Featured series 
Tag: Engineering & Technology
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Campus & Community
H-Link will connect students in same classes
In response to student requests and the evolving ways students are using technology to communicate with each other, Harvard University is creating H-Link, a Web application that connects students’ courses and classmates with their Facebook accounts, which will be available starting Feb. 25. Facebook is an Internet “social utility” very popular among high school and…
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Campus & Community
Harvard to collect, disseminate scholarly articles for faculty
In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted Tuesday (Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.
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Campus & Community
‘I’m ready for my close-up, Professor Kuriyama …’
How do you attract students to a course? With more than 5,400 classes on offer each year, it can be a difficult proposition. Shigehisa Kuriyama, Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, borrows a Hollywood technique: offer a movie trailer.
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Science & Tech
Seabed microbe study leads to low-cost power, light for the poor
A Harvard biology professor’s fascination with seafloor microbes has led to the development of a revolutionary, low-cost power system consuming garbage, compost, and other waste that could provide light for the developing world.
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Arts & Culture
Scholar uses Singer sewing machine to parse cultural, economic development
Harvard historian Andrew D. Gordon ’74, Ph.D. ’81 specializes in modern Japan and has written or edited a handful of breakthrough books on big labor, big steel, and big management.
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Campus & Community
In brief
Harvard Trademark Program launches new site The Harvard Trademark Program has announced the launch of its new Web site,http://www.trademark.harvard.edu.
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Arts & Culture
The hidden resources of ‘the extended piano’
Brian Kane’s composition “Another Cascando” sounds a bit like barking dogs at a construction site; Johannes Kreidler’s “Piano Piece #5” is reminiscent of distant artillery fire; and Hans Tutschku’s “Zellen – Linien” seems to include the sharp, high-pitched sounds of breaking glass.
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Health
A smaller world, but not more intimate
Our increasingly interconnected world has made it easier for information and disease to spread. However, a new study from Harvard University and Cornell University shows that fewer “degrees of separation” can make social networks too weak to disseminate behavioral change. The finding that “small world” networks are limited in their power to shape individual behavior…
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Health
Researchers track down arthritis gene
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have discovered a gene involved in rheumatoid arthritis, a painful inflammation that affects 2.1 million Americans and which can destroy cartilage and bone within the afflicted joint.
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Science & Tech
Engineered weathering process could mitigate global warming
Researchers at Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University have invented a technology, inspired by nature, to reduce the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by human emissions.
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Campus & Community
In brief
Community Gifts kicks off season of giving Vendor fair to explore the ease of being green HILR’s new Green Committee spotlights transportation Upcoming Goethe-Institut concert to feature Harvard composer Safra Foundation seeks fellowship applicants Holyoke group art show seeks submissions Arboretum seeks T-shirt designs for Lilac Sunday
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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
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
The Committee for the Provostial Fund awards seven new proposals
The Office of the Dean for the Arts and Humanities has announced that the Committee for the Provostial Fund in the Arts and Humanities has recently awarded funds to the following seven proposals (in alphabetical order by title).
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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
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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Nation & World
How Sputnik changed U.S. education
Education experts said Oct. 4 that the United States may be overdue for a science education overhaul like the one undertaken after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite 50 years ago, and predicted that a window for change may open as the Iraq war winds down.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard scientists predict the future of the past tense
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.”
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Campus & Community
Taking distance education to the next level
A major advance in distance education was initiated this fall in a specially equipped classroom at the Harvard Extension School. Classes held there give online students the ability to view on-campus lectures in real-time and actually take part in classroom discussions. The facility also serves as an experimental locus to test distance education teaching methods…
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Science & Tech
Ancient practice sans theory
Move over, Archimedes. A researcher at Harvard University is finding that ancient Greek craftsmen were able to engineer sophisticated machines without necessarily understanding the mathematical theory behind their construction.
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Science & Tech
Digging for solutions to energy crisis
In the 1970s, Iceland was one of the poorest countries in Europe. Today it is one of the richest, with a per capita GDP higher than that of Denmark, from which it won full independence in 1944.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard Map Collection digitizes historic Cambridge and Boston atlases
The Harvard Map Collection’s atlases of historic Cambridge have much to reveal about the city and the University’s past. Looking at these oversized documents one learns, for instance, that 135 years ago, Harvard students boarded their horses in the University stables where the current-day John Harvard’s Brew House operates, and that, as of 1903, the…
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Arts & Culture
Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art announces landmark gift
The Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art (CTSMA), a leading research center of the Harvard University Art Museums, has announced a major gift of Barnett Newman’s studio materials and related ephemera through the generosity of The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation.
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Campus & Community
University adopts a new schedule for management of records
As of Sept. 1, the University has adopted a new General Records Schedule (GRS) — a publication of records management services in the Harvard University Archives. The new GRS describes and sets standards for the management and retention of University records. This vital document is relevant to every Harvard office and applies to records in…
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Science & Tech
Creating a computer currency
Computer scientists are using the latest version of peer-to-peer video sharing software to explore a next-generation electronic commerce model that uses bandwidth as a global currency.
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Arts & Culture
Light Prop shines again
This Saturday (July 21), one of the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s most unusual artworks will get a new lease on life.