Science & Tech

Four teams that took part in a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab last weekend will go on to present their practical solutions for reducing institutional corruption to a conference at Harvard Law School in May.

“Science and Cooking” was the topic of a HarvardX lecture offered at the new Harvard Ed Portal in Allston.

Step by step, a growing Harvard women’s student group is helping to change the male-dominated culture of computer science by creating fresh realities.

Professor David Montgomery’s most recent book explores an unexpected crossroads: the intersection of geology and the Bible.

A new study examines how different kinds of shared beliefs can affect how people cooperate, and how people use common knowledge, a type of shared understanding, to coordinate their actions.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and from universities in Chile, Costa Rica, and Brazil have been studying the secret power of the velvet worm.

Harvard President Drew Faust tells an audience at Tsinghua University in Beijing that universities have a unique and critical role to play in combatting climate change.

The Gazette asked Henry Lee, an authority on electric cars and the Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at the Belfer Center, about the opportunity for the Postal Service to improve its environmental footprint — and perhaps spark broader automotive changes — through a more fuel-efficient replacement for the current model, which gets roughly 9 miles per gallon.

Sculptor Kim Bernard, known for her spinning, swaying, bouncing, moving creations, is artist-in-residence in the Physics Department.

The shale gas boom, which has transformed domestic and global energy markets, is still in its infancy, according to the chair of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Twenty-two faculty members presented seven-minute lightning lectures on research and realities involving food.

Three exhibits at the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall represent different facets of how design learning gets done.

Harvard Professor David Keith says that two new reports by the National Academy of Sciences are likely to boost a deeper look at possible geoengineering options for climate engineering.

Harvard researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind model, dubbed the “envelope game,” that can help researchers to understand not only why humans evolved to be cooperative but why people evolved to cooperate in a principled way.

A new study of football-shaped collections of stars called elliptical galaxies provides insights into the connection between a galaxy and its black hole. This new research was designed to address a controversy in the field.

Harvard Law School grad and former Pixar CFO Lawrence Levy was on campus to talk about leaving corporate life to promote the benefits of meditation with his nonprofit Juniper Foundation.

In a quest to find mismatched star pairs known as extreme mass-ratio binaries, Harvard astronomers have discovered a new class of binary stars, in which one star is fully formed while the other is still in its infancy. The discovery of these stellar twins could provide invaluable insight into the formation and evolution of massive stars, close binaries, and star nurseries.

Harvard and Brazilian students spent 10 days visiting sustainability-related sites around São Paulo as part of a field course sponsored by Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the University of São Paulo.

Seven research projects aimed at confronting the challenge of climate change using the levers of law, policy, and economics, as well as public health and science, have been awarded grants in the inaugural year of President Drew Faust’s Climate Change Solutions Fund.

For a handful of Harvard undergraduate and graduate students, the January semester break included a rare treat — a visit to the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass.

A team of researchers has developed a novel class of materials that enable a safer, cheaper, and more energy-efficient process for removing greenhouse gas from power-plant emissions.

For doctoral student Sarah Rugheimer, the study of atmosphere holds deep promise in the search for extrasolar life.

A southpaw science writer comes to terms with research on handedness by the Kennedy School’s Joshua Goodman.

A Harvard-led study reveals that an aging natural-gas distribution system short-changes Boston-area customers and contributes to greenhouse-gas buildup. Depending on the season, natural gas leaking from the local distribution system accounts for 60 percent to 100 percent of the region’s emissions of methane.

The Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University have released a report on “multistakeholder governance groups” to better inform the discussion over Internet governance models and mechanisms.

A new study shows that sea levels have increased over the last two decades at a greater rate than previously understood.

In Harvard’s high-tech cleanroom, applied physicists produce vivid optical effects — on paper.

Astronomers announced Tuesday that they have found eight new planets in the Goldilocks Zone of their stars, orbiting at a distance where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. The discoveries double the number of small planets believed to be in the habitable zone of their parent stars.

Harvard researchers have found that stars slow down as they age, and their ages are well-kept secrets. But astronomers are taking advantage of the first fact to tackle the second and tease out stellar ages.

For life as we know it to develop on other planets, those planets would need liquid water, or oceans. Geologic evidence suggests that Earth’s oceans have existed for nearly the entire history of our world.