Category: 7. SciTech

Partying the night before a big exam. Preparing last-minute for a work presentation. Running a 5K in a 10-pound Halloween costume. All are examples of what psychologists call “self-handicapping” — creating obstacles to success to order to bolster or protect one’s own…

Venki Murthy: Memory is just not something that’s stored on a tape and it just sits around, right? It’s really astonishing how you can remember anything at all. So for me, this now really brings to the point — where is the stability in the face of this constant onslaught? And that almost…

Long before modern pharmaceuticals, our ancestors turned to plants to find cures for ailments from infections to parasites to fevers. A new study by Harvard researchers reveals the deep roots of that relationship: Several hot spots of medicinal plant diversity correspond to regions with long…

A San Francisco pedestrian was severely injured in 2023 when a driver struck her, throwing her in the path of a self-driving car that dragged her 20 feet while attempting to pull over. In the complex circumstances and legal fallout of the crash, educators saw a learning opportunity for future…

The southern tip of South America was one of the last regions of the world to be populated by modern humans, but the early history of settlement has remained murky.

A new study by Harvard researchers sheds new light on this mystery with the discovery of a previously unknown ancient lineage…

A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute” to “cognitive atrophy” and shrinking of critical thinking abilities. The study is small and is not peer-reviewed, and yet it delivers a warning that even artificial intelligence…

The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction.

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers…

A few weeks after their arrival at the College, 15 first-year students settled into chairs for an unusual class — one with no answers.

The brainchild of Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman, “Genuinely Hard Problems in Science” explores mysteries of the natural world that have stubbornly…

Biologists long have been fascinated by the ability of salamanders to regrow entire limbs. Now Harvard researchers have solved part of the mystery of how they accomplish this feat — by activating stem cells throughout the body, not just at the injury site.

In a new paper published in the…

You might call it the case of the missing carbon.

It was the 1980s. Scientists knew roughly how much carbon dioxide (CO₂) was being emitted globally by humans burning fossil fuels and by natural processes such as volcanos. They also knew how much CO₂ was in the atmosphere. These data…