Amazon immersion fosters partnerships, offers students, researchers hard look at threats to economic security, environment of rainforest as Earth warms
A new three-year, three-city course at the Harvard Graduate School of Design gives students an immersive learning experience in some of China’s fast-growing frontier cities.
The U.S. lacks a national water policy, resulting in pushing and pulling by a wide array of competing interests in managing the nation’s water supply, said experts at a Radcliffe symposium.
Harvard’s Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program is making a digital scan of Harvard Yard’s Chinese stele as part of a conservation effort aimed at preserving the ornate gift from Harvard’s Chinese alumni on Harvard’s 300th birthday.
Joel Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia universities, looked at the latest projections for world population growth, and factors that could alter them, in a Harvard talk.
Using a continent-spanning telescope, an international team of astronomers has peered to the edge of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. For the first time, they have measured the black hole’s “point of no return” — the closest distance that matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.
The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences celebrates a landmark degree accreditation, and a broadening, flexible future of programs that break down academic barriers.
Environmentalists and faculty members gathered at Sanders Theatre to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which catalyzed the environmental movement in its impassioned presentation of the impact of chemicals on nature.
While new species naturally expand to other places and sometimes disrupt the scene when they arrive, the pace of introduction of invasive species has picked up enormously over the past century and a half, stressing and transforming New England forests.
Measurements of stress hormones and self-reports of anxiety show that leaders in stable organizations experience less stress than their subordinates, likely because they have greater control over their office lives.
Republican objections to a climate change “tax” have stained the cap-and-trade approach to tackling climate change, making it politically unpalatable, even though it proved effective at fighting acid rain over the past two decades.
Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments celebrates the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, whose ideas theorized the first computers, spurred the science of artificial intelligence, and — oh yes — helped save the Allies during World War II.
At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that planets still can form in this cosmic maelstrom.
A Harvard-led team of researchers has demonstrated a new type of light beam that propagates without spreading outward, remaining very narrow and controlled along an unprecedented distance. It could greatly reduce signal loss for on-chip optical systems and may eventually assist the development of a more powerful class of microprocessors.
A team of experts in mechanics, materials science, and tissue engineering at Harvard has created an extremely stretchy and tough gel that may suggest a new method for replacing damaged cartilage in human joints.
Chef-mixologist Dave Arnold and kitchen science author Harold McGee kicked off the third season of the “Science and Cooking” lecture series, looking at both the history and versatility of food.
Harvard researchers, captivated by a strange coiling behavior in the grasping tendrils of the cucumber plant, have characterized a new type of spring that is soft when pulled gently and stiff when pulled strongly.
Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without imparting the distortions of conventional lenses.
For the first time, Harvard scientists have created a type of cyborg tissue by embedding a 3-D network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues.
Baby songbirds learn to sing by imitation, just as human babies do. So researchers at Harvard and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, have been studying the brains of zebra finches — red-beaked, white-breasted songbirds — for clues to how young birds and human infants learn vocalization on a neuronal level.
A tool rarely used to understand the impact of pollution on the natural world is evolution, an oversight that an environmental toxicologist says is robbing investigators of important information.
Researchers have developed a system — inspired by nature — that allows soft robots to either camouflage themselves against a background, or to make bold color displays. Such a “dynamic coloration” system could one day have a host of uses, ranging from helping doctors plan complex surgeries to acting as a visual marker to help search crews following a disaster.
Having already broken new ground in robotics with the development, last year, of a class of “soft”, silicone-based robots based on creatures like squid and octopi, Harvard scientists are now working to create systems that would allow the robots to camouflage themselves, or stand out in their environment.
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have made it possible to build a universe from scratch.
It happens to all of us: We think we learned of the Sept. 11 attacks from a radio report, when, in fact, the news came from a co-worker; we’re sure the robber running from the bank was tall, when actually he was short; we remember waking up at 7 yesterday, when 8 is closer to the truth. Such “false memories,” unavoidable in everyday life, can have disastrous consequences in courtrooms and other settings where exactitude matters.
Featured series 
