Amazon immersion fosters partnerships, offers students, researchers hard look at threats to economic security, environment of rainforest as Earth warms
A group of graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters — or any other three-dimensional animations — into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3-D printer.
A Harvard Summer School class spurs learning through food, by examining how microbes — bacteria and fungi — can help as well as harm when they get into food, doing much of the work preparing cheeses, beer, soy sauce, and even chocolate.
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have provided visual evidence that atmospheric particles — which are ubiquitous, especially above densely populated areas — separate into distinct chemical compositions during their life cycle.
A team of researchers led by James G. Anderson, the Philip S. Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, warns that a newly discovered connection between climate change and depletion of the ozone layer over the U.S. could allow more damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation to reach the Earth’s surface, leading to increased incidence of skin cancer.
Harvard physicists say they have unlocked the chemical secret that controls the “fool’s gold” of superconductivity, a “pseudogap” phase that mimics, but doesn’t have all the advantageous properties of, superconductivity.
Research led by scientists at Harvard and University College London has shown that Native Americans arrived in three waves of migration, not one, as is commonly held and that at least one group returned home to Asia.
A team led by Harvard computer scientists, including two undergraduate students, has developed a new tool that could lead to increased security and enhanced performance for commonly used Web and mobile applications.
Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering announced that it has received a $2.6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a smart suit that helps improve physical endurance for soldiers in the field.
Rhythm research has implications for both audio engineering and neural clocks, said Holger Hennig, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Eric Heller in the Physics Department at Harvard, and first author of a study of the Ghanaian and other drummers in the journal Physics Today.
Harvard-led researchers have discovered that an Ascomycete fungus that is common in polluted water produces environmentally important minerals during asexual reproduction.
For decades, it has been the holy grail of particle physics, an elusive subatomic particle that offered the tantalizing possibility of explaining how much of the universe works. Billions of dollars have been spent in the search for it. Thousands of researchers — including dozens from Harvard — have conducted trillions of experiments as part of the hunt for its telltale signature.
Atmospheric scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Nanjing University have produced the first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for 2005 to 2009, and the first statistically rigorous estimates of the uncertainties surrounding China’s CO2 emissions.
Using a pair of impurities in ultra-pure, laboratory-grown diamonds, researchers have created room-temperature quantum bits and have stored information in them for nearly two seconds — an increase of nearly six orders of magnitude over the life span of earlier systems. The work, described in the June 8 issue of Science, is a critical first step in the eventual construction of a functional quantum computer, as well as a host of other potential applications.
A new exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology traces the development of photography and its use in anthropology from the beginnings of both fields in the 1800s to the present.
Materials scientists at Harvard have demonstrated that a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC), which converts hydrogen into electricity, can also store electrochemical energy like a battery. This fuel cell can continue to produce power for a short time after its fuel has run out.
In a paper published in the June 7 issue of Nature, Associate Professor Sujoy Mukhopadhyay presents evidence that the Earth’s deep mantle incorporated gas found in the solar nebula in the first few millions of years of the solar system’s formation.
In a talk at Harvard’s Semitic Museum, archaeologist Robert Mason described the discovery of mysterious rock formations near an ancient monastery in Syria.
A Harvard team of researchers has invented a way to keep any metal surface free of ice and frost. The treated surfaces quickly shed even tiny, incipient condensation droplets or frost, simply through gravity.
The annual symposium of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, held at Harvard Medical School, prompted a spirited discussion on robotics and medicine, with nature as a model.
Research by computer scientists, biologists, and cognitive psychologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts suggests that collaborative touch-screen games have value beyond play.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ astronomers have detected for the first time jets of gamma rays extending thousands of light years from the Milky Way’s core, confirming expectations based on observations of other galaxies.
MIT’s Anant Agarwal, who is the first president of edX, shared early results from the new online education venture’s first pilot course at the second annual Harvard IT Summit.
On the roof of the Gordon Indoor Track and Tennis building, workers installed rooftop solar panels as part of what has become Harvard’s largest solar energy project. It is part of Harvard’s commitment to sustainability and its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2016 (from a 2006 baseline).
A business idea born in a Harvard classroom to improve the delivery of vaccines in developing countries has been selected as the grand prize winner of the Harvard University President’s Challenge for social entrepreneurship.
A new, highly innovative, computer-based simulation tool, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (Mass. Eye and Ear) Cataract Master, bridges the learning gap that residents and ophthalmologists new to phaco must navigate prior to performing actual surgery.
As described in an April 23 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), graduate students Eric Morrow and Carling Hay demonstrate the use of a statistical tool called a Kalman smoother to identify “sea level fingerprints” — telltale variations in sea level rise — in a synthetic data set. Using those fingerprints, scientists can determine where glacial melting is occurring.
A recent SEAS workshop emphasized comprehensive planning, cultural awareness, and a holistic approach to design in developing solutions to global problems.
Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have figured out how to use short lengths of DNA as physical, rather than genetic, building blocks, creating letters and other shapes from the molecules in a proof of design that could one day lead to the creation of structures that, among other things, deliver drugs to disease sites.
Before 2004, the most recent Venus transit occurred more than a century ago, in 1882, and was used to compute the distance from the Earth to the sun. On June 5, 2012, another Venus transit will occur. Scientists with NASA’s Kepler mission hope to discover Earth-like planets outside our solar system by searching for transits of other stars by planets that might be orbiting them. The next Venus transit: Dec. 11, 2117.
Featured series 
