Science & Tech
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The answer to your search may depend on where you live
Researchers find ‘language bias’ in various site algorithms, raising concerns about fallout for social divisions among nations
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Putting human past on the MAPS
Harvard digital atlas plots patterns from history ancient and modern
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Does AI help humans make better decisions?
One judge’s track record — with and without algorithm — surprises researchers
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Tracking entwined histories of malaria, humans
New study of ancient genomes tracks disease over 5,500 years, factors in spread, including trade, warfare, colonialism, and slavery
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Want to make robots more agile? Take a lesson from a rat.
Scientists create realistic virtual rodent with digital neural network to study how brain controls complex, coordinated movement
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More than a planetary fender-bender
New study finds Earth collided with dense interstellar cloud, possibly affecting life on planet
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Better-quality child care has real effects
In a study, higher quality child care showed a positive relation to higher levels of social functioning in children both at school and at home. Those children who attended higher-level…
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Business professor works to unlock the mysteries of television viewing habits
Media consultants have spent years studying what convinces viewers to watch certain programs. While there are no purely empirical answers why certain programs are more popular than others, a new…
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Astronomers resolve visible blast wave from gamma-ray burst
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are mysterious flashes of high-energy light that are detected about once a day somewhere in the sky. However, their origin remains unknown to astronomers, most of whom…
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Examining differing reproductive desires in Gambia
For men in rural Gambia, more than 15 kids are desirable. That’s double the number of children that women are actually delivering. The number may seem high to people in…
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Chandra clinches case for missing-link black hole
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have zeroed in on a mid-mass black hole in the galaxy M82. This black hole – located 600 light years away from the center…
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Cosmic ‘superbubbles’ bespeak toil and trouble
The merging Antennae Galaxies in constellation Corvus are producing massive bubbles of expanding X-ray-emitting gas at such astonishing rates that they are bumping into each other. Giuseppina Fabbiano, Andreas Zezas…
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Medical records play role in domestic violence legal cases
Two researchers studied nearly 100 medical charts of women who had previously been identified as abuse survivors. They found that physicians frequently did not screen for abuse and that the…
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Mystery of cometary X-rays solved
Comets, which resemble “dirty snow balls” a few miles in diameter, until recently were thought to be too cold to emit X-rays. So the detection of X-rays from comet Hyakutake…
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Fighting prostate cancer with radioactive seeds
In November 1997, a team of surgeons headed by Anthoy D’Amico, an associate professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School, first used a technique that treats early stages of…
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Men have distorted image of what women find attractive
Asked by researchers to choose the bodies they would most like to have, male college students in a study picked computer images with 30 pounds more muscle than they actually…
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The whys and woes of child beauty pageants
Hilary Levey, a member of the Harvard College Class of ’02, studied child beauty pageants. “With the death of JonBenet Ramsey, there’s been a barrage of interest in beauty pageants…
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Chandra discovers elusive ‘hot bubble’ in planetary nebula
A planetary nebula (so called because it looks like a planet when viewed with a small telescope) is formed when a dying red giant star puffs off its outer layer,…
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Nebula resembles gigantic cosmic crossbow
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captured the details of a compact nebula that resembles a gigantic cosmic crossbow. The nebula, located in the Vela supernova remnant, is created as a rapidly…
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High demands, lack of control on the job damage health
A new study has advanced previous research by linking job stress to broad, quality-of-life health issues such as carrying out daily household chores and general mental health. Previous studies have…
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What constitutes “community” online?
How do we create online communities? Six panelists at the 2000 Harvard Internet and Society Conference struggled with the question. “Real world communities are ever so simple to create,” said…
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Internet revolutionizing way designers (and others) work
Professor Spiro Pollalis, who serves as director of the Center for Design Informatics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, estimates Internet-based project management networks are now being utilized by…
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Gamma rays may be left over from cosmic construction project
The origin of the diffuse and pervasive background of gamma-ray radiation that exists over the universe has been one of the great unsolved mysteries in cosmology. Even the known population…
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Study finds that for young men, family comes first
Breaking ranks with their fathers and grandfathers on the important issue of work-family integration, 71 percent of men 21-39 said in a survey that they would give up some of…
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Professor’s survey method opens ‘windows of consciousness’
Bringing together theories and tools from disciplines ranging from psychology to neuroscience, the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School attempts to define and qualify consumers’ and managers’…
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Helping clear the air in China
Across China’s industrial areas, black soot settles into people’s lungs and bronchial tubes, producing an annual epidemic of respiratory disease. That’s the result of heating homes, schools, and offices with…
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New generation of faculty members sets new priorities
Although doctoral candidates and new faculty still regard tenure as important when seeking employment, they will consider non-tenure over tenure-track positions if jobs meet other conditions, including desirable geographic location,…
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Air pollution deadlier than previously thought
The idea that air pollution is harmful is hardly new. However, critics of the previous research of Joel Schwartz, associate professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public…
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Digital communications will reshape the way businesses market goods
In a chapter of the forthcoming book Digital Marketing, Harvard Business School Professor John A. Deighton and coauthor Patrick Barwise of the London Business School identify three qualities that distinguish…
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Computers that are more than the sum of their parts
In the 1960s, a potentially serious drawback threatened further progress toward the computer age. As Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark and his colleague, Professor Carliss Baldwin, wrote in their…
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Cosmic pressure fronts mapped by Chandra
The collision of two giant clusters of galaxies has been imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. For the first time, the pressure fronts in this system, which has been compared…
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Scientists probe Northern Hemisphere ozone loss
The ozone layer shields us from cancerous ultraviolet radiation. Understanding how it is being destroyed was the mission of more than 350 scientists from the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan,…
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Immigration experts focus on attitudes of children
Too many immigrants in the United States are staring into what Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco call “a toxic mirror” that seriously compromises the self-image of children who will grow up…
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Differences between vowels and consonants are real
While working with colleagues in Rome, two Harvard researchers serendipitously met two women with intriguing speech deficits. As the result of a stroke, one patient could not reproduce the sounds…
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South Pole telescope sees origin of starbursts
Astronomers have seen how star formation occurs in the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy by using a telescope based at the South Pole. The observations contribute to our…
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Despite some progress, segregation persists in Boston area
A report, “Segregation in the Boston Metropolitan Area at the End of the 20th Century,” found that despite the progress that disadvantaged minorities have made in achieving homeownership outside of…