Tag: Peter Reuell

  • Campus & Community

    Daniel M. Wegner famous for ‘thought suppression’

    Daniel M. Wegner, a pioneering social psychologist who helped to reveal the mysteries of human experience through his work on thought suppression, conscious will, and mind perception, died July 5 at age 65.

  • Science & Tech

    Efficiency in the forest

    Spurred by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, forests over the past two decades have become dramatically more efficient in how they use water, a Harvard study has found.

  • Campus & Community

    Watching Spanish grow

    The Instituto Cervantes Observatory of the Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures in the United States at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University will be a center for tracking Spanish language growth.

  • Science & Tech

    Right down the middle, explained

    The ability to throw an object with great speed and accuracy is a uniquely human adaptation, one that Harvard researchers say played a key role in our evolution.

  • Science & Tech

    Map to renewable energy?

    Researchers hoping to make the next breakthrough in renewable energy now have plenty of new avenues to explore — Harvard researchers this week released a database of more than 2 million molecules that might be useful in the construction of organic solar cells for the production of renewable energy.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Campus & Community

    He made the most of his opportunities

    A biomedical engineering concentrator and Quincy House resident, Scott Yim’s senior project explored using naturally derived materials such as bamboo to help reduce the cost of medical devices and biomaterials in the developing world.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Science & Tech

    Warmth across 600 years

    Harvard researchers are adding nuance to our understanding of how modern and historical temperatures compare.

  • Science & Tech

    Fine-tuning online education

    Andrew Ho, research director of HarvardX and an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, spoke with the Gazette about a recent study that found that interspersing online lectures with short tests improved student performance.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Campus & Community

    A look inside the lab

    The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Division of Science recently relaunched its “Science Research Lecture Series,” aimed at introducing the broader local community to research conducted by Harvard faculty members. The talks will be held once a month in the Science Center, and will be open to the public.

  • Health

    Major weight loss tied to microbes

    In a study conducted by Harvard and MGH researchers, gut microbes of mice underwent drastic changes following gastric bypass surgery, and transfer of the microbes into sterile mice resulted in rapid weight loss.

  • Science & Tech

    Sharper view of matter

    In a breakthrough that could one day yield important clues about the nature of matter itself, a team of Harvard scientists has measured the magnetic charge of single particles of matter and antimatter with unprecedented precision.

  • Health

    When timing is everything

    In a new paper, Christopher Marx, associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, says that beneficial mutations may occur more often than first thought, but many never emerge as “winners” because they don’t fall within the narrow set of circumstances required for them to dominate a population.

  • Health

    One gene, many mutations

    In a new paper, Harvard researchers show that changes in coat color in mice are the result not of a single mutation, but of many mutations, all in a single gene. The results start to answer one of the fundamental questions about evolution: Does it proceed by huge leaps — single mutations that result in…