Featured series 
Tag: Research
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Campus & Community
Berkman named director of Center for Population and Development Studies
Social epidemiologist Lisa Berkman has been appointed director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman announced today (Oct. 26).
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Health
DNA reveals Neanderthal redheads
Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals’ pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of…
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Health
Lava provides window on early Earth
Researchers at Harvard and the University of Hawaii believe they’ve resolved a long-standing controversy over the roots of islands — volcanoes in the middle of tectonic plates — showing that the islands’ lava provides a window into the early Earth’s makeup.
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Science & Tech
New laser nanoantenna shows unprecedented detail
In a stunning feat of nanotechnology engineering, researchers from Harvard University have demonstrated a laser with a wide-range of potential applications in chemistry, biology, and medicine. Called a quantum cascade (QC) laser antenna, the device is capable of resolving the chemical composition of samples, such as the interior of a cell, with unprecedented detail.
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Science & Tech
Massive black hole smashes record for sizeMassive black hole smashes record for size
Using two NASA satellites, astronomers have discovered a black hole that obliterates a record announced just two weeks ago. The new black hole, with a mass 24 to 33 times that of our sun, is the heftiest known black hole to orbit another star.
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Science & Tech
If not in atmosphere, where does carbon go?
A prominent atmospheric scientist Monday (Oct. 29) called for more research into natural carbon “sinks,” which today absorb almost half of man-made carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and which will play a large role in determining the extent of future global warming.
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Campus & Community
Shell makes 5-year gift to fund Harvard energy policy research
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG) is the recipient of a five-year $3.75 million donation from the Shell Exploration & Production Co., KSG Dean David T. Ellwood recently announced. The funds will be used to enhance and expand University research efforts on critical issues of energy policy.
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Campus & Community
Harvard president announces task force on the arts
Harvard President Drew Faust announced today (Nov. 1) that she is creating a University-wide task force to examine the place of the arts at Harvard. Chaired by Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt, the task force draws its membership from faculty, students, and others across the University who represent many fields and modes of engagement with…
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Campus & Community
Du Bois Institute announces appointment of 20 fellows for 2007-08
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced the appointment of 20 new fellows for the 2007-08 academic year.
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Campus & Community
Harvard-Yenching Institute names doctoral fellows
Initiated in the 1960s, the Harvard-Yenching Institute’s Doctoral Scholar Program (DSP) now consists of two branches — Harvard-DSP and Non-Harvard DSP. Each year the institute invites Harvard departments of the humanities and social sciences to nominate candidates for the Harvard-DSP scholarship. Although not necessarily faculty members or researchers, these candidates must be from Asia.
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Campus & Community
Kuwait Program Research Fund accepting grant proposals
The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) has recently announced the 13th funding cycle for the Kuwait Program Research Fund. With the support of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, a KSG faculty committee will consider applications for one-year grants (up to $30,000) and larger grants for more extensive proposals to support advanced research…
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Health
Steven Pinker’s ‘Ideas on the Fringe’
Not long ago, Steven Pinker appeared on “The Colbert Report.” He managed to explain the functioning of the human brain to Stephen Colbert in only five words: “Brain cells fire in patterns.”
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Health
Panel investigates media reporting on science and politics of stem cells
Stem cells, politics, “fairness,” and what one participant termed “the disintegration of traditional journalism,” were all on the bill at Thursday night’s (Oct. 18) public forum titled “Stem Cells and the Media,” hosted by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
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Health
Field school brings students to Borneo
Morning came in the middle of the night in the hikers’ hut partway up the side of Borneo’s towering Mount Kinabalu.
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
Visiting scientist Frederick “Skip” Burkle, a senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), was recently elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM). New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd will deliver the Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics Thursday (Oct. 25) at 6 p.m. in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the…
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Campus & Community
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…
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Health
Nanowire makes own electricity
Harvard chemists have built a new wire out of photosensitive materials that is hundreds of times smaller than a human hair. The wire not only carries electricity to be used in vanishingly small circuits, but generates power as well.
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Health
Study probes academic, industry relationships
A study led by members of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy (MGH-IHP) has found that institutional academic-industry relationships — financial relationships companies have with medical schools or teaching hospitals rather than with individual physicians or scientists — are as common and pervasive as individual relationships. The report, the first nationwide look at…
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Campus & Community
Shore Fellows awarded valuable time
N. Stuart Harris, an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, is also an active researcher doing groundbreaking research on hypoxia — a shortage of oxygen in the body.
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Campus & Community
Center for European Studies names fall fellows
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) has recently announced the arrival of its 2007 fall fellows. The center is dedicated to fostering the study of European history, politics, and society at Harvard. Its visiting scholars play an active role in the intellectual life of the center and the University. While at Harvard,…
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Campus & Community
Program on U.S.-Japan Relations announces 16 program associates, fellows
The Program on U.S.-Japan Relations has announced this year’s class of program associates, which includes scholars, professors, government officials, businesspeople, and journalists from Japan, the United States, and elsewhere.
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Health
Hormone therapy for prostate cancer puts heart at risk
Administering androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) prior to surgery and combining ADT with radiation therapy are popular approaches to treating men diagnosed with advanced or high-risk localized prostate cancer. However, the potentially negative side effects of ADT are just now being explored. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that ADT may increase the…
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Health
Researchers better understand biological clock
Researchers at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have discovered that a simple circadian clock found in some bacteria operates by the rhythmic addition and subtraction of phosphate groups at two key locations on a single protein. This phosphate pattern is influenced by two other proteins, driving phosphorylation to oscillate according to…
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Health
Mahzarin Banaji looks at biology of bias
Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist, studies how people think, and how they think they relate to one another. She’s an expert in the little secrets we all have: those implicit attitudes — sometimes prejudicial — regarding race, age, gender, and similar territories of otherness.
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Health
Biologists remember landmark theory
Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.
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Health
At HMOs, Medicaid patients fare worse than others
Once viewed as a panacea to the nation’s health care problems, HMOs have fallen out of favor. Commercially insured patients who flooded into HMOs, or managed care, in the early 1990s left in droves by the end of the decade. Medicaid patients, however, don’t always have the luxury of choosing their health plans, and the…
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”
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Campus & Community
Harvard-Yenching Institute names visiting scholars, fellows
The Harvard-Yenching Institute recently welcomed 33 visiting scholars and fellows to the institute for the 2007-08 academic year.
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Campus & Community
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…
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Science & Tech
Harvard brings the Earth to high school
Steam vents in Yellowstone National Park are part of the area’s unique environment, seen in a case study exploring Yellowstone and the reintroduction of wolves into the park. This case study is part of a new environmental science course for high school science teachers.