Meet the economics professor who keeps running office hours
Many mornings a week, Andrei Shleifer uses his morning run to connect with students.
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Bigger benefits for kindergarten’s oldest boys uncovered
Being born a few days on either side of the school-enrollment cutoff date might seem like an arbitrary difference. But new research finds boys born just after the cutoff, who start kindergarten relatively old for their grade, enjoy far more advantages than previously known.
How a giant predator of prehistoric seas was discovered — twice
After 80 million years, a giant fossil jaw has quite a story to tell. Back in the age of the dinosaurs, Tylosaurus proriger was a fearsome predator — a bus-sized aquatic reptile with a crushing snout, daggerlike teeth, and knack for swallowing prey whole. How its bones wound up at Harvard is a tangled yarn involving a Wild West stagecoach station, the early western railroads, the infamous “Bone Wars” between rival fossil hunters, and a founding scholar of natural history.
Women more likely to marry, land jobs after taking GLP-1s
New research by economist Rebecca Diamond found an increase in marriage among single women and an increase in employment rates among unemployed women after they started taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. Diamond says the pattern suggests that at least part of the female obesity penalty — the social and financial costs women bear due to their body size — is linked to first impressions.
At age 101, alum gifts ‘big, geometric, colorful’ artwork to the FAS
When David Bakalar first set foot at Harvard, he was a 17-year-old child of immigrants commuting by bus from Lynn, Mass., his $500 “nonresident scholarship” covering tuition and a study space at Leverett House but not room and board.
Harvard scientists detect atmosphere on distant ‘Earth-like’ planet
The first-of-its-kind discovery is expected to set off a search for signs of life.
Deep structural deficit in the FAS forces longer-game reset
After a series of temporary belt-tightening measures were introduced to give the FAS flexibility to respond to financial turmoil from Washington, the administration prepares to make longer-term changes to address a significant structural deficit.
The smartphone system that detected seismic activity and saved lives in Venezuela
An earthquake alert system mines data from billions of Android phones, the most common smartphone in the world, and easily the most popular in less wealthy nations.
‘High risk, high reward’ researchers awarded Star-Friedman funding
Grantees cross the sciences, range from work in quantum to ‘smart skins’
New FAS CFO named
Julie Joncas will begin her role in the FAS on August 24.
David Reich on migration, mixed ancestries, and ancient DNA
Drawing on data from over 50,000 genetic samples, Reich’s research shows that the people living in a place today are almost never the direct descendants of the people who lived there before.