Science & Tech

Nice guys can finish first — a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that complex social networks like those of everyday life encourage members to be friendlier and more cooperative, with the possible payoff coming in an expanded social sphere. The study said selfish behavior can lead to an individual being shunned from the group and left — literally — on his or her own.

Steven Wofsy and Andrew Richardson discuss New England’s still-growing forests and their role as a buffer against the effects of climate change.

The Harvard College Observatory built its foundation in the mid-1800s, after an epidemic of train wrecks prompted the railroads to seek a regional standard for greater accuracy and safety.

In a new paper, Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Edwin Turner of Princeton University suggest a new technique for finding aliens: Look for their city lights.

A new chemical process developed by a team of Harvard researchers may increase the utility of positron emission tomography (PET) in creating real-time 3-D images of chemical processes occurring inside the human body.

Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan students put IBM’s groundbreaking, “Jeopardy!”-winning computer to the test in a live match-up on Oct. 31. But outsmarting Watson, it turns out, is a not-so-elementary task.

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ PlateMate project proves that a well-managed crowd can play the role of a trained nutritionist.

Though it won’t be completed until 2013, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope observatory under construction in northern Chile, is already the most powerful and complex such facility ever built, and four astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are among those first in line to use it.

The stunning regrowth of New England forests over the past century marks a conservation victory, but an Arnold Arboretum forest expert says there’s no turning back the clock to pre-colonial times. Today’s forests are a blend of native New England plants and invasive species, growing on a human-altered landscape.

Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Energy, discussed the environmental risks and potential benefits of shale gas extraction in a Future of Energy talk sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Two fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society revolutionized how people create and consume digital information.

With water scarcity a growing worldwide worry, Harvard programs, faculty, staff, and students are exploring ways to protect precious supplies, both globally and on campus.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Justin Kasper has designed an instrument that will peek out from behind a heat shield to touch the sun’s atmosphere on a NASA solar probe designed to get far closer to the sun than any before.

Prescription data stripped of identify information seems not so anonymous after all. Researcher Latanya Sweeney aims to make such personal data more secure and to provide recourse for people who are harmed by privacy breaches.

Scientists from around the world gathered at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Oct. 14 for a symposium on advancing efforts to study and design molecules as motors.

Researchers are making progress in creating a biofuels process that will allow the use of tough-to-digest cellulose produced by hardy grasses that can be grown on marginal land around the world, the head of the Energy Biosciences Institute said Oct. 13 during a presentation at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate.

Allan M. Brandt Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine, Harvard Medical School Professor of the History of Science, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Michael D. Smith Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, SEAS

Mahzarin R. Banaji Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Charles Waldheim Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design

Steven Pinker Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Harvard College Professor

A national research project led by Harvard scientist Steven Wofsy tries to fill in the blanks of understanding how the Earth’s atmosphere works by crisscrossing the globe by jet, measuring air changes.

Nicholas L. Tilney Francis D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School

All three winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics have connections to Harvard — including two whose Ph.D.s launched them into their winning notion of an accelerating universe and the puzzle of dark matter.

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a new device that creates strong forces more efficiently than traditional optical tweezers and eliminates a problem that caused earlier setups to overheat.

Recycling was the norm before the Industrial Revolution’s creation of cheap consumer goods started to produce what eventually became the throwaway society, according to Susan Strasser, author of the book “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.”

Harvard professor and current Radcliffe fellow Michael Brenner explores the evolution of his wildly popular cooking course.

The Harvard Sustainability Science Program marked the beginning of its third phase Sept. 19 with a forum on issues facing the rapidly industrializing major nations of China, Brazil, and India.

An international team of researchers studying DNA patterns from modern and archaic humans has found that the Denisovans, a recently discovered hominin group, contributed genes to several populations in Asia and that modern humans settled Asia in more than one migration.