The single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Tiny fish trapped in a virtual world provide a window into complex brain connections as a research team at Harvard tries to answer the biggest question in neuroscience: how a doughy mass of neurons in the brain gives rise to an exquisite suite of behaviours, absorbing information from the outside world and generating responses. Author…
As the world waits for the next installment of news in the hunt for the Higgs boson, a simple smart phone game encourages players to hide, not hunt, the world’s favorite particle. Agent Higgs has a simple interface. Players shuffle these particles around a grid, trying to land on – and therefore conceal – the…
When you hear about climate change it’s most often about melting glaciers and sea ice, increasing frequency of heatwaves and powerful storms. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear about the acidification of the oceans too. What you don’t hear about is the saltiness of the seas. But that’s changing too, according to a new piece of…
Harvard scientists have, for the first, time created a type of “cyborg” tissue by embedding a three-dimensional network of functional, bio-compatible nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues. As described in a paper published in Nature Materials, a multi-institutional research team led by Harvard’s Charles M. Lieber and Daniel Kohane developed a system for creating nanoscale…
A simple brain trace can identify autism in children as young as two years old, scientists believe. A U.S. team at Boston Children’s Hospital say EEG traces, which record electrical brain activity using scalp electrodes, could offer a diagnostic test for this complex condition. EEG clearly distinguished children with autism from other peers in a…
With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year’s end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called…