Featured series 
All articles
-
Campus & Community
Robert Johnson, 35-year employee, passes away
Robert M. Johnson, an employee of the University for 35 years, died on Dec. 18, 2004, in Sandwich, Mass. Johnson was 83. Johnson, who retired in 1979, worked at Harvard for buildings and grounds. He was a World War II veteran and a VFW commander.
-
Campus & Community
Snaring secrets of Venus flytrap
A team of researchers has solved the riddle of one of the plant kingdoms fastest and most ferocious movements: the blink-of-an-eye closing of the Venus flytrap.
-
Campus & Community
Dean appointed to Graduate School of Design
President Lawrence H. Summers announced Wednesday (Feb. 2) the appointment of Alan A. Altshuler, Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Policy and Planning in the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School of Government, to the position of dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (HGSD), effective immediately. Altshuler has been…
-
Campus & Community
A record 22,717 students apply to the College
A record total of 22,717 students have applied for entrance next September to Harvard College. This unprecedented applicant pool is due in large measure to the new Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI) announced by President Lawrence H. Summers last February in his keynote address to the American Council on Education, said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean…
-
Campus & Community
Biggest stars produce strongest magnets
Assistant Professor of Astronomy Bryan Gaensler and colleagues have discovered the source of powerful magnetic objects in the universe called magnetars, finding that some of the biggest stars in the cosmos become the strongest magnets when they die. First discovered in 1998, a magnetar is an exotic kind of neutron star – a city-sized ball…
-
Campus & Community
Climate solutions through forests
Using the environment to help address the nation’s pollution problems. That’s the focus of a new report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and researchers at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and Indiana University. The “Cost of U.S. Forest-based Carbon Sequestration” investigates the potential for incorporating land-use changes into climate policy. Authored…
-
Campus & Community
Winds and waves sculpted a ‘snowball Earth’
It’s a world hard to imagine. Some 650 million years ago, Earth’s land and oceans were almost completely covered by ice and snow. The planet’s population – primitive plants and animals like algae and bacteria – sheltered themselves around hot springs on the ocean floor, in surface ponds melted by volcanic heat, or in nooks…
-
Campus & Community
Suicide high among female doctors
Male doctors take their own lives at a higher rate than the general population of white men in the United States. That’s been known for some time. Now, the largest, latest study of physician suicides in this country has found that female doctors take their lives much more often. The study was undertaken by Harvard…
-
Health
Weight and weight gain may predict breast cancer survival
The study included 5,204 women with invasive breast cancer who were between the ages 30 to 55 when enrolled in the study in 1976. The researchers found that women who weighed more before they were diagnosed with breast cancer and those who were lean but gained weight after diagnosis and treatment tended to have worse…
-
Health
Phobic anxiety increases risk of sudden cardiac death in women
According to lead author Christine M. Albert, M.D., M.P.H., an epidemiologist at BWH and an electrophysiologist and cardiologist at MGH, “Phobic anxiety is associated with coronary heart disease risk factors. However, in this study, in which these risk factors were controlled, we found a correlation between higher levels of phobic anxiety and death from CHD,…
-
Science & Tech
Most Milky Way stars are single
Common wisdom among astronomers holds that most star systems in the Milky Way are multiple, consisting of two or more stars in orbit around each other. Common wisdom is wrong.
-
Health
Scientists discover “master switch” that triggers insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes
“We zeroed in on a factor called NF-kB,” said principal investigator Steven E. Shoelson, M.D., Ph.D., Helen and Morton Adler Chair and head of the Section on Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Joslin, and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medicine School. Shoelson said that activating NF-kB in the livers of laboratory animals incited inflammatory responses.…
-
Health
Study says women don’t experience pain, anxiety during mammograms
“I think it’s an old wives tale that mammograms hurt,” says the study’s lead author, Alice Domar, PhD, director of the Mind/ Body Center for Women’s Health at Boston IVF and senior psychologist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. According to the American Cancer Society, one-third to one-half…
-
Health
Weight gain and obesity linked to higher risk of kidney stones
“Our study demonstrated that multiple measures of larger body size, including larger waist circumference, higher weight, and higher body mass index, were related to an elevated risk of kidney stones,” said Eric Taylor, M.D., a BWH researcher and nephrologist. The data are based on a study of approximately 45,000 men and more than 200,000 women…
-
Health
Snaring secrets of the Venus flytrap
While “speed” is not a word most people associate with the plant kingdom, the Venus flytrap closes its v-shaped leaves in just one-tenth of a second – fast enough to accomplish a feat thousands if not millions of backyard barbecuers fail at each summer: snaring a fly. So how can a plant pull this off?…
-
Science & Tech
Racial, ethnic gap in youth violence linked to social factors
A study conducted by Robert J. Sampson of Harvard University and Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Michigan shows that the longstanding gap in the racial burden of violence follows a social anatomy and is not immutable. The odds of committing violence are almost double for blacks as compared to whites…
-
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…
-
Health
Safer cigarettes would cut fire deaths if made available
Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health, funded by the American Legacy Foundation, compared the physical properties of cigarettes sold in New York with cigarettes of the same brands sold in Massachusetts and California. The researchers found: • That while not perfectly self-extinguishing, New York cigarettes were far less likely to burn to the end…
-
Health
One alcoholic drink per day improves cognitive function among older women
According to the study’s senior author, BWH’s Francine Grodstein, Sc.D., “Much evidence has demonstrated the heart benefits of light alcohol drinking, but less research has focused on cognitive functioning. While we all continue to recommend exercising caution when consuming any type of alcohol, our study suggests that moderate consumption might provide older women some cognitive…
-
Health
First view of many neurons processing information in living brain
A Harvard Medical School (HMS) research team used a new technique to obtain the first close-up look at the neural circuits that produce vision in cats and rats. “Put simply, this technique allows us to see the brain seeing,” said R. Clay Reid, HMS professor of neurobiology, a member of the HMS Systems Neuroscience initiative,…
-
Science & Tech
Tiny RNA molecules fine-tune the brain’s synapses
Non-coding regions of the genome – those that don’t code for proteins – are now known to include important elements that regulate gene activity. Among those elements are microRNAs, tiny, recently discovered RNA molecules that suppress gene expression. Increasing evidence indicates a role for microRNAs in the developing nervous system, and researchers from Children’s Hospital…
-
Health
Monitoring system needed to prevent safety hazard of problem physicians
Asserting that “physician performance failures are not rare and pose substantial threats to patient welfare and safety,” experts in medical error are calling on state medical boards and healthcare organizations to institute a formal monitoring and prevention system for catching “problem doctors” before they do further harm. Research has shown that “the vast majority of…
-
Health
Disparate proteins structurally identical
Gerhard Wagner, the Elkan Blout professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, and Tucker Collins, the S. Burt Wolbach professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital, made a crucial connection between two unrelated proteins. They were studying a particular type of protein when a database search for proteins with similar structures turned…
-
Health
Findings recommend herpes vaccine for human trials
Research published in the January 2005 Journal of Virology compared three different experimental vaccines for herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2), which causes most cases of genital herpes. Lead author Stephen Straus, senior investigator in the Medical Virology Section in the Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tested…
-
Health
RNA-making apparatus seen to uncoil and recoil DNA
Eukaryotic cells like to keep their DNA under wraps, winding the long strands of nucleic acid around millions of little protein complexes. This bead-on-a-string structure, called chromatin, ensures that the DNA is protected and also helps to condense the long strands of nucleic acid so they more easily are accommodated in the nucleus. Chromatin also…
-
Science & Tech
New maser measurements trace detail in active galactic core
The roiling cores of many active galaxies are difficult to see in detail because of surrounding gas and interstellar dust. Smithsonian astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006, however, a first-time measurement that may help to better trace the structure of these unusual regions. Elizabeth M. L. Humphreys and other Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) research team…
-
Science & Tech
Growing supermassive black holes from seeds
Astronomers announced Jan. 12, 2006 that they have found the first sample of intermediate-mass black holes in active galaxies – a discovery that will help in understanding the early universe. “These are local analogues of the `seed’ black holes from which supermassive black holes formed,” said Jenny E. Greene of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics…
-
Health
One third of U.S. adults use complementary and alternative medicines
The continued widespread use of individual and multiple CAM therapies underscores the need to rigorously evaluate the safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness of these approaches, according to the study’s lead author Hilary Tindle, Harvard Medical School (HMS) research fellow, and co-author David Eisenberg, director of the Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical…
-
Science & Tech
Astronomers spot the Great Orion Nebula’s successor
Astronomers announced Jan. 11, 2006, that they have found the next Orion Nebula. Known as W3, this glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia has just begun to shine with newborn stars. Shrouds of dust currently hide its light, but this is only a temporary state. In 100,000 years – a blink of the eye…