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Campus & Community
Harvard underfoot
Theres beauty everywhere, even underfoot, if you only look. A puddle captures the tower of Harvard Hall gracefully framed by a bare winter tree. (Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)
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Campus & Community
Researcher Mia Ong: Physics ‘glass ceiling’ intact
Ask most people to pull up a mental image of a physicist, and theyll likely present a wild-haired amalgam of Albert Einstein and Bill Gates wearing Buddy Holly glasses, a lab coat, and yesterdays lunch on his shirt. After all, it hardly matters what you look like if youre doing great science, right?
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Campus & Community
Women outnumber men in College’s Early Action
For the first time in Harvards history, women outnumber men in gaining admission to the College under the Early Action program. Early Action admissions for the Class of 2008 total 906, 50.9 percent of which are women. For quite some time, we have been on the verge of reaching this milestone. Alumni/ae, faculty, students, and…
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Campus & Community
President Summers holds student office hours today, 4-5 p.m.
President Lawrence H. Summers will hold office hours for students in his Massachusetts Hall office on the following dates:
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Campus & Community
Police reports
Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department for the weeks beginning Dec. 7 and ending Jan. 3. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor.
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Campus & Community
Public notice
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations will conduct an accreditation survey of Harvard University Health Services on Feb. 10 -13.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Jan. 10, 1921 – In the Music Building’s John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Marian MacDowell, widow of composer Edward MacDowell, gives a lecture on “The MacDowell Colony at Peterborough” (the New Hampshire artist colony that the MacDowells established in 1907). Jan. 11, 1942 – The 100th birthday of Harvard psychologist-philosopher William James (1842-1910). For weeks…
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Campus & Community
Faculty Council meeting, Jan. 7
At its sixth meeting of the year, the Faculty Council discussed three interrelated topics: (1) The extension of the Infrastructure Fund (2) The rise in and effects of the fringe benefit rate and (3) Faculty of Arts and Sciences financial results for FY 2003 and prospects for this and future years. Ann Berman, vice president…
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Campus & Community
Eaton memorial service set
A memorial service for Kennedy School faculty member Susan C. Eaton will be held Saturday (Jan. 10) at 10:30 a.m. at First Parish Church in Cambridge. Eaton died Dec. 30 from complications of leukemia. She was 46.
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Campus & Community
Police advisory
On Dec. 11 at approximately 7 p.m. a graduate student was walking on Mt. Auburn Street toward Dunster Street when she was approached by a male who attempted to grab her crotch while walking by her. The victim pulled back causing the suspect to briefly touch her thigh. The suspect and the victim continued to…
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Campus & Community
Harvard Gazette: Scorpion venom blocks bone loss
Paloma Valverde knows scorpion venom. A biochemist, she has worked with it for years, and marveled at how it can both kill prey and fight a number of diseases in both animals and humans.
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Science & Tech
Researcher Mia Ong finds physics ‘glass ceiling’ intact
If you’re anything other than a middle-aged white guy, your appearance matters profoundly in physics, where appearances aren’t supposed to matter, found Graduate School of Education researcher Maria “Mia” Ong. Ong’s research emerged from a much larger study of physics undergraduates and graduates at a large research university. While conducting interviews with these students, she…
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Campus & Community
C-reactive protein, high blood pressure linked
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital found a strong link between levels of C-reactive protein in the blood and the future development of high blood pressure. C-reactive protein (CRP) is an indicator of inflammation and has already been linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. The research,…
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Science & Tech
Light propagates via wires more slender than its own wavelength
A research team led by Harvard’s Eric Mazur and Limin Tong, a visiting professor from Zhejiang University in China, reported on their work with nanowires in the Dec. 18, 2003 issue of the journal Nature. “You wouldn’t normally imagine that a baseball could pass through a garden hose, but these nanowires appear able to handle…
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Science & Tech
Tiniest droplets produced from triangular nozzles
Ultra-tiny taps – which could, in theory, create drops just 8 billionths of a millimeter in size – might prove a boon for technologies that employ sprays of costly materials. For instance, triangular taps could boost the resolution of ink-jet printers, which work by squirting fine droplets of ink onto surfaces. They could also cut…
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Science & Tech
Have light, will not travel
Harvard researchers fired a short signal pulse of red laser light into a sealed glass cylinder containing a hot gas of rubidium atoms illuminated by a strong control beam. While the pulse was traveling through the rubidium gas, they switched off the control beam, resulting in the storage of a holographic imprint of the signal…
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Health
Scorpion venom blocks bone loss
Rats given kalitoxin, from scorpion venom, enjoyed 84 percent less jawbone loss than those that didn’t get the injections. “We are very excited because this is the first demonstration that this type of compound may be useful in treating periodontal disease,” says Martin Taubman, Harvard professor of oral and developmental biology who chairs the Department…
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Health
Keeping synapses clean may hold key to fear-conditioning
As readers of introductory psychology texts know, animals easily learn to fear a harmless stimulus, such as a tone, if that stimulus is paired with a painful one, such as a foot shock. For this fear conditioning to take root in the brain, neurons located in the almond-shaped amygdala must become extraordinarily sensitized to the…
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Health
MRI scan shows promise in treating bipolar disorder
A study published in the Jan. 1, 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry had a surprising start. As Michael Rohan, imaging physicist in McLean Hospital’s Brain Imaging Center, explains, “We were using MRI to investigate the effectiveness of certain medications in bipolar patients and noticed that many came out of the MRI feeling…
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Health
For-profit health plans did not restrict Medicare beneficiaries’ use of high-cost operative procedures
Testing the hypothesis that rates of use of 12 high-cost procedures would be lower in for-profit health plans than in not-for-profit plans, researchers analyzed Medicare HEDIS (Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set) data on more than 3.7 million Medicare beneficiaries 65 years of age or older who were enrolled in 254 health plans in…
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Science & Tech
Raging storms of hot and cold gas
New observations with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), Hubble’s high-precision and ultra-sensitive spectrometer, show that the warm chromosphere of Betelgeuse extends out to more than 50 times its radius in visible light, a size five times larger than the orbit of Neptune. (The chromosphere is an inner layer of a star’s atmosphere, between the…
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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…
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Science & Tech
Suns of all ages possess comets, maybe planets
Astronomers observed a comet puffing out huge amounts of carbon, one of the key elements for life. The comet also emitted large amounts of water vapor as the Sun’s heat baked its outer surface. When combined with previous observations suggesting the presence of evaporating comets near young stars like Beta Pictoris and old stars like…
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Science & Tech
Young star caught speeding
Findings linking a speeding star to its birthplace provide direct observational support of theoretical simulations predicting that protostars can be tossed out of a young cluster. This is the first time that such a fast-moving young star has been seen outside of a cluster or binary system. Astronomers Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and…
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Health
Coffee cuts diabetes risk
More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of a study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses Health Study. Some 41,934 men were tracked from 1986 to 1998 and 84,276 women from1980 to 1998 via food…
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Science & Tech
Planetary survivor strategy: Outeat, outweigh, outlast!
Astronomers Myron Lecar and Dimitar Sasselov have found that planet formation is a contest, where a growing planet must fight for survival lest it be swallowed by the star that initially nurtured it. Of the first 100 stars found to harbor planets, more than 30 stars host a Jupiter-sized world in an orbit smaller than…
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Health
New study identifies inhibitor of anthrax toxin
Findings by a research team could eventually lead to the development of a protease inhibitor drug, which in combination with antibiotics could be used to treat anthrax cases later in the disease, at a point when antibiotics alone are no longer effective. “Unlike most types of bacteria, bacillus anthracis has the ability to produce large…
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Health
Many Americans at high risk from flu not vaccinated
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highly recommends the flu vaccine for certain high-risk groups including people with chronic illnesses, children between the ages of six and 23 months, and people aged 65 and over. A national poll conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health Project on the Public and Biological Security found…
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Science & Tech
Diminishing returns
Election Night is one of the increasingly rare moments when large numbers of Americans gather in front of their television sets to hear about politics. Although a comparison of the 2000 election night broadcasts with those of 1968 indicates that these programs have increasingly employed sophisticated projection techniques, they now contain less of the content…
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Campus & Community
In brief
Band names Holmes Scholarship recipients The Harvard University Band has awarded its annual Malcolm H. Holmes Scholarship to freshmen Keneshia Washington and Kenton Hetrick. Given annually to two dedicated new members of the band, the award is named for Malcolm H. Holmes ’28, former conductor of the Harvard University Band. A graduate of Robert E.…