Tag: Physics

  • Nation & World

    Life on the ice

    Harvard researchers describe life in the South Pole.

    21 minutes
    Auroras as seen from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station..
  • Nation & World

    A ‘Goldilocks zone’ for planet size

    Researchers have redefined the lower size limit for planets to maintain surface liquid water for long periods of time, extending the so-called habitable zone for small, low-gravity planets.

    5 minutes
    moon Ganymede orbits the giant planet Jupi
  • Nation & World

    Black hole project nets Breakthrough Prize

    The nearly 350 astronomers, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates who worked for more than a decade to capture the first-ever image of a black hole have been named the recipients of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

    5 minutes
    Shep Doeleman
  • Nation & World

    Lessons in learning

    Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think

    6 minutes
    two students looking at notebook together
  • Nation & World

    How the moon came to be

    A fourth-year graduate student in the lab of Professor of Geochemistry Stein Jacobsen, Yaray Ku is working on a project aimed at understanding how the moon formed, and to do it, she’s working with actual lunar samples.

    4 minutes
    Yaya Ku researches the moon
  • Nation & World

    Funding promising scientists

    Associate Professor of Physics Cora Dvorkin and Associate Professor of Computer Science Stratos Idreos will each receive at least $150,000 a year for the next five years through the Department of Energy Early Career Research Program.

    3 minutes
    Matter in space
  • Nation & World

    A way to make Mars habitable

    Researchers from Harvard University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and the University of Edinburgh suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material — silica aerogel — that would mimic Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse effect.

    5 minutes
    Robin Wordsworth
  • Nation & World

    Spreading seeds of life

    Scientists at the Institute for Theory and Computation have made a comprehensive calculation suggesting that panspermia could happen, and have found that as many as 10 trillion asteroid-sized objects might exist that carry life.

    4 minutes
    Idan Ginsburg at Harvard College Observatory.
  • Nation & World

    Oceans away

    A new NASA-funded program will study water worlds and environments to understand the limits of life as part of the search for life on other planets.

    4 minutes
    Fish in the ocean
  • Nation & World

    A new vision for neuroscience

    For decades scientists have been searching for a way to watch a live broadcast of neurons firing in real time. Now, a Harvard researcher has done it with mice.

    6 minutes
    Researchers Adam Cohen and Yoav Adam examine their experiment in the lab
  • Nation & World

    Ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi breakthrough

    In a breakthrough on the road toward ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi, Harvard researchers have demonstrated for the first time a laser that can emit microwaves wirelessly, modulate them, and receive external radio frequency signals.

    3 minutes
    Laser.
  • Nation & World

    Containing the sun

    Scientists from Harvard and Princeton have teamed up to create an artificial intelligence algorithm that can predict destructive disruptions in nuclear fusion experiments

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Before the Big Bang

    Harvard researchers are proposing using a “primordial standard clock” as a probe of the primordial universe. The team laid out a method that may be used to falsify the inflationary theory experimentally.

    5 minutes
    A representation of the timeline of the universe.
  • Nation & World

    Seeing brain activity in ‘almost real time’

    Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, King’s College London, and other institutions have developed a technique for measuring brain activity that’s 60 times faster than traditional fMRI.

    6 minutes
    Measuring brain function image of scans
  • Nation & World

    ‘Seeing the unseeable’

    A years-long effort by dozens of researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reveals the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole.

    9 minutes
    In the first picture of a black hole, it is outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon.
  • Nation & World

    A black hole, revealed

    Researchers at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) just unveiled the first-ever image of a black hole, which captures what EHT Director Sheperd Doeleman called “a one-way door from our universe.”

    5 minutes
    Harvard Senior Research Fellow Shep Doeleman
  • Nation & World

    Our endless fascination with pi

    For centuries, pi — the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — has fascinated mathematicians and scientists. For more perspective on the famous number, the Gazette turned to physics lecturer Jacob Barandes — who, with some help from his 9-year-old daughter, Sadie, recited pi to 100 digits for us.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Seeing things in a different light

    Harvard researchers are using a chemical process known as triplet fusion upconversion to transform near-infrared photons into high-energy photons. The high-energy photons could be used in a huge range of applications, including a new type of precisely targeted chemotherapy, in which low-energy infrared lasers that penetrate deep into the body could be used to transform…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Nobel physics laureate Roy Glauber dies at 93

    Roy Glauber, the pioneering theoretical physicist who received the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics, died on Dec. 26. He was 93.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Electrons, up really close

    Working in a basement lab at Harvard, a group of researchers led by John Doyle, the Henry B. Silsbee Professor of Physics, have been part of a team making the most precise measurement of the shape of the field around an electron. The results suggest that some theories for what lies beyond the standard model…

    5 minutes
    John Doyle.
  • Nation & World

    Learning catalysts’ secrets

    Cynthia Friend, who recently received a multimillion dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, is well positioned to help “change the face and carbon footprint of the chemical industries sector,” one of her team’s goals.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    150 years later, her star is still rising

    At Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th century, Henrietta Swan Leavitt developed a powerful new tool for estimating the distances of stars and galaxies.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Developing micron-sized magnetic resonance

    Harvard scientists have developed a system that uses nitrogen-vacancy centers — atomic-scale impurities in diamonds — to read the nuclear magnetic resonance signals produced by samples as small as a single cell — and they did it on a shoestring budget using a 53-year-old, donated electromagnet.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A new view of the moon

    Harvard grad student Simon Lock is the lead author of a study that challenges conventional wisdom on how the moon formed.

    4 minutes
    Visualization of the moon emerging from a cloud of vaporized rock.
  • Nation & World

    Charles Slichter, longtime Corporation member, dies at 94

    Charles Pence Slichter ’45-’46, A.M. ’47, Ph.D. ’49, an internationally known physicist who won the National Medal of Science in 2007 and served on the Harvard Corporation for a quarter-century, died on Feb. 19. He was 94.

    5 minutes
    Charles Pence Slichter
  • Nation & World

    Picture-perfect approach to science

    After creating a 3-D language called quon, which could be used to understand concepts related to quantum information theory, Harvard mathematicians now say the language offers tantalizing hints that it could offer insight into a host of other areas in mathematics, from algebra to Fourier analysis, and in theoretical physics from statistical physics to string…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    First glimpse of a kilonova, and Harvard was there

    Marking the beginning of a new era in astrophysics, scientists for the first time have detected gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, or light, from the same event. Harvard researchers were pivotal in the work.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Last survivors on Earth

    A testament to the resiliency of life, the microscopic tardigrade can survive any cosmic calamity, according to an Oxford-Harvard study.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Figuring out superconductors

    A team of physicists has taken a crucial step toward understanding superconductors by creating a quantum antiferromagnet from an ultracold gas of hundreds of lithium atoms.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Inspired by physics and art

    Julia Grotto ’17 combines art, science, and public service to paint a complete picture of her life at Harvard.

    4 minutes