office of Career Services.
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Science & Tech
Evolutionary oomph
Scientists may soon be able to turn to one of the most powerful forces in biology — evolution — to help in their quest to develop new synthetic polymers.
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Campus & Community
Calvert Watkins dies at 80
Calvert Watkins, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, emeritus, died March 20 at the age of 80.
