Tag: science history

  • Science & Tech

    The evolution of Darwin

    In a fitting celebration of a man whose ideas revolutionized science, Harvard marked Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in style.

    5–8 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Tilting at ice ages

    Here’s a story to cool you off on a hot summer day. One of the major mysteries of ice ages may have been solved by a Harvard climatologist.

    2–3 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Figs likely first domesticated crop

    Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley, and legumes were domesticated in the region. The discovery dates domesticated figs to a period some 5,000 years earlier than…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Human skull is 7 million years old

    When a 7-million-year-old skull was first found, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard, called it “one of the greatest discoveries of the past 100 years.” After studying new evidence including teeth and jaw fragments, Lieberman stands by that statement. “The next oldest, reasonably complete humanlike skull we have is just over 3 million…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Solving the mystery of a centuries-old plague

    Edward O. Wilson identified two different ant species in investigating the mystery of centuries-old plagues, a tropical fire ant in the early 1500s and an introduced African ant in the late 1700s. Both ant plagues came with widespread crop destruction that Wilson blames on the arrival of sap-sucking insects that are tended by the ants…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Lifeless suns dominated early universe

    The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as brilliant supernovae. Those very first stars began the seeding process in the universe, spreading vital elements like carbon and oxygen, which…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Did life originally spring from clay?

    While the research is a far cry from proving that humans sprang from clay, as some creation myths assert, it does provide a possible mechanism for explaining how life initially arose from nonliving molecules. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital showed that the presence of clay aids naturally occurring reactions…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    “Winking star” started winking only recently

    In 2002, astronomers at Wesleyan University announced that they had discovered a “winking” star that undergoes a regular, long-lasting (approximately 20 day) eclipse every 48 days. They theorized that those eclipses were caused by intervening blobs of material within a protoplanetary disk surrounding that young star. Harvard astronomer Joshua Winn and colleagues decided to examine…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Earth’s birth date turned back

    Radioactive elements in rocks decay in a predictable way, like the ticking of a well-made clock that can run for millions of years. The decay marks a change in character of the elements; one type of uranium, for example, decays into lead. To measure the age of meteorites, and thereby deteremine the age of Earth…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Spotlight on the Dark Ages

    “Medievalists are just beginning to be aware of the implications of the revolutions now occurring in the life sciences for the knowledge of the past,” says Michael McCormick, the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History. “Ancient DNA has proven to be remarkably tough and, even though it is usually no longer completely intact, enough can…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Medical texts and other fictions

    In the 19th century, hysteria was considered one of the most common disorders afflicting women. Doctors advised parents to keep their daughters from riding horseback, eating vanilla, or reading novels, for fear they might develop the condition. Janet Beizer, a Harvard scholar of 19th century French literature, was so struck by the pervasiveness of this…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Cooking up a story of apes and humans

    For humans, cooking played a major role in the development of smaller jaws and teeth, bigger brains, smaller guts, shorter arms, and longer legs, according to Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. He also believes that cooking is associated with females getting heavier and more fertile. That, in turn, changed mating and…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Charles Rosenberg looks at changing perceptions of illness

    In Charles Rosenberg’s eyes, epidemics tell us a great deal about American society. Rosenberg, considered by many to be the nation’s pre-eminent medical historian, was recently named Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. Though many of Rosenberg’s works are well known, he is perhaps best known for his 1962 book, “The Cholera Years:…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    El Nino found to be 124,000 years old

    Records preserved in corals from Indonesia reveal that El Niño was causing severe weather even before the last ice age began, when the climate apparently was like it was for most of the 20th century. “No question about it; there were El Niños that long ago,” says Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences.…

    1–2 minutes