News & Events

Can iPads help students learn science? Yes

The scale of the universe can be difficult to comprehend. Pretend you are going to make a scale model with a basketball representing the Earth and a tennis ball as the moon. How far would you put the tennis-ball moon from the basketball Earth? Most people...
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Future Robots Will Be Soft And Shaped Like Squids

Someday soon, your life may be saved by a weird-looking octopus, squid, or caterpillar – a squishy, form-changing, animal-like device that’s actually a soft robot. Scientists are exploring the fluidity and deformable nature of animals like those mentioned...

Harvard Professors Receive Physics Frontiers Prize

Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa, of the Harvard Department of Physics, were named by the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation as winners of the 2014 Physics Frontiers Prize. The prize comes in recognition of their deep and groundbreaking contributions...

Mystery world baffles astronomers

Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn’t exist. This scorching lava world circles its star every 8½ hours at a distance of less than 1 million miles — one of the tightest known orbits. According to current theories of planet formation, it couldn’t have...
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Galaxy Quest: Just How Many Earth-Like Planets Are Out There?

A team of planet hunters estimates that about 22 percent of the Sun-like stars in our galaxy may have planets about the size of Earth that are bathed in similar amounts of sunlight — and potentially habitable. That's the conclusion of a new analysis of...
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Top-notch teachers

Edo Berger, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, and Anne Pringle, an associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, have been named the recipients of this year’s Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching...
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