Research
Drinking is Contagious
The person next to you yawns, and all of a sudden you can’t help but open your mouth, close your eyes, and take a gaping breath of air. It’s involuntary and seemingly contagious. Well yawning isn’t the only thing that’s contagious, apparently so is drinking. If you partied hard on Friday night, it is more likely that your close friends did too.
Students Perform Better When Paid
Providing financial incentives for positive behavior can lead to higher test scores among adolescents.
EPA Grants Go to Harvard, MIT
Harvard and MIT researchers received $2.1 million in grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last Thursday to study the effects of climate change on public health and local ecosystems.
Harvard To Institute Research Ethics Training
Harvard has instituted a new policy that requires all science students conducting research to receive ethics training, University officials say.
New HSPH Office To Help Research Proposal Process
With the recent creation of a separate office for research strategy, the Harvard School of Public Health was well equipped to handle the January revisions to the National Institutes of Health grant application process.
Centers in Africa Fight HIV/AIDS
Earlier this year, Harvard’s two HIV/AIDS research centers in Africa each spun off limited liability companies, a strategic move that will open up funding streams that had previously been off-limits due to federal restrictions. For the 120,000 AIDS orphans living in Botswana, the potential funding increase could speed further advances in research as well as public health initiatives.
Study Recommends Limiting Saturated Fats
A study published yesterday in PLoS Medicine and led by Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of epidemiology at HSPH, showed that replacing saturated fats with a higher than previously recommended percentage of polyunsaturated fats was associated with a significantly decreased risk of coronary heart disease, the leading killer of adults in developing countries.
Lecture at the Semitic Museum
Several experts on archaeology from Harvard and institutions around the world came together yesterday evening at the Semitic Museum to deliver a lecture entitled "Writing History from Material Objects: New Light on Late Bronze Age Glass in Egypt and Mesopotamia."
A Golden Levitating Act
Hamsa Sridhar ’12 works with levitating gold on a regular basis—but the work is neither magical nor costly.
Harvard Graduate Student Wins MIT Award
After winning the 2010 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize on Wednesday, inventor Erez Lieberman-Aiden will now have an additional $30,000 to pour into his creative efforts.
Childhood Obesity Prevention Should Start Early
Childhood obesity prevention programs, often targeted at children ages 8 and older, should begin efforts to curb obesity at infancy or even earlier, according to researchers at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.
New Lab Device Improves Experiment Speed
A group including several Harvard researchers has developed a new microfluidic screening device that can run biochemical experiments on a much smaller, faster, and more cost-effective scale.
Sophomore conducts research levitating micro-particles.
Hamsa Sridhar ‘12 is conducting research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences that seeks to levitate gold-coated micro-particles. The research made the front cover of the journal Nature.
Study Links Gene with Aggressive Prostate Cancer
A team of Harvard researchers recently identified a gene that may play a direct role in developing aggressive prostate cancer—a discovery they said could lead to a more accurate technique to test for the disease.
Professor Rethinks Origins of Religion
A new study finds that religion may have evolved as a by-product of non-religious, cognitive processes.
Jack Szostak
HMS Professor and Nobel Prize Laureate Jack Szostak spoke about his research on telomeres and telomerase at MGH yesterday.
Looking at Time and Teeth
Children examine models of teeth and skulls at the Harvard Museum of Natural History after listening to archaeologist Tanya Smith's talk on how studying teeth can lead to insights in human development.
Findings on HIV Mutations May Provide Leads in Drug Research
Scientists at Harvard and the University of California, San Diego have discovered that mutations in the HIV virus work together to induce drug resistance—a finding that may offer new leads in HIV drug research and therapy.
Harvard Researchers Use Innovative Method to Follow Genetic Footprint
A team of Harvard researchers have recently developed a novel way to pinpoint, with greater accuracy than ever before, genetic mutations that drive evolution—and the new method of examining natural selection’s footprint may have tremendous implications for biomedicine and studies of human evolutionary history.
More Than Just a Hole in the Ground
As the cold began to bite down hard earlier this month, the students of Anthropology 1130: "Archaeology of Harvard Yard" ...