News

Women undergrads research climate change and sustainability
Climate change knows no borders. As temperatures and seas rise, ecosystems change, and extreme weather patterns affect communities around the globe, insights that help identify solutions to these challenges are being had in every corner of the world. Five...
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Research explores natural selection in action
The extreme “polar vortex” winter of 2013–14 did more than set records across the United States; it created conditions for a Harvard graduate student to explore something rarely observed by biologists: natural selection in action. In 2013, Shane Campbell...
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Harvard photos of eclipses through the years
Eclipses like the one coming Monday have mystified and intrigued humans for millennia. They also fascinate Harvard researchers, who have long studied them to better understand the workings of the sun and the solar system. In the early years of Harvard...
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Harvard research explores post-WWII rise in knee arthritis
The average American today is twice as likely to be diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis as in the years before World War II, Harvard scientists say. And the reasons are less clear than you might think. Based on a study of more than 2,000 skeletons from...
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Harvard-Smithsonian app readies U.S. for 2017 eclipse
Thousands of years ago, human beings reacted to solar eclipses with dismay, flooding the streets with pots and pans to scare away whatever had blotted out the sun with a cacophony of banging and shouting. When a total solar eclipse crosses the United...
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Baltic amber specimens to be returned to Königsberg collection
Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente held up a piece of ancient amber, peering at the 40-million-year-old insect inside. Preserved whole after being trapped in sap that hardened over millennia, the fierce-looking larva was a favorite: Its image adorned his computer...
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New insight on height, arthritis
Terence Capellini, an associate professor of human evolutionary biology, is co-author of new research revealing a genetic “switch” that changes the activity of a key skeletal gene related to height, and pinpoints a variant in the switch that favors...
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Scientists are using the universe as a ‘cosmological collider’
Physicists are capitalizing on a direct connection between the largest cosmic structures and the smallest known objects to use the universe as a “cosmological collider” and investigate new physics. The 3-D map of galaxies throughout the cosmos and the...
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Tardigrade or ‘water bear’ will survive until the sun dies
The world’s most indestructible species — a stout, microscopic animal with four pairs of legs, known as the water bear or tardigrade — will survive until the sun dies, according to new research from Oxford University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for...
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Taking cells out to the movies with new CRISPR technology
Researchers use expensive machinery to develop ways to harness DNA as a synthetic raw material to store large amounts of digital information outside of living cells. But what if they could coerce living cells, such as large populations of bacteria, to use...
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