How new plant species get their names

Kanchi Gandhi is one of a small group of global experts who referees the rules of naming new plant species.

Alvin Powell • harvard
Oct. 25, 2019 ~9 min

Built for distance and speed, Tunabot can illuminate how fish move

Scientists from Harvard and the University of Virginia have developed the first robotic tuna that can accurately mimic both the highly efficient swimming style of tuna, and their high speed.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Oct. 23, 2019 ~5 min


Harvard scientists use optical tweezers to capture ultracold molecules

Using precisely focused lasers that act as “optical tweezers,” Harvard scientists have been able to capture and control individual ultracold molecules – the eventual building-blocks of a quantum computer – and study the collisions between them in more detail than ever before.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Oct. 2, 2019 ~6 min

Online Music Lab studies questions of melody and humanity

Samuel Mehr has long been interested in questions of what music is, how music works, and why music exists. To help find the answers, he’s created the Music Lab, an online, citizen-science project aimed at understanding not just how the human mind interprets music, but why music is a virtually ubiquitous feature of human societies.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Sept. 12, 2019 ~6 min

Study shows that students learn more when taking part in classrooms that employ active-learning strategies

A new Harvard study shows that, though students felt like they learned more from traditional lectures, they actually learned more when taking part in active-learning classrooms.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Sept. 4, 2019 ~8 min

Harvard study: Artificial neural networks could be used to provide insight into biological systems

Martin Haesemeyer set out to build an artificial neural network that worked differently than fish’s brains, but what he got was a system that almost perfectly mimicked the zebrafish — and that could be a powerful tool for understanding biology.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Aug. 27, 2019 ~6 min

Harvard panel on mental health in the workplace

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Diversity Summer Panel focuses on the impacts of mental illness in the workplace and what can be done about it.

Juan Siliezar • harvard
Aug. 23, 2019 ~6 min

Making a case for ‘managed retreat’ from areas prone to flooding and storms

For decades, the response to flooding and hurricanes was a vow to rebuild. A.R. Siders believes the time has come to consider managed retreat, or the practice of moving communities away from disaster-prone areas to safer lands.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Aug. 23, 2019 ~7 min


Like humans, crows are more optimistic after making tools to solve a problem

A new paper, co-authored by Dakota McCoy, a graduate student working in the lab of George Putnam Professor of Biology David Haig, suggests that, after using tools, crows were more optimistic.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Aug. 22, 2019 ~7 min

Graduate student lands lunar samples to learn how moon was formed

A fourth-year graduate student in the lab of Professor of Geochemistry Stein Jacobsen, Yaray Ku is working on a project aimed at understanding how the moon formed, and to do it, she’s working with actual lunar samples.

Peter Reuell • harvard
Aug. 20, 2019 ~5 min

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