Science & Tech

With the end of the academic year fast approaching, the temptation to purge all obsolete office and school materials is stronger than ever. But to maintain Harvard’s impressive 50 percent recycling rate, Harvard’s University Operations Services (UOS) wishes to remind the community to continue recycling all materials whenever possible. All old documents, books, folders, magazines, catalogs, cardboard, and boxes are recyclable; and after receptions, meetings, and parties, bottles, cans, cups, and containers can be recycled.

Costa Rica’s environment minister outlined the Central American nation’s plans to become carbon neutral by 2021 through green reforms in energy, transportation, government, and private industry sectors.

A team composed of Harvard students and alumni was among the winners of the World Bank’s Lighting Africa 2008 Development Marketplace competition, held in Accra, Ghana, from May 6 to 8, 2008. The team’s innovation, microbial fuel cell-based lighting systems suitable for sub-Saharan Africa, netted the Harvard group a $200,000 prize.

They were in a bind, no doubt about it.

Jonathan Zittrain is a man with a passion for cyberspace and a concern for its future.

Spanning topics as diverse as cancerous tumors and the overfishing of grouper in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a new journal aims to highlight the serious scientific research regularly undertaken…

Embryonic stem cell research will likely have a more sympathetic ear in the White House after November’s presidential  election, but a panel of speakers said last night that an era…

In investigating the intricacies of the body’s biological rhythms, scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have discovered the existence of a “food-related clock” which can supersede the “light-based”…

Eight Harvard faculty members this week were elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The three women…

Malcolm Hyman, a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, addressed a group of 20 listeners at the Barker Center about the theoretical challenges ahead for humanities computing — a fast-growing corner of scholarship in the classics, modern literature, and the arts that looks to computer science for analytical help.

The chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming struck an optimistic tone about the planet’s climate crisis Monday (April 21), saying that an energy revolution is in the offing if government can just get the policy right.

The chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming struck an optimistic tone about the planet’s climate crisis last night, saying that an energy revolution…

Jeremy B.C. Jackson earned his first chops as a scholar by studying the ecological impacts of an event that unfolded over the last 15 million years: the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, dividing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and setting off profound evolutionary oceanic and terrestrial changes.

SUBHEAD By XXXXXXXXX Harvard News Office –> Jeremy R. Knowles, an eminent chemist and longtime leader of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, died April 3 at his home in…

The Harvard Foundation will present its 2008 Scientist of the Year Award to Stephanie D. Wilson, a NASA astronaut and 1988 Harvard College graduate, at this year’s annual “Albert Einstein Science Conference: Advancing Minorities and Women in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics.” Wilson will be honored for her outstanding work in engineering and space exploration with NASA.

As a sophomore at Harvard College in 1992, Salil Vadhan skeptically and rather grudgingly enrolled in an introductory departmental course that a friend had cajoled him into taking. The course was “Computer Science 121: Introduction to Formal Systems and Computation,” a class that he would revisit a little more than a decade later — as the professor.

Harvard scientists have unveiled a new laser-measuring device that they say will provide a critical advance in the resolution of current planet-finding techniques, making the discovery of Earth-sized planets possible.

Harvard scientists have unveiled a new laser-measuring device that they say will provide a critical advance in the resolution of current planet-finding techniques, making the discovery of Earth-sized planets possible.…

Harvard scientists have found that a common class of freshwater invertebrate animals called bdelloid rotifers are extraordinarily resistant to ionizing radiation, surviving and continuing to reproduce after doses of gamma…

Harvard Medical School (HMS) Dean Jeffrey Flier today announced that the school is taking steps to reduce the cost of a four-year medical education by an average of $50,000 for…

With the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period expiring in 2012, the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements hosted a workshop of leading thinkers Friday (March 14) to help determine what comes next.

Can green cities save a blue planet? That question was posed last week by Harvard climatologist Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment. The professor of Earth and planetary sciences and professor of environmental science and engineering was one of three technical experts who spoke at a conference March 5 — co-sponsored by Harvard and the city of Boston — on the regional impacts of global warming.

How did we get here? That’s not the first line in a hangover joke. It’s a question that has been asked for centuries about the origins of life on Earth. At Harvard last week, an A-list of astronomers, physicists, Earth scientists, and chemists met in the Radcliffe Gymnasium to look at this and other fundamental questions. (What is life? Are we alone in the universe?)

With the careers of a generation of young researchers threatened by five years of flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, Harvard President Drew Faust and leaders of six other…

 When the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC) gathered for its first meeting late last April, it was charged by not one, but two Harvard Presidents. Then President-designate and…

What might be Harvard’s oddest birthday party unfolded last week (Feb. 29-March 1). In a lecture hall at Maxwell Dworkin, 50 physicists gathered to share the latest research in spintronics, an emerging branch of their science concerned with the quantum spin states of electrons.

J. Craig Venter, the visionary biologist and intellectual entrepreneur who was a leading figure in the decoding of the human genome, will join Harvard University as a visiting scholar at…

In the public health field, there is an ongoing debate as to whether improvement in the overall health of the population is linked to increases or decreases in social inequities…

“This,” Joanna Aizenberg says slyly, picking up a latticed tube from her desk in Pierce Hall, “is a glass house you can throw stones at.” The tube, tapered to a close at one end and festooned with a cluster of curious white fibers at the tip, resembles an upturned dog’s tail. It is, in fact, the skeleton of a deep-sea sponge, she reveals, made entirely out of a natural glass. The tube acts as a kind of high-rise apartment building for shrimp that live symbiotically in the sponge’s tissue.

Disagreement over the public health impact of global warming emerged in a symposium Monday morning (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The colloquium, titled “Sustaining Human Health in a Changing Global Environment,” addressed what hazards can be expected as a result of rapid and continuing climate change. For additional AAAS coverage, page 9 http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/topics/harvard-aaas-news