Tag: In the Field
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Nation & World
‘I thought a bomb went off’
As twilight fell over Port-au-Prince that first terrible night after Haiti’s January earthquake, Louise Ivers watched a strange cloud of dust settle over the city. Stirred by buildings collapsing as the late afternoon quake struck, the cloud was pierced only by sound, a rising chorus of screams from across the capital as the toll became…
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Nation & World
Report from Haiti
Nearly a month after a massive earthquake devastated Haiti, paramedic Anthony Croese looked into the crowd outside a destroyed orphanage near Port-au-Prince and spotted an emaciated baby cradled in his father’s arms.
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Nation & World
After bloody revolution: Bringing science back to Liberian classrooms
Adam Cohen and Ben Rapoport needed materials to conduct a science experiment, but supplies were hard to come by. Cohen, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics…
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Nation & World
Peculiar, junior-sized supernova discovered by New York teen
In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so.
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Nation & World
Student diggers take Harvard’s roots from dirt to display case
Emily Pierce ’10 was up to her hips in Harvard Yard, standing in a square hole in the ground, carefully scraping soil as she sought bits of archaeological treasure: a…
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Nation & World
Foraging for forest frogs
In the dark of the Sri Lankan cloud forest, the researchers’ only guides were the headlamps they used to light up the night, illuminating the cold, gray mist that drifted…
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Nation & World
Forests, reefs, mountaintop illuminate tropical biology
Morning came in the middle of the night in the hikers’ hut partway up the side of Borneo’s towering Mount Kinabalu. At 2 a.m., after just a few hours’ sleep,…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
‘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…
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Nation & World
Gilby blogs from Ugandan forest
Ian Gilby was following a chimpanzee through Uganda’s Kibale Forest, observing behavior and testing revised data collection methods. Gilby had done his doctoral dissertation on chimpanzees in Tanzania and was…
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Nation & World
Three weeks in tiny tunnel pay off
After three weeks in a tiny tunnel 50 feet below an ancient Maya pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, Peabody Museum researcher Bill Saturno finally got to view his prize. Fine…
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Nation & World
A star that looks like a planet
Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a remarkably small brown dwarf surrounded by a dusty disk. The brown dwarf contains only about eight times the mass of Jupiter,…
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Nation & World
A harvest of dozens of new stars
A new infrared image of the reflection nebula NGC 1333, located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, reveals dozens of stars like the Sun but much younger.…
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Nation & World
Wing color not just for looks
Harvard and Russian researchers have documented natural selection’s role in the creation of new species through a process called reinforcement, where butterfly wing colors differ enough to avoid confusion with…
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Nation & World
Amateur and professional astronomers team to find new planet
Astronomer Scott Gaudi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believes that microlensing has the potential for wide use in the future: “With improving technologies and techniques, the first Earth-sized planet…
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Nation & World
Astronomers spot the Great Orion Nebula’s successor
Astronomers announced Jan. 11, 2006, that they have found the next Orion Nebula. Known as W3, this glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia has just begun to shine with…
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Nation & World
Barcelona works
A pioneer in his field, Richard forman has helped forge the basic concepts of landscape ecology, a science that sees the surface of the Earth as a complex mosaic linked…
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Nation & World
The tale of the tail
Sharks’ tails have always mystified biologists. Their relatives, hundreds of different species of fish, happily push themselves through the water with symmetrical tails that move from side to side. But…
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Nation & World
Monsters, tooth fairies and germs!
Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Harris argues that children as young as preschool age can discern whether or not they’re hearing the truth, even in a domain for…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
A pancake, not a doughnut, shapes distant galactic center
Astronomer Lincoln Greenhill (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues have found direct evidence for a “pancake” of gas and dust at the center of Circinus — a thin, warped disk…
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Nation & World
Australian shale tells tale of layered seas
Harvard researchers have found important clues about the Earth’s environment 1.5 billion years ago. Their results present quite a different picture from present times, in which oceans have oxygen-rich waters…
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Nation & World
Researcher studies effects of terrorist attacks on office workers near WTC site
Since 1971, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has conducted 1,200 investigations into indoor air. Last fall, the agency undertook an investigation unlike all the others. Aided by…
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Nation & World
Looking for the meaning of life at the bottom of the sea
Charles Langmuir, Harvard professor of geochemistry, loves going to sea. “It’s tremendously stimulating, wonderful, exciting, and eye-opening,” he says enthusiastically. “Every time I’ve gone since 1984, I’ve seen things I’ve…
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Nation & World
Beetle mania
Grain weevils alone cost the global economy about $35 billion, or a third of the world’s grain crop, every year. Various other beetle species damage dozens of crops including bamboo,…