Science
Discover the scientific breakthroughs and engineering innovations being pioneered across Harvard’s labs and centers.
What Bonobos Teach Us About Female Power and Cooperation
A Harvard scientist expands our understanding of our closest living relatives.
by Annie Roth
Shedding Light on Life
The scenes are familiar from biology textbooks. A long string of DNA is copied to form a matching strand. A virus infects a cell by stealing through its membrane.
Light Makes a Comeback
Today’s high-powered light microscopes bear little resemblance to the iconic instruments of high-school biology labs. This revolution...
Fishing for Answers
Photograph by Ralf-Finn Hestoft Neil Shubin and Tiktaalik In 2005, parents and school officials in Dover, Pennsylvania, were locked in a...
Antibiotics Feed These Bacteria, Instead of Killing Them
It sounds like science fiction, but it's not. A paper published today in the journal Science explains that some bacteria thrive on a diet of antibiotics, instead of dying as previous science predicts they should...
Dead or Alive? Seems Like a Simple Question, But...
The "Ideas" section in this week's Boston Sunday Globe had an article exploring how the advances of modern medicine have made "death" a subjective term...
Life's Speed Limit
Mutation is the engine of evolution: organisms would not be able to evolve new characteristics if their DNA did not randomly acquire small...
When Minnie Turns Mickey
If males are from Mars and females from Venus, as self-help author John Gray memorably suggested, sex hormones usually get the blame for placing...
"Tyrant Fever's" Trigger
When an infection assails the body, the response is predictable. Fever, loss of appetite, fatigue, that achy feeling—we never get just one...
Autism Update
In a recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a group of Boston Autism Consortium members reported a significant breakthrough...
Stem Cells in the New Year
Brock Reeve, executive director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, offers his predictions for what 2008 holds for the field of stem-cell research...