science wire

Two SEAS profs envision the next big ideas in teaching and learning

The Older We Get, The Less We Know (Cosmologically)
Cambridge, MA - The universe is a marvelously complex place, filled with galaxies and larger-scale structures that have evolved over its 13.7-billion-year history.

Toxic mercury, accumulating in the Arctic, springs from a hidden source
Harvard study finds circumpolar rivers most responsible for high levels of mercury in the Arctic The Lena River delta.

Design Solutions Workshop emphasizes teamwork, process, and context
Students from across the University, and the community beyond, bring diverse expertise to a creative exercise Participants in the workshop offered definitions for the term "design," settling on

2011-12: The year in review
Highlights from a year of innovative teaching, breakthrough research, inventive student projects, and global impact SEAS alumna Joanne Chang '91, owner of Flour Bakery & Cafe, prepared the enormous cake for Harvard's 375th birthday party in October.

David M. Brooks wins ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award

Computer scientist Ryan Adams wins DARPA Young Faculty Award
$300,000 grant will support work on building new computational tools that exploit statistical inference Ryan Adams, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering

Sharing design, in all its forms
Massive fair highlights hundreds of great ideas that emerged in courses at SEAS this year By Mureji Fatunde '12 and Caroline Perry Gye Hyun Baek '13 and Madalina Persu '13 exhibit their ES 50 project with course assistant Leonard Kogos '12, right.

One Supernova Type, Two Different Sources
Cambridge, MA - The exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae serve an important role in measuring the universe, and were used to discover the existence of dark energy. They're bright enough to see across large distances, and similar enough to act as a "standard candle" - an object of known luminosity.

David C. Parkes awarded Harvard College Professorship

New undergraduate S.B. degrees in EE and ME approved
Harvard College students now have the option of pursuing Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering S.B. degrees Harvard College students will now be able to pursue standalone S.B&

"Warming hole" delayed climate change over eastern United States
50-year model suggests regional pollution obscured a global trend : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 Climate scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have discovered that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a "warming hole" over the eastern United States - that is, a cold patch where the effects of global warming were temporarily obscured.

Sujata Bhatia wins Marquand Award

Loncar wins 2012 Levenson Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

James R. Rice awarded the Harry Fielding Reid Medal

Radhika Nagpal approved for promotion to tenured full professor
Computer scientist applies inspirations from biological multi-agent systems to computer and robotic systems Harvard President Drew Faust has approved Radhika Nagpal for promotion to the role of full professor with tenure at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

SEAS receives grants from the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching

1000 Days of Infrared Wonders
Cambridge, MA - For the last 1000 days the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has been operating continuously to probe the universe from its most distant regions to our local solar neighborhood.

Zhiming Kuang approved for promotion to tenured full professor
Climate scientist aims to understand the convective forces driving El Niño and the South Asian monsoons Harvard President Drew Faust has approved Zhiming Kuang for promotion to the role of full professor with tenure.

James R. Rice wins Louis Néel Medal
Mechanics and geosciences expert honored for seminal contributions to strain localization, poromechanics and friction The 2012 Louis Néel Medal has been awarded to James R. Rice for his s

Abernathy to receive special Green Carpet Award

Robotic design and production as easy as 1-2-3
NSF grant funds team of researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Penn to create design and print-your-own robot technology April 3, 2012 - An ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced is being funded by a $10-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Socially-minded projects abound at I3 start-up competition

Robert J. Wood approved for promotion to tenured full professor

New Cosmological Insights from the South Pole Telescope
Cambridge, MA - Analysis of data from the 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT) is providing new support for the most widely accepted explanation of dark energy - the mysterious force that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The data strongly support Einstein's cosmological constant, even though the analysis was based on only a fraction of the SPT data collected and only 100 of the over 500 galaxy clusters detected so far.

When Dark Energy Turned On
Cambridge, MA - Astronomers announced today that they have made the most accurate measurement yet of galaxy distances in the faraway universe, giving an unprecedented look at the time when dark energy turned on. Some five to seven billion years ago, the expansion of the universe stopped slowing due to gravity and started to accelerate due to dark energy.

Nurturing the seeds of innovation

"Buckliball," an engineered buckling structure, advances folding materials
Inspired by a toy, the collapsible buckliball represents a new class of 3D, origami-like structures Playing with an expanding and collapsing toy (top row), researchers at Harvard and MIT were inspired to design a new type of folding structure. The result is a one-piece silicone sphere, dubbed a "buckliball" for its pressure-induced buckling behavior (bottom row).

Big Bang on Earth: Blasting a Mountaintop to Mine the Sky
Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for what will be the world's largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade.

Planet Starship: Runaway Planets Zoom at a Fraction of Light-Speed
Cambridge, MA - Seven years ago, astronomers boggled when they found the first runaway star flying out of our Galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour. The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme velocity, could the same thing happen to planets? New research shows that the answer is yes.

Explosive Stars with Good Table Manners
Cambridge, MA - An exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova plays a key role in our understanding of the universe. Studies of Type Ia supernovae led to the discovery of dark energy, which garnered the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Yet the cause of this variety of exploding star remains elusive. All evidence points to a white dwarf that feeds off its companions star, gaining mass, growing unstable, and ultimately detonating.

Marko Loncar approved for promotion to tenured full professor
Expert on nano-optics will further strengthen SEAS' teaching and research in electrical engineering Harvard President Drew Faust has approved Marko Loncar for promotion to the role of full professor with tenure at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Engineer Robert J. Wood to receive NSF’s Alan T. Waterman Award

Metamaterials may advance with new femtosecond laser technique
"Lucky" combination of chemicals and laser pulses enables high-resolution, 3D patterning for futuristic optical materials : Caroline Perry The experimental setup in Eric Mazur's laser laboratory at Harvard. Using femtosecond lasers, Mazur and colleagues have developed a new nanofabrication process for use in creating metamaterials.

David C. Bell appointed Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Electron Microscopy
Physicist also manages the imaging and analysis facility at Harvard's Center for Nanoscale Systems David C. Bell, an expert on imaging techniques for nanoscale research in applied physics

Joanna Aizenberg talks "extreme biomimetics" at TEDxBigApple

Reduction in U.S. carbon emissions attributed to cheaper natural gas
Lower emission from power plants in 2009 was driven by competitive pricing of natural gas versus coal : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 In 2009, when the United States fell into economic recession, greenhouse gas emissions also fell, by 6.59 percent relative to 2008.

Donhee Ham named an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer

In new mass-production technique, robotic insects spring to life
Production method inspired by children's pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 - A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet.

Katia Bertoldi wins Faculty Early Career Development Award

"Flipped classroom" teaching model gains an online community
The Peer Instruction Network, a new global social site for interactive teaching, launches at Harvard Researchers at Harvard University have launched the Peer Instruction (PI) Network ( www.peerinstruction.net ), a new global social network for users of interactive teaching methods.

Street smarts
Students develop hurricane response plans on Cambridge roads, gaining practical experience in computational science Debris lingered just outside New Orleans in July 2006 - almost a full year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region.

Researchers to receive high-performance computing grants
Projects will advance both basic science and applications, and accelerate development of exascale computing systems Seven Harvard-affiliated researchers will receive grants to support collaborative projects in high-performance computing.

For cutting-edge biomedical materials, try corn
Winter mini-course explores plant-derived materials for wound closures, drug delivery, and tissue engineering By Mureji Fatunde '12 Students in the undergraduate teaching labs at SEAS are investigating plant-based materials that may help regrow damaged neurons.

Designing in the human context

Physics at 2,500 feet
Sharing his lifelong passion for flight, CNS manager T. Fettah Kosar teaches aerodynamics from the cockpit Ismail Türsan, at right, stands in front of the Kleopatra, a glider he built with his friends and flew in 1934, in Turkey.

Femtosecond laser research wins SPIE Green Photonics Award

Early Stage Venture Fund launches in Cambridge, Mass
Cambridge, Mass. - January 18, 2012 - When the "next big thing" is invented in a dorm room, ruminated over in a late-night café, or discovered in a laboratory, it will now find more support in - and its inventors will have better reasons to stay connected to - the Cambridge area.

Hosang Yoon and Kitty Yeung win 2012 Analog Devices design award

Stephen Chong wins Air Force Young Investigator Award

Planets with Double Suns are Common
Austin, TX - Astronomers using NASA's Kepler mission have discovered two new circumbinary planet systems - planets that orbit two stars, like Tatooine in the movie Star Wars. Their find, which brings the number of known circumbinary planets to three, shows that planets with two suns must be common, with many millions existing in our Galaxy.

Robert Howe named IEEE Fellow

Before They Were Stars: New Image Shows Space Nursery
Austin, TX - The stars we see today weren't always as serene as they appear, floating alone in the dark of night.

Harvard Tweets from Silicon Valley

Leading entrepreneurs will share their stories

Happy Holidays from SEAS

Tool detects patterns hidden in vast data sets
Relationships uncovered in data from biology, baseball, and more Researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard University have developed a tool that can tackle large data sets in a way that no other software program can. Part of a suite of statistical tools called MINE, it can tease out multiple patterns hidden in health information from around the globe, statistics amassed from a season of major league baseball, data on the changing bacterial landscape of the gut, and much more.

Powerful potential
SEAS holiday lecture engages young learners with the wonders of energy By Mureji Fatunde '12 Research assistant Daniel Rosenberg, a key member of Harvard's science lecture demonstration te

No bugs at annual CS 50 Fair

Computer scientist Margo Seltzer named 2011 ACM Fellow

Capasso awarded honorary doctorate from Université Paris Diderot

Sinking ice and hovering foams

SEAS heats up for winter 2012

Aiden wins 2011 GE & Science grand prize

New Exhibition, Website Guide Visitors through the Evolving Universe

Nano meets pharma at Harvard-BASF symposium
Experts gather this week to discuss the efficient creation and delivery of nanoscale particles of drugs : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 From targeted cancer chemotherapy to the guarantee of successful organ transplants, the 21st century may prove to be the age of big ideas in medicine.