Science & Tech

Scientist Benny Shilo left his developmental biology lab to spend a year as a fellow at Radcliffe, where he explores the intersection of art and science to foster greater public understanding.

More than 300 Harvard alumni, students, and guests gathered at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Sunday for “Digital Harvard in Austin,” a first-of-its-kind event sponsored by Alumni Affairs & Development.

An American manufacturing revival is needed if the United States is to transform its energy mix at the scale necessary to blunt coming climate change, the former chairman of the Sierra Club said in a Harvard University Center for the Environment discussion on the future of energy.

A team of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris have proposed a surprisingly simple explanation for magnetic anomalies that have baffled scientists since the mid-1960s, suggesting they are remnants of a massive asteroid. As described in a paper published in Science, the researchers believe an asteroid slammed into the moon 4 billion years ago, leaving behind an enormous crater and iron-rich, highly magnetic rock.

A new imaging technique, developed by Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, is giving scientists their first three-dimensional view of the human genome, one that is already shedding new light on a number of what Liberman-Aiden calls the “central mysteries of biology.”

Working at a scale applicable to infrared light, a Harvard team has used extremely short and powerful laser pulses to create 3-D patterns of tiny silver dots within a material. Those suspended metal dots are essential for building futuristic devices like invisibility cloaks.

The head of California’s air pollution regulatory board said Feb. 27 that with climate change action stalled in Washington, D.C., the states are taking the lead in creating ways to reduce carbon emissions.

Dozens of Harvard faculty and students gathered at Emerson Hall on Feb. 23 to ponder the nature of perception with Ned Block, the Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU) and one of the country’s leading thinkers on consciousness. Block’s lecture, “How Empirical Facts about Attention Transform Traditional Philosophical Debates about the Nature of Perception,” explored prevailing notions of perception by looking at how we see and pay attention to objects we encounter.

Four years ago, Harvard’s Office of Technology Development launched its Accelerator Fund, a $10 million revolving account to be used as a bridge across the “valley” between creation and development. The fund is proving to be just such a bridge.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have shown that the primary explanation for the reduction in CO2 emissions from power generation that year was that a decrease in the price of natural gas reduced the industry’s reliance on coal.

Engineers at Harvard have demonstrated a new kind of tunable color filter that uses optical nanoantennas to obtain precise control of color output. The advance has the potential for application in televisions and biological imaging, and could even be used to create invisible security tags to mark currency.

Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have added a new type of planet to the mix. By analyzing the previously discovered world GJ1214b, astronomer Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues proved that it is a water world enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere.

When faced with a tough choice, we already have the cognitive tools we need to make the right decision, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, told a Harvard Law School audience on Feb. 16. The hard part is overcoming the tricks our minds play on us that render rational decision-making nearly impossible.

A production method inspired by children’s pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process will enable the creation of a broad range of electromechanical devices.

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. The presence of the star cluster suggests that the black hole was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy.

Plastic pollution in the oceans is a large and growing problem, but one that may be out of the reach of consumers to solve and instead may require cooperation from industry, said Max Liboiron, regional co-director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Students develop hurricane response plans on Cambridge roads, gaining practical experience in computational science competition, ComputeFest, a two-week program hosted by the recently created Institute for Applied Computational Science within the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

One might expect, these days, to find corn products in food, fuel, and fabric, but a corn-based glue that can heal an injured eyeball? That’s a-maize-ing.

Wyss Institute scientists have created a material that mimics the hard outer skin of bugs. The result is low-cost and easily manufactured, and tough. It eventually might provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to plastic.

For a week in January, 40 students from a variety of backgrounds — comparative literature to computer science — engaged in a “design thinking” workshop led by IDEO, an internationally renowned design consulting firm. Throughout, the human element was key — How do people actually use a product? — as was a certain amount of ad-libbed fun.

Opportunities for women and people of color to pursue careers in science have improved in recent years, but still lag behind those of white men, Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds told a crowd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in her keynote address at the Institute Diversity Summit.

In 1934, a group of enterprising young Turks pooled their money and bought construction plans for a glider. Pioneers in the infancy of aviation, they built it by hand, out of wood and fabric, and when the time came for its maiden flight, they drew straws.

Today, the Experiment Fund, a new seed-stage investment fund, opens its doors with backing from storied venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Designed specifically to support student start-ups and nurture novel technologies and platforms created in Cambridge (or by innovators educated in Cambridge), the Experiment Fund will eventually include additional strategic angel investors and advisers.

The social networks of the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, show evidence that many elements of social network structure may have been present at an early point in human history.

New research at Harvard explains how bacterial biofilms expand on teeth, pipes, surgical instruments, and crops.

The rapid rise in discoveries of planets circling other stars is changing astronomers’ views of the galaxy and the Earth’s place in it, giving impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life, astronomer and Radcliffe Fellow Ray Jayawardhana says.

Using friendship data collected from Facebook, Harvard sociologists have found that people who share similar interests in music and movies are more likely to befriend one another, but that very few interests are likely to spread among friends.

Developed by Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, WorldMap allows scholars to create, share, and publish maps and other geospatial data.

Dr. Eric Chivian from Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, named by Time Magazine in 2008 as “one of the most influential people in the world” and a recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Eric Chivian. December 8, 2011

Professor Rebecca Henderson from Harvard Business School is the Co-Director of their Business and Environment Initiative and recently named the John and Natty McArthur University Professor December 8, 2011