Science & Tech

In a question-and-answer session, Professor Robert Stavins discusses the recent international conference on climate change, and the prospects for nations to reach agreement on a plan to confront it.

Harvard researchers have concluded that omitting the adaptive ability of crops from assessments of potential damages from a warming climate could substantially overestimate losses to U.S. maize yields.

Harvard design students imagine multiple futures for a longtime New England military base.

Disaster relief dollars flowing to those affected by hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina represent an important opportunity to ensure that communities are better able to withstand the stronger storms and higher seas likely coming as climate change worsens, panelists said.

An international regulatory framework is needed to govern possible research and deployment of engineering approaches to counter climate change, an authority on environmental law says.

Hundreds of students — hackers and newcomers alike — showed off their programming chops at Monday’s CS50 Fair, a raucous exhibit of mobile apps, websites, and other projects created for Harvard’s wildly popular computer science class.

A new study finds differences in the ways that participation in Alcoholics Anonymous helps men and women maintain sobriety.

Harvard Law School Professor David Barron offered a range of ideas as he addressed the challenges presented by rising sea levels.

Two Harvard-led teams are among the 66 selected by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) that will receive a total of $130 million in funding through its OPEN 2012 program, which is designed to support innovative energy technologies.

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created more than 100 3-D nanostructures using DNA building blocks that function like Lego bricks — a major advance from the two-dimensional structures the same team built a few months ago.

A new device invented at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) can absorb 99.75 percent of infrared light that shines on it. When activated, it appears black to infrared cameras.

Jason Ur, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, earlier this year launched a five-year archaeological project — the first such Harvard-led endeavor in the war-torn nation since the early 1930s — to scour a 3,200-square-kilometer region around Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, for the signs of ancient cities and towns, canals, and roads.

Harvard University Dining Services has turned its attention to sustainable seafood, an effort that may lead to new institutional standards for purchasing.

Harvard scientist Margaret Livingstone uses works of art to explore the workings of the brain.

Scientist and Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman argued for a new approach to teaching science to college students, introducing it earlier in the learning process.

Director Ken Burns presented clips of his new documentary on the Dust Bowl at Harvard’s Boylston Hall, talking about the creative process that he uses in his films.

Harvard architecture student Jeffrey Mansfield launches a project designed to combine solar power and smartphones to protect the Amazon basin, link forest entrepreneurs, and give Amazonian people a voice in the world.

Researchers designed a chip that uses a 3-D DNA network made up of long DNA strands with repetitive sequences that — like the jellyfish tentacles — can detect, bind, and capture certain molecules.

Once its axis tilts, how does the Earth “know” to return to its normal orientation? Work by Harvard researchers provides some answers.

Superstorm Sandy’s hurricane winds and torrential downpours killed at least 106 people, left millions without power, and caused billions of dollars in damage. It also got people talking again about climate change.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Ph.D. student in economics, uses Google Insights for Search, an online tool for extracting data from the millions of daily Google searches, and then uses statistical tools to analyze the data to gain insights on who is likely to vote and on voter turnout on Election Day.

Grasp the right facts, said a renowned medical statistician, and the world is more complicated and interesting, with fewer myths that divide one region from another.

A new Harvard study says that pica — and particularly geophagy, or the eating of soil or clay — is far more prevalent in Madagascar, one of the few areas of the world where it had gone unreported, than researchers previously thought. The research also suggests that the behavior may be more prevalent worldwide, particularly among men, than earlier believed.

CfA fellow David Kipping is heading a hunt for astronomical bodies at the edge of our ability to detect them: moons circling planets in other solar systems.

By tailoring geoengineering efforts by region and by need, a new model promises to maximize the effectiveness of solar radiation management while mitigating its potential side effects and risks.

Harvard University President Drew Faust speaking on the University’s commitment to sustainability and the release of its first Sustainability Impact Report (http://www.green.harvard.edu/report).

Harvard has released a sustainability impact report that provides a University-wide snapshot of the progress that has been made by students, staff, and faculty to reduce the environmental footprint and increase the operational efficiency of Harvard’s campus.

A new study by Harvard University researchers, soon to be published in the journal Ecology, yields a surprising result for large woodlands: When it comes to the health of forests, native plants, and wildlife, the best management decision may be to do nothing.

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.