Tag: Nature

  • Nation & World

    Critical finding for skin cancer treatment

    Researchers’ findings pinpoint a critical gene involved in melanoma growth, and provide a framework for discovering ways to tackle cancer drug resistance.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Wild Harvard

    Nature watchers around campus, open to the hard-to-see creatures nearby, deliver a message of attention and affection.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Poised for progress

    A discovery by scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute may lead to an effective way of operating the immune system’s internal “control panel,” improving therapies for a variety of diseases.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Quantum connections

    Harvard physicists demonstrate the first quantum entanglement of photons and solid-state materials, in work that marks a key advance toward practical quantum networks that can communicate over long distances.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    What comes after

    Joanna Klink, the Briggs-Copeland Poet in the English Department, is out with a new book chronicling a failed relationship.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sperm competition, cooperation

    Some mouse sperm can discriminate between their brethren and the competing sperm from other males, showing an unusual behavioral complexity.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Berrizbeitia appointed professor of landscape architecture

    Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, announced the appointment of Anita Berrizbeitia as tenured professor of landscape architecture, starting in July.

    1 minute
  • 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.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sobering poems, more sobering oration mark PBK

    Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter first met in 1781, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Martins receives top honor

    Princess Anne of Britain presented a Whitley Award, one of the world’s top prizes for grassroots nature conservation, to Dino J. Martins of Kenya, for his work to improve local understanding of and win greater protection for the pollinators that underpin farming in and around the Great Rift Valley and Taita Hills.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Nectar nurtures pitcher plant’s eating habits

    New research from the Harvard Forest shows that carnivorous pitcher plants use sweet nectar to attract ants and flies to their water-filled traps, not color, as earlier research had indicated.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Modeling the forest … and the trees

    When building computer models of the ecosystems that cover the earth’s surface, it is tempting to incorporate sweeping generalizations in your calculations.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scientists explore nature’s designs

    As a graduate student, Harvard physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg acquired a passionate curiosity about — of all things — sponges. She particularly liked the ones made of glass, whose apparent fragility belied the fact that they could withstand terrific pressure in the deep sea.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Global warming predicted to hasten carbon release from peat bogs

    Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Harvard Forest names Bullard Fellows

    The Harvard Forest has recently announced nine Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research for 2008-09. Established in 1962, the Bullard Fellowship program was created to support the study and advanced research of individuals looking to make important contributions as scholars or administrators in forestry.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Effects of climate change vary greatly across plant families

    Drawing on records dating back to the journals of Henry David Thoreau, scientists at Harvard University have found that different plant families near Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., have borne the effects of climate change in strikingly different ways. Some of the plant families hit hardest by global warming have included beloved species like lilies,…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Fall commences motley fete

    If “April is the cruellest month,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem “The Wasteland” — then November is certainly the most marvelous. Judging from the glorious display of fall foliage in a Harvard Yard stimulated by chill breezes and hosting a thousand squirrels, this year’s turning leaves are a short-lived sight to behold.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    New Guinea forest expands ‘observatory’

    Just getting there takes hours of hot, sweaty hiking through lowland Papua New Guinea forests: three hours from the road to the base camp, then another seven to the site. That’s when the real work begins: tagging, measuring, and identifying 250,000 trees scattered over 50 hectares.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cabot Science Library catches migration in exhibit case

    Roadkill may seem an odd inspiration for a library exhibition, but when a colleague mentioned an article about the rising number of migratory animals killed on roads and highways, Cabot Science Reference Librarian Reed Lowrie knew he’d stumbled onto his next exhibit.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    And quiet flows the Don at Pusey

    The Harvard Map Collection presents its fall exhibition, “From the Amazon to the Volga: The Cartographic Representation of Rivers,” which opened Wednesday (Sept. 24). For centuries, cartographers have wrestled with the difficulties of depicting rivers, and in the process they have devised many ingenious ways of answering the challenge — from streambed profiles to bird’s-eye…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Ken Burns to headline Theodore Roosevelt celebration

    Theodore Roosevelt is considered a principal architect of the U.S. national park system. To help mark his 150th birthday this fall, noted filmmaker Ken Burns will come to Harvard to offer remarks and show clips from his upcoming documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” due out in fall 2009. Scheduled for Oct. 3 at…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Photographs reveal tiny leaf details

    The sense of loss Amanda Means felt is exposed in a new exhibit of her unusual photographs of leaves at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Called “Looking at Leaves,” the exhibit is the third in a series of photographic exhibitions at the museum that explore the intersection of art and science by inviting visitors…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on show at HMNH

    Carl Linnaeus believed that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was not an apple but a banana. He came to this conclusion in 1737, while studying plant specimens at Hartecamp, the estate of George Clifford, a wealthy Dutch banker and director of the Dutch East India Company. Clifford collected exotic plants from around the…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Over the river, through the woods

    For close to 30 Hyde Park preschool children, a recent trip to the Arnold Arboretum, the majestic 265-acre botanical garden run by Harvard University in Jamaica Plain, meant a journey to a world alive with natural wonders and surprises.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Newsmakers

    Katherine Swartz, professor of health policy and economics at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has been elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Swanee Hunt, founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the School, was inducted…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Frankel receives Lennart Nilsson Award for science photography

    Felice Frankel, scientific imagist and researcher in Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award for scientific or nature photography. Frankel was cited for creating images described by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which oversees the award, as “exquisite works of art and crystal-clear scientific photographs — both fascinating…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Harvard Forest announces Bullard Fellows

    Harvard Forest recently announced the 2007-08 Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research. The purpose of this fellowship program, established in 1962, is to support advanced research and study by persons who show promise of making important contributions, either as scholars or administrators, to forestry defined in its broadest sense as the human use and study…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Jane Goodall: A life in the field

    As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood. Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Tree huggers

    The Arnold Arboretum’s program for preschoolers that serves the area Head Start brings very excited kids to a lovely, engaging and stimulating nature setting.

    1 minute