Science

Discover the scientific breakthroughs and engineering innovations being pioneered across Harvard’s labs and centers.

To Promote Healthy Habits in Patients, Start with the Doctors

Why Harvard Medical School is training physicians to think more like coaches

by Jonathan Shaw

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...

by Nell Porter-Brown

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...

"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...

by Elizabeth Gudrais

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...

by Courtney Humphries

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...

by Erin O’Donnell

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...

Repressed Memory

Are some experiences so horrific that the human brain seals them away, only to recall them years later? The concept of “repressed...