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Nation & World
The truths lost and gained in wartime
The symposium “War and Truth” explored the modern resonance of an ancient sentiment: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s attributed to the Greek tragedian Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) and was revived to describe the events of World War I and other confounding 20th century conflicts. Six scholars and writers investigated what truths are lost…
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Science & Tech
Yale honors E. O. Wilson with Verrill Medal
Yale honors Wilson with Verrill Medal Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus E.O. Wilson received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal from Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History on Wednesday (Oct. 17) in New Haven, Conn. Awarded by the curators and trustees of the museum, the medal was established in 1959 to honor “some signal practitioner in…
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Science & Tech
Nanowire generates its own electricity
Harvard chemists have built a new wire out of photosensitive materials that is hundreds of times smaller than a human hair. The wire not only carries electricity to be used in vanishingly small circuits, but generates power as well. Charles M. Lieber, the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry, and colleagues created the nanowire out…
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Health
Database of human genetic diversity allows identification of disease-associated genes
Investigators from six countries have completed the second phase of the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify and catalog genetic similarities and differences among populations around the world. Information provided in the first phase of the HapMap, completed in 2005, has led to the development of techniques facilitating the search for genes associated with…
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Science & Tech
Frankel wins Lennart Nilsson Award
Felice Frankel, scientific imagist and Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award for scientific or nature photography. Frankel was cited for creating images described by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which oversees the award, as “exquisite works of art and crystal-clear scientific photographs –…
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Health
Medical schools’ departments, department heads often have industry relationships
BOSTON – A study led by members of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy (MGH-IHP) has found that institutional academic-industry relationships – financial relationships companies have with medical schools or teaching hospitals rather than with individual physicians or scientists – are as common and pervasive as individual relationships. Their report, the first nationwide…
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Science & Tech
Basic understanding of biological clock advances
Writing this week in the journal Science, researchers at Harvard describe what causes a trio of proteins, if placed in a test tube with the common biochemical fuel ATP as a source of phosphate, to function as a minimalist biological clock of sorts, maintaining an accurate circadian rhythm for long periods of time. The new…
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Science & Tech
Forests, reefs, mountaintop illuminate tropical biology
Morning came in the middle of the night in the hikers’ hut partway up the side of Borneo’s towering Mount Kinabalu. At 2 a.m., after just a few hours’ sleep, the Harvard Summer School students slowly roused themselves, creating a chorus of rustling sleeping bags, zippers, and boots on the wooden floor. They’d been on…
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Science & Tech
Survey of hurricane preparedness finds one-third on high risk coast will refuse evacuation order
Thirty-one percent of residents surveyed in coastal areas said they wouldn’t evacuate in the face of a major hurricane, even if told to do so by the government, according to a new survey of people in high-risk hurricane areas conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health Project on the Public and Biological Security. This…
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Health
High rates of HIV infection documented among young Nepalese girls sex-trafficked to India
A study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers of girls and women who were sex-trafficked from Nepal to India and then repatriated has found that 38 percent were HIV positive. The infection rate exceeded 60 percent among girls forced into prostitution prior to age 15 years. One in seven of the study’s participants…
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Health
Income Inequality Associated with Double Disease Burden of Overnourishment and Undernourishment in India
It has been known that countries with rapidly developing economies may experience a double-disease burden that results from undernutrition and overnutrition. People living in poverty experience diseases that result from a lack of resources, while affluent individuals may suffer from diseases that result from an abundance of resources. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public…
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Science & Tech
Tracking down the seat of moral reasoning
Moral philosophers have long grappled with ethical questions, creating hypotheticals that test basic beliefs about right and wrong. For example: A trolley is running down a track out of control. If it keeps going, it will run over the five unsuspecting people hanging out on the track. You can prevent this disaster by throwing a…
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Science & Tech
From overviews of landscapes to inner views of cells
The photographs are stunning abstracts that look as though they should be hung above a mantle or in a fine art gallery. But these aren’t primarily works of art; they are images of scientific phenomena. The images were made by Felice Frankel, a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Initiative in Innovative Computing. Frankel brings…
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Campus & Community
Oberhuber, curator and professor, dies, 72
Konrad Oberhuber, curator of drawings and professor of fine arts from 1975 to 1987, died of brain cancer on Sept. 12 in San Diego. He was 72 years old.
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Campus & Community
Center for European Studies names fall fellows
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) has recently announced the arrival of its 2007 fall fellows. The center is dedicated to fostering the study of European history, politics, and society at Harvard. Its visiting scholars play an active role in the intellectual life of the center and the University. While at Harvard,…
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Campus & Community
Program on U.S.-Japan Relations announces 16 program associates, fellows
The Program on U.S.-Japan Relations has announced this year’s class of program associates, which includes scholars, professors, government officials, businesspeople, and journalists from Japan, the United States, and elsewhere.
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Campus & Community
GSD new financial aid program for international students
Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Dean Alan Altshuler recently announced an expansion of GSD’s financial aid policy.
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Campus & Community
IOP announces pair of distinguished visiting fellows
Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the Kennedy School of Government, has announced that U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill., and former Egyptian parliamentary member and human rights advocate Mona Makram-Ebeid will serve as IOP Visiting Fellows. Makram-Ebeid’s fellowship is under way; Moseley Braun’s fellowship will occur during the week of Nov. 12.
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Campus & Community
University employees honored for 25 years of service
More than 140 Harvard employees will be honored Oct. 18 for reaching a milestone: 25 years of service to the University. The 53rd annual 25 Year Recognition Ceremony — a unique event in that it recognizes both faculty and staff from across the entire University — will be held at the Ropes-Gray Room, Pound Hall,…
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Campus & Community
Grad student victim of robbery
On Saturday (Oct. 6) at approximately 12:05 a.m., a male graduate student and an unaffiliated male reported to the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) that they were the victims of an armed robbery at the corner of Broadway and Highland avenues.
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Campus & Community
Portrait of Amos unveiled
A portrait of Harold Amos, who taught at Harvard for nearly half a century, was unveiled by the Harvard Foundation on Oct.4 at the Courtyard Café in the Warren Alpert Building at Harvard Medical School. Amos was a member of both the Medical School Faculty and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He was the…
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Campus & Community
Elizabeth J. Perry named director of Harvard-Yenching Institute
Elizabeth J. Perry, a scholar whose work has illuminated the study of Chinese politics, has been appointed director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, effective July 1, 2008.
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Campus & Community
Sports brief
The Ivy League has named senior safety John Hopkins its Defensive Player of the Week for his efforts in the Harvard football team’s 32-15 dismissal of host Cornell on Oct. 6.
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Health
Hormone therapy for prostate cancer puts heart at risk
Administering androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) prior to surgery and combining ADT with radiation therapy are popular approaches to treating men diagnosed with advanced or high-risk localized prostate cancer. However, the potentially negative side effects of ADT are just now being explored. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that ADT may increase the…
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Health
Researchers better understand biological clock
Researchers at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have discovered that a simple circadian clock found in some bacteria operates by the rhythmic addition and subtraction of phosphate groups at two key locations on a single protein. This phosphate pattern is influenced by two other proteins, driving phosphorylation to oscillate according to…
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Nation & World
How Sputnik changed U.S. education
Education experts said Oct. 4 that the United States may be overdue for a science education overhaul like the one undertaken after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite 50 years ago, and predicted that a window for change may open as the Iraq war winds down.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard scientists predict the future of the past tense
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.”
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Nation & World
JFK and the Cuban missile crisis — a new assessment
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 has been called the “single most serious moment in human history.” During the 40 years of the Cold War, it was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war.
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Health
Mahzarin Banaji looks at biology of bias
Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist, studies how people think, and how they think they relate to one another. She’s an expert in the little secrets we all have: those implicit attitudes — sometimes prejudicial — regarding race, age, gender, and similar territories of otherness.