Featured series 
Tag: Insects
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Nation & World
Flying right
Mary Salcedo, who successfully defended her thesis on insect wings, talks about her love of bugs and mentoring and her strategy for a successful doctoral program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
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Nation & World
Critical collections
Harvard researchers contribute to the preservation of museum specimens, marking the collections’ importance in a special journal released Nov. 19.
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Nation & World
Bees, social and solitary
Harvard study reveals underlying genetic basis for halictid bee communication and social behavior.
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Nation & World
Digitization uncovers pre-WWII fossil loan
Digitization of Harvard’s fossil insect collection produced a surprising twist: The return to Germany of hundreds of Eocene insects frozen in amber.
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Nation & World
New weapons against agricultural pests
Using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) technology developed by Harvard professor David Liu and his co-workers, a team of researchers has evolved new forms of a natural insecticidal protein called “Bt toxin,” which can be used to help control Bt toxin resistance in insects.
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Nation & World
Beyond the lab and library
For the past seven years, January has been a time when students in Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences can delve into topics they might not otherwise have the chance to explore — everything from the mating habits of insects to writing grant proposals to various imaging techniques.
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Nation & World
Where creativity rules
Harvard’s i-lab is a safe place for students to take risks and explore potentially commercial ideas, like cricket chips, aerial drone service and repair, or a public service-oriented website to connect voters and officials.
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Nation & World
Solving a biological mystery
A team of Harvard researchers has shown that insects like crickets possess a variation of a gene — called oskar — that is critical to the production of germ cells in “higher” insects. That discovery suggests that the oskar gene emerged far earlier in insect evolution than researchers previously believed.
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Nation & World
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.
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Nation & World
Planting a research center in the arboretum
With the opening of the Weld Hill facility at Arnold Arboretum, staff members and lab equipment are filling the long-awaited space dedicated to botanical research.
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Nation & World
Cracking flight’s mysteries
Harvard engineers have created a millionth-scale automobile differential to guide tiny aerial robots.
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Nation & World
Trading energy for safety, bees extend legs to stay stable in wind
New research shows some bees brace themselves against wind and turbulence by extending their sturdy hind legs while flying. But this approach comes at a steep cost, increasing aerodynamic drag and the power required for flight by roughly 30 percent, and cutting into the bees’ flight performance.
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Nation & World
Decoding effort reveals fly species’ DNA
An enormous effort to decode the DNA of one of science’s most important laboratory animals — the fruit fly — ended in success this week as a collaboration of researchers from 16 nations announced the sequencing of 10 fly species’ genomes.
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Nation & World
First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old
Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs.