Featured series 
Tag: Science
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Arts & Culture
Albert Einstein, Civil Rights activist
Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children.
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Campus & Community
John Lyell Sanders Jr.
John Lyell Sanders, Jr., served on the Harvard faculty for a total of thirty seven years and as Gordon McKay Professor of Structural Mechanics for over thirty years from 1964 until his retirement in 1995.
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Campus & Community
Five receive Guggenheim Fellowship Awards
Five Harvard affiliates are among the 189 artists, scholars, and scientists to be selected fellowship award winners by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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Nation & World
HSPH study shows guns in homes linked to higher rates of suicide
In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state-level rates of suicide in the United States, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found that suicide rates among children, women, and men of all ages are higher in states where more households have…
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Nation & World
Global momentum for smoke-free society
In a perspective article in the April 12 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Association of European Cancer Leagues describe the growing momentum for indoor smoking bans in countries across the globe. They identify Ireland’s pioneering 2004 comprehensive indoor smoking ban…
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Science & Tech
New tourism threatens desert ecosystems worldwide
The Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) hosted a conference April 4-5 titled “Desert Tourism: Delineating the Fragile Edges of Development.” Panel discussions with leading architects, planners, and developers explored the relationship between tourism, social development, and the architecture and landscapes of arid regions around the world.
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Health
Eradicating polio better option than control
Concerns about the high perceived costs of eradicating the relatively low number of polio cases worldwide have led to recent suggestions that it is time to shift from a goal of eradication to control: abandoning eradication and allowing wild poliovirus to continue to circulate, which proponents of control believe can sustain the low number of…
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Arts & Culture
Harvard researchers head south to preserve ancient inscriptions
Researchers from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are preparing to head into the Central American rain forest to begin an ambitious, multiyear project to scan and digitize fading Maya inscriptions and carvings.
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Campus & Community
Provost Hyman names Buckley, Porter top administrators for HUSEC
Harvard University Provost Steven E. Hyman has selected two individuals with both broad and deep experience in Harvard science administration to provide administrative leadership and structure for the newly created Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC).
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Health
Root, root, root for the umpire
The roar of the crowd may subconsciously influence some referees to give an advantage to the home team, according to a study that examines the results of more than 5,000 soccer matches in the English Premier League. The matches were played between 1992 and 2006, and involved 50 different referees, each of whom had officiated…
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Health
Manipulating genetic switch in mice eases MD symptoms
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have shown in a laboratory study that revving up a crucial set of muscle genes counteracts the damage caused by a form of muscular dystrophy.
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Science & Tech
Libraries, museums meet with IT
The ability to search the actual text of millions of books — instead of just titles or summaries — will change the way students and academics conduct research, revealing a host of new sources invisible to current search methods, a Harvard University Library official working on the Google project said on March 28.
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Science & Tech
Collaboration yields first citywide network of wireless sensors
Harvard University, BBN Technologies, and the city of Cambridge have begun a four-year project to install 100 wireless sensors atop streetlights in Cambridge, Mass., creating the world’s first citywide network of wireless sensors.
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Health
Finding the start of Alzheimer’s disease
Faces are hard to remember. Even harder are the names that go with them. It’s one of the most common problems people face as they get older.
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Health
Weight gain in pregnancy linked to overweight in kids
Pregnant women who gain excessive or even appropriate weight, according to current guidelines, are four times more likely than women who gain inadequate weight to have a baby who becomes overweight in early childhood. These findings are from a new study at the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and…
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Science & Tech
Warming may not spark tree growth
A bright spot in the gloomy global warming picture has been scientists’ predictions that at least some carbon dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere by a burst of growth from tropical forests. New research from the Arnold Arboretum, however, questions that prediction, finding that trees in two forests on opposite sides of the world…
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Campus & Community
Accelerating science with innovative computing
How daunting a task is it, in an age when it is possible to visualize structures and to see them at magnifications not even dreamed of a short time ago, to produce a “wiring diagram” of the human brain?
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Campus & Community
New department approved
The Harvard Corporation has approved, with the support of the deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Harvard Medical School (HMS), the establishment of a new Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology, the first academic department in Harvard’s 371-year history to be based in more than one of the University’s Schools.…
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Health
Smile and the world smiles with you, but why?
“We are connected in ways we don’t consciously know, but which are absolutely essential for communication,” said psychologist and author Daniel Goleman at a March 14 talk on social intelligence sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. “There is a subterranean emotional economy that’s part of any interaction.”
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Campus & Community
SEAS debuts new seal, which captures the idea of ‘coming full circle’
Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) announced the debut of its new seal earlier this week. The design is based on the seal created for the Harvard School of Engineering in 1936 by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose (class of 1895).
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Health
Noninfectious pathway for HIV found by HSPH team
HIV is a crafty virus. It attacks the body by invading and taking over the very cells meant to protect humans from infection. Hiding within cells such as macrophages and lymphocytes, the virus uses the body’s natural machinery to replicate itself, destroying the immune system and leaving patients open to a range of debilitating and…
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Nation & World
Stem cells, through a religious lens
Representatives of three of the world’s major religions tangled over the beginnings of human life, the disposal of surplus embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics, and the conduct of embryonic stem cell research Wednesday (March 14) at Harvard Divinity School. Panelists at the event, representing Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, each briefly presented their faith’s teachings…
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Health
Vitamin D may protect against prostate cancer
With spring on the way, Harvard researchers advise men to get more sun, supplements, and seafood. All are good sources of vitamin D, and a large, lengthy study suggests the vitamin reduces risk of prostate cancer.
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Health
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…
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Health
Brugge, colleagues urge Senate to increase NIH funding
Testifying Monday afternoon (March 19) before a U.S. Senate committee hearing on National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, Harvard Medical School Cell Biology Department Chair Joan S. Brugge warned that “four years of flat [NIH] funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research,” threatening “the rapid progress in developing effective and…
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Arts & Culture
Rothenberg praises value of humanities
James Rothenberg is a leading figure in the investment world as well as being Harvard University’s treasurer and a member of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers.
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Campus & Community
Holdren delivers keynote at AAAS conference
Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government John Holdren recently delivered the keynote address at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) last month in San Francisco. The director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program at the Belfer Center and…
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Health
High-deductible health plans are linked to fewer ER visits
Patients who switched to high-deductible health plans went to the emergency department 10 percent less than patients who remained in traditional plans, according to a new study by the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention (of Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care). The study, published in the March 14 Journal of the American…