Science & Tech

Christoph Reinhart is from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Associate Professor of Architectural Technology and the leader of Harvard’s Sustainable Design Research Initiative December 8, 2011

Professor Robert Kaplan from the Harvard Business School is a professor of Management Policy December 8, 2011

Richard Lazarus from Harvard Law School, is the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law December 8, 2011

James McCarthy is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and a co-chair with the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change December 8, 2011

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Harvard Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers confirms that changes in the orientation of the Earth’s spin axis have contributed to periods of major deglaciation in the past million years.

A team led by Harvard researcher Charles Lieber has for the first time succeeded in creating a device that opens the door to using tiny holes called nanopores in an electrically charged membrane to quickly and easily sequence DNA.

Harvard astronomers, working as part of NASA’s Kepler mission, have detected the first Earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star, a milestone in the hunt for alien worlds that brings scientists one step closer to their ultimate goal of finding a twin Earth.

Harvard Medical School Instructor Stephanie Kayden’s educational life came full circle this semester, when she taught a humanitarian studies course in Emerson Hall, where, as an undergraduate philosophy concentrator she honed her own reasoning skills years ago.

A computer program developed by brothers David and Yakir Reshef, together with Professors Michael Mitzenmacher and Pardis Sabeti, enables researchers to scour massive data sets for meaningful relationships that might otherwise have been missed.

A long-term Semitic Museum project labors to conserve thousands of 3,500-year-old clay tablets that detail everyday life in an ancient city.

Science writer Carl Zimmer talked about the surprising number of science-oriented tattoos gotten by scientists, who wear their love of science proudly, and his related book, “Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed,” during a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Harvard Professor George Whitesides and his research team have developed an array of “soft” robots based on natural forms, including squids and starfish, that may one day be used to aid disaster recovery efforts by squeezing into the rubble left by an earthquake to locate survivors, or as a way to free up a surgeon’s hands in the operating room.

By studying the behavior of tiny particles at an interface between oil and water, researchers at Harvard have discovered that stabilized emulsions may take longer to reach equilibrium than previously thought.

Projects on display at the CS 50 Fair ranged from a tool that limits procrastination, to a website that displays longitudinal market capitalization data, to an application that helps with music composition.

Large-scale increases in forest cover in North America and Eurasia — proposed by some analysts as a way to cut climate change — could hurt the environment by shifting rainfall patterns across the globe, Harvard study says.

At the first Harvard Thinks Green, six Harvard professors gathered at Sanders Theatre to seek big solutions for complex and potentially intractable problems such as climate change.

The annual Science & Cooking Fair shows off students’ final projects from the undergraduate General Education course “Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter.”

With half of U.S. trash still going into landfills, discussions are ongoing about how to handle the nation’s waste, with recycling, composting, incineration, and reuse all part of the mix, says Samantha MacBride, who studies such issues.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says China has “Henry Ford-ed” the U.S. solar industry, building a global empire on advances made in the U.S.

In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies.

James Hackett, chairman and chief executive officer of the Anadarko Petroleum Corp., described an energy future driven by new, abundant supplies of natural gas. He spoke during a Future of Energy talk sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

A professor emeritus of physics who died recently at 96, Norman Ramsey laid the foundation for the atomic clock, which allows scientists to measure time more precisely than ever, and is a critical component in GPS.

Harvard researchers have developed a “primer” to identify some of the most useful probes for super-resolution imaging. As described recently on Nature Methods’ website, the work also identified the key characteristics that are important for imaging, giving researchers a framework for evaluating other probes, or even designing custom-made molecules to use in imaging.

A new report by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs recommends transforming the U.S. energy picture by nearly doubling funding for U.S. energy technology research and instituting incentives for adopting cleaner technologies, such as a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions.

Students digging in Harvard Yard uncovered a major feature in the final days before the site had to be filled: a stone-lined trench that likely began the conversion of the marshy area to the high and dry land of today.

A postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, Christopher Golden, is the lead author of a paper. It says that in societies where people rely on bush meat for important micronutrients, people’s lost access to wildlife could hurt children’s health

A group of researchers is working to map how the brain is wired in an effort to pinpoint the causes of — and potential treatments for — schizophrenia, autism, and a host of other disorders.

By nestling quantum dots in an insulating egg-crate structure, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have demonstrated a robust new architecture for quantum-dot light-emitting devices (QD-LEDs).

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.