The inaugural Pforzheimer Fellows program ended with the summer, but each of the four fellows said the experience had a lasting impact on how they understand and use libraries. The program, launched earlier this year for humanities graduate students interested in learning about emerging library fields, exposed the fellows to new materials as well as…

The number of premature deaths worldwide could be reduced by 40 percent by 2030 with political commitment and sustained international efforts, according to a new study in The Lancet. The study suggests that half of all deaths under age 50 and a third of deaths between ages 50-69 could be prevented, largely by accelerating efforts…

Can any single object create more more anxiety for librarians than the simple X-Acto knife? At the inaugural Books@Baker event, Michael Blanding, author of The Map Thief and Baker Library staff member, discussed the damage wrought by a rare map dealer and his X-Acto knife. Between 1998 and 2005, E. Forbes Smiley III pilfered nearly…

On one of the last summer days, volunteers and community members met to share food, recipes and remedies at the Countway Community Garden’s Harvest Festival. Attendees enjoyed hand-bagged herbal teas and a potluck feast made by the gardeners.

Six Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers were among the recipients of the 2014 António Champalimaud Vision Award, the highest distinction in ophthalmology and visual science. The award was given for the development of anti-angiogenic therapy for retinal disease. The researchers include Joan Whitten Miller, Evangelos S. Gragoudas, and Patricia A. D’Amore, of HMS and Massachusetts…

Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) epidemiologist Caroline Buckee and her team are using cell phone data to track travel patterns across West Africa to help fight the Ebola epidemic. Such data — including unique cell phone “pings” from cell phone towers — can show where people have gone after leaving a disease hot spot, thus suggesting where a disease cluster might…

Mosoka Fallah, MPH ’12, who grew up in Monrovia, Liberia, has returned to the capital city to help contain the spreading Ebola epidemic. An epidemiologist and immunologist, Fallah has been systematically leading teams of volunteers through the city’s slums to identify victims, remove bodies, and trace contacts of infected people. A New York Times profile published September 13, 2014…

Houston-based artist and community activist Rick Lowe has been named a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. The founder of Project Row Houses, Lowe transformed 22 derelict shotgun houses in Houston’s historic Third Ward into a combined arts venue and community center for artists, single mothers, and low-income families. Twenty years and 71 structures later, Lowe’s unconventional approach…

People who have had colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy to remove low-risk colorectal polyps may have no greater risk of dying from colon cancer than the general public and likely do not need frequent follow-up colonoscopies, according to new findings by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers and colleagues. The researchers, including Mette Kalager, visiting scientist in HSPH’s Department…

Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, has become a leading critic of experiments creating dangerous flu strains that are transmissible between mammals. Earlier this year, he co-authored an editorial calling for greater scrutiny of these so-called “gain-of- function” experiments, and for future studies on flu transmission to use safer and more effective alternative approaches. “Just learning…

The amount of methylmercury, a neurotoxin, in the earth’s atmosphere has quadrupled since the days before industrialization, and its toxic effects are changing the songs being sung by birds in the area of Waynesboro, Virginia. An article in Environmental Health News explores how the mercury emitted by a nearby factory contaminated Waynesboro’s South River, affecting the animals that the…

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today a $150,000 grant to the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture (HMSC) to create an innovative learning experience titled “What’s in a Name? Species, Naming and the Scientific Process” to educate and engage the public in the scientific process of systematics, species identification and naming. …

Twenty-three public service visionaries and social entrepreneurs from Harvard Law School have been selected as recipients of grants from the Public Service Venture Fund, a unique program that awards up to $1 million each year to help graduating Harvard Law students and recent graduates obtain their ideal jobs in public service. This year’s recipients were…

Flashed on screen at a recent Harvard symposium was an illustration from the year 1308 showing students in a lecture-style class. Some are fooling around. Some look bored. One is even sleeping. Next on screen: a modern-day photo of a lecture-style class, surprisingly similar to the 1308 illustration. The professor is at a lectern —…

Examining urban heat vulnerability, GSD assistant professor of urban planning Joyce Klein Rosenthal recently published “Intra-Urban Vulnerability to Heat-Related Mortality in New York City” in the journal Health and Place. Unlike past research on this topic, Klein Rosenthal’s approach was very fine-grained, analyzing findings from specific New York City neighborhoods, as well as socioeconomic and demographic factors and the role…

Two new studies are weighing in on the ongoing debate about whether the best diet is low-fat or low-carbohydrate, but Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) nutrition expert Frank Hu says that no one diet can claim to be best for everyone. One new study found that a group of low-carb dieters lost about 12 pounds over the course of a year — four…

HarvardX for Allston is a new educational initiative which brings HarvardX content and edX online courses to the Allston-Brighton community and general public by offering programs that integrate the latest in virtual education technologies with opportunities for in-person interactions and discussion. The endeavor, part of the University’s community benefits program for the Allston-Brighton community in…

In the years since a 2011 study found that early treatment with antiretroviral drugs could reduce HIV transmission between couples in which one partner has the virus and the other does not, “Treatment as Prevention” (TasP) has become a major focus for attention in the global fight against AIDS. But more work is needed to know how to…

In 2002, Harvard opened another online door to its vast collections via the Open Collections Program, an early effort to design web-accessible collections to support research, teaching and learning for anyone with internet access. The initiative posted 2.3 million pages of materials from across Harvard’s libraries online, which are still regularly used by researchers. With initial…

Old habits may die hard, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. David Gordon Lyon, founder of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Hollis Professor of Divinity and Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages began keeping a diary in 1870 as an undergraduate and continued throughout the rest of his life. The 38 notebooks Lyon filled…

The Parker Quartet will present its first concert as Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at the Harvard on Friday, September 26 at 8 p.m. in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall. The concert features Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5, Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit, and Dvořák’s String Quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105. The renowned Quartet (Daniel…

Judith D. Singer, senior vice provost for Faculty Development and Diversity and the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education, is the recipient of the 13th annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences, The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced last week. Singer is an internationally renowned statistician…

HarvardX invites creative coders everywhere to a learning technology challenge. The mission is to create an interactive visualization of the binomial distribution suitable for students who are learning the topic of probability. Possible approaches include interactive line or bar graphs, coin-flip or dice-roll simulations, combinations of these, or something completely different. Winners will see their work appear in…

Jonathan Haber, the lifelong learner behind Degree of Freedom and author of MOOCs: The Essential Guide, has been appointed the inaugural HarvardX Visiting Fellow. He begins his six month appointment in September. Haber will immerse himself in the organization, focusing in particular on helping the learning and research teams develop better, more robust, and effective online assessments. In…

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports no known cases of Ebola transmission in the United States, a Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH)/SSRS poll released August 21, 2014 shows that four-in-ten (39 percent) adults in the U.S. are concerned that there will be a large outbreak in the U.S., and a quarter (26 percent) are concerned…

In only two months as an intern in a lab at Harvard School of Public Health, Erika Espinosa believes she learned more than she could have in a semester of undergraduate courses. The Summer Program in Biological Sciences in Public Health (BPH), Espinosa said, “taught me the real definition of hard work” as she performed molecular…

When she was running for a seat in Japan’s house of representatives, Mayuko Toyota, SM ’02, one day found herself standing in the rain on crutches, giving a speech at a common venue for politicking in that country: outside the train station. “I might have looked miserable,” she said, explaining that an injury had her hobbling around…

The U.S. spends more than $2.8 trillion on health care each year, and some estimate that 30% of that price tag may be waste. To promote more effective use of health care resources, a group of national organizations representing medical specialists are working to identify procedures and tests that may be overused. The Choosing Wisely initiative, sponsored by the American Board of…

For the past year, Harvard Law students in the Education Law Clinic have travelled back and forth to the Massachusetts State House to lobby state legislators to pass an Act Relative to Safe and Supportive Schools. On August 13, all that work paid off, when Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed the Safe and Supportive Schools…

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Emily Balskus has been named an Innovator Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. Each year since 1999, editors of the review have selected exceptionally talented young innovators whose work they believe has the greatest potential to transform the world. Balskus uses a variety of approaches, including advanced DNA sequencing,…