Chemist’s fix for a stubborn biomanufacturing problem? Engineer the liquid, not the machine
FluxBio’s near-term focus is to help biomanufacturers get more out of the reactors they already own.
Inquiry & Impact
The pursuit of knowledge through research, teaching, and learning, with impact at the FAS and beyond
Octopus cells pack ‘real surprise’ for biologists
Harvard biologists have discovered a mysterious distinction at the core of the octopus‘ cellular biology that appears to be unique in the animal kingdom.
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 your cells make a molecule you can buy as a supplement
Researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology combined biophysics, structural biology, and simulation to solve a manufacturing question.
Lab-grown brain ‘organoids’ set longevity record
In a new milestone for stem cell research, Harvard neuroscientists have set a record for keeping alive lab-grown human brain “organoids” and proven that they mimic key developmental stages seen in living people.
For a closer look at the sun, scientists ready 5,000-pound device for balloon launch
Forget about the ancient Greek myth of Icarus. For the last 10 years, Jenna Samra, Ph.D. ’18, and her colleagues have been pushing technology to fly closer to the hottest part of the sun. Samra, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, an institution jointly run by Harvard and the Smithsonian, leads a scientific quest to study the solar corona.
Valeria Luiselli’s ‘deep dive into mother-daughter relationships’
The incoming professor of English’s fourth novel, “Beginning Middle End,” follows a mother and her 12-year-old daughter as they travel to Sicily, where the duo is figuring out how to reconstruct their lives amid their encounters with the island’s daily life, its winds, waters, and volcanoes.
At minus 421 degrees, scientists capture structure of elusive chemical compound
A team from The Rowland Institute at Harvard has uncovered complex nanoscale orders in a chemical compound that has long mystified researchers when exposed to extreme cold.
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.
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.
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’
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.