Tag: Harvard Museum of Natural History

  • Arts & Culture

    Artful balance

    Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev spoke at Harvard about her work with exhibit “dOCUMENTA (13,” launching a new annual program on curatorial practice.

  • Health

    How Earth was watered

    Evidence is mounting that Earth’s water arrived during formation, aboard meteorites and small bodies called “planetesimals.”

  • Campus & Community

    A museum as school lab

    Hundreds of Cambridge sixth-graders swarmed the Harvard Museum of Natural History for a look at prehistoric New England.

  • Health

    Evolution in real time

    After 26 years of workdays spent watching bacteria multiply, Richard Lenski has learned that evolution doesn’t always occur in steps so slow and steady that change can’t be observed.

  • Health

    Flower power

    Four creations are back on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Glass Flowers gallery after a long absence.

  • Arts & Culture

    At one with Thoreau

    Scot Miller’s photographs from the Maine wilderness, inspired by Thoreau’s “Maine Woods,” are on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

  • Health

    Fin to limb

    New research brings scientists closer to unraveling one of the longest-standing questions in evolutionary biology — whether limbs, particularly hind limbs, evolved before or after early vertebrates left the oceans for life on land.

  • Health

    Saving tortoises by a hair

    Five species of giant, long-lived Galapagos tortoises are thought to have gone extinct, but recent DNA analysis shows that some may survive on other islands in the archipelago, according to work by Michael Russello, Harvard Hrdy Fellow in Conservation Biology.

  • Campus & Community

    A walk in Thoreau’s woods

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History’s “The Language of Color” exhibition, which was supposed to close in 2009 but remained popular among visitors, will close in October to make way for a new exhibition on Thoreau’s Maine woods, featuring the work of photographer Scot Miller.

  • Campus & Community

    Collaborative museums

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the new public face of the FAS science museums, has enjoyed a successful first year with new programs and exhibits and a record number of visitors.

  • Science & Tech

    Looking at chimp’s future, seeing man’s

    The fate of chimpanzees in Africa is largely in the hands of increasing numbers of poor, rural dwellers crowding the primates’ forest homes. That is why an educational project begun near Uganda’s Kibale National Forest focuses on 14 schools teaching almost 10,000 children, researchers say.

  • Campus & Community

    What rocks can teach

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History has opened its renovated Earth and Planetary Sciences gallery, linking the fantastic mineral displays to the story of the Earth and the work of faculty members who conduct research on geological processes.

  • Health

    Not as evolved as we think

    Lest you think you’re at the top of the evolutionary heap, looking down your highly evolved nose at the earth’s lesser creatures, Marlene Zuk has a message for you: When it comes to evolution, there is no high or low, no better or worse.

  • Campus & Community

    A director for Museums of Science and Culture

    Dean Michael D. Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that Jane Pickering has been named executive director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.

  • Health

    The ants come marching

    Aaron Ellison, a senior research fellow in ecology at Harvard Forest, has co-authored a new book, “A Field Guide to the Ants of New England.” During a discussion, he explained their pivotal importance to nature.

  • Science & Tech

    An invasion of New England

    While new species naturally expand to other places and sometimes disrupt the scene when they arrive, the pace of introduction of invasive species has picked up enormously over the past century and a half, stressing and transforming New England forests.

  • Science & Tech

    Using evolution to understand pollution

    A tool rarely used to understand the impact of pollution on the natural world is evolution, an oversight that an environmental toxicologist says is robbing investigators of important information.

  • Health

    The tangled web around spiders

    A biologist with an affinity for spiders shared his passion, taking the audience on a tour of arachnids large and small and making a pitch for their conservation as natural pest control.

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Spider-Man,’ the scavenger hunt

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History has launched a summer-long program called Spider Sense! Scavenger Hunt, designed to entertain fans of the comics character and natural science alike.

  • Campus & Community

    Straight from the farm

    Harvard welcomed back farmers’ markets in Allston and Cambridge.

  • Science & Tech

    Touch, drag, learn

    Research by computer scientists, biologists, and cognitive psychologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts suggests that collaborative touch-screen games have value beyond play.

  • Health

    Fish in depth

    The renovated fish gallery at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, open as of June 2, includes displays that explain both fish biology and the science being conducted on the topic at Harvard.

  • Campus & Community

    Into local libraries, and into lives

    The John Harvard Book Celebration program included the donation of more than 400 books to libraries, 17 lectures by Harvard faculty and members of Harvard’s Board of Overseers at local libraries, and 18 programs for children and youth. The programming reached more than 200 children and youth in the Greater Boston area this spring, concluding…

  • Science & Tech

    The whys of religion vs. evolution

    University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne says that dysfunction within American society promotes high levels of religious belief that in turn blocks general acceptance of evolutionary theories.

  • Campus & Community

    Sharing a passion for science

    Harvard scientists are participating in the Cambridge Science Festival, 10 days of events where experts in technology, engineering, and math share research with the public.

  • Health

    Survival of the selfless

    In a talk sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History, biologist E.O. Wilson said that competition among groups of humans is a likely explanation for the rise of altruistic behavior in individuals.

  • Health

    Clams, snails, and squids, oh my!

    A new Museum of Natural History exhibit focuses on the enormous diversity of mollusks, which live everywhere from the deep ocean to fresh water to land.

  • Science & Tech

    Trouble afloat: Ocean plastics

    Plastic pollution in the oceans is a large and growing problem, but one that may be out of the reach of consumers to solve and instead may require cooperation from industry, said Max Liboiron, regional co-director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

  • Health

    The search for life’s stirrings

    As science wrestles with the problem of how life arose on Earth, hindsight shows that seemingly intractable obstacles can have simple, even elegant solutions, said Nobel laureate Jack Szostak.

  • Science & Tech

    Planets, planets everywhere

    The rapid rise in discoveries of planets circling other stars is changing astronomers’ views of the galaxy and the Earth’s place in it, giving impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life, astronomer and Radcliffe Fellow Ray Jayawardhana says.