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Come work with us Interested in working with researchers from different disciplines within the Harvard, MIT and Broad community and an unique opportunity to participate in world-class research to make an impact on human health? Come work with us! We are looking for a computational biologists to handle data from a wide variety of experimental methods, focusing on next-gen sequencing technologies. Keep Reading...  SCDE is live The Stem Cell Discovery Engine (SCDE) is an integrated platform that allows users to consistently describe, share and compare cancer and tissue stem cell data. It is made up of an online database of curated experiments coupled to a customized instance of the Galaxy analysis engine with tools for gene list manipulation and molecular profile comparisons. The SCDE currently contains more than 50 stem cell-related experiments. Each has been manually curated and encoded using the ISA-Tab standard to ensure the quality of the data and its annotation. Keep Reading...  The Center for Health Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health provides consults to researchers for the management, integration and contextual analysis of biological high-throughput data. We are a member of the Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics, the Environmental Statistics and Bioinformatics Core at the Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Genetics & Bioinformatics Consulting group for Harvard Catalyst and work closely with our colleagues in the Department of Biostatistics and the Program in Quantitative Genomics to act as a single point of contact for computational biology,

Charting innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge creation and dissemination in the arts and humanities, metaLAB (at) Harvard is

Tamir DI, Mitchell JP. Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. dtamir@fas.harvard.edu Abstract Humans devote 30-40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self.

The EconCS Group pursues research, both theoretical and experimental, at the intersection between computer science and economics.

Three Harvard scholars trained in chemistry and physics pursue innovative approaches and tools that address problems in neuroscience.

"Class Central is a free online course aka MOOC aggregator from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. offered via Coursera, Udacity, edX, Canvas Network, & others"

"I visit a lot of molecular biology labs, and most of them look pretty much identical: lab benches, microscopes, computers, messy break rooms, big filing cabinets crammed into every free corner. When you look closely, though, every lab has its own flavor, its own culture. This is the first post of what I hope will be a fun, photo-heavy series on the culture of different labs. Florian Engert's lab at Harvard is large, colorful, and messy."

"Was die Zellzahl angeht, besteht jeder Mensch zu 90 Prozent aus Mikroben", sagt Dennis Kasper von der Harvard Medical School in Boston. Die Hauptmasse dieser Mitbewohner des menschlichen Körpers lebt im Darm. Sie unterstützen nicht nur die Verdauung, sondern sind für unsere Gesundheit generell unverzichtbar. So wie sie sich speziell an ihren Wirt angepasst haben, hat sich auch unser Organismus an die Mikroben angepasst. Insbesondere hängt die normale Entwicklung des Immunsystems von der Mitwirkung der Darmkeime ab. Das schließen Kasper und seine Kollegen aus ihren Experimenten mit Mäusen, die in keimfreier Umgebung gehalten wurden. In den bakterienfreien Darm neugeborener Mäuse übertrugen die Forscher ein natürliches Gemisch von Darmmikroben, das entweder von gesunden Mäusen oder von gesunden Menschen stammte. In beiden Fällen kam es zum Wachstum von Bakterien in ähnlich hoher Zahl und mit einem ähnlich breiten Artenspektrum. Beide Bakterienpopulationen waren aber aus sehr unterschiedlichen Keimspezies zusammengesetzt, wie DNA-Analysen zeigten. Die Untersuchung von Darmlymphknoten ergab, dass sich bei den Mäusen mit den „menschlichen" Darmkeimen genauso wenige Immunzellen entwickelt hatten wie bei Mäusen, deren Darm völlig keimfrei blieb. „Es schien so, als ob diese Mäuse die Bakterien gar nicht erkennen würden", sagt Hachung Chung, ein Mitglied des Forscherteams"

Chemists and engineers at Harvard University have fashioned nanowires into a new type of V-shaped transistor small enough to be used for sensitive probing

A chemistry professor at Harvard University is trying to shrink a medical laboratory onto a piece of paper that's the size of a fingerprint and costs about a penny.

An immune-suppressing drug called rapamycin could possibly treat Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a rare genetic disease that causes premature aging, and advance biological understanding of the normal aging process, according to researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Maryland and Massachusetts General Hospital. Progeria is a genetic disorder characterized by dramatic premature aging. "Progerin that causes progeria also accumulates, although in very small amounts, in normal aging," said Dimitri Krainc, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "However, if rapamycin proves to have beneficial effects in lifespan in humans it is safe to assume that it will not be just because it may clear progerin from cells, but also because it clears other toxic products that accumulate during aging." Ref.: Francis S. Collins, et al., Rapamycin Reverses Cellular Phenotypes and Enhances Mutant Protein Clearance in Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome Cells, Science, 2011; [DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3002346]

"Wie Placebos es schaffen, Schmerzen zu lindern, ist noch immer eines der großen Rätsel der Medizin. Forscher der Harvard University fordern nun, gezielt in den Genen des Menschen zu suchen. "

"A second phenomenon which did a lot of harm to the European universities, was the lasting glorification of the American higher education system. Many politicians, but also scientists themselves, see this system as a permanent source of excellence and success without-as US scientist Martin Trow (1997) writes-getting the general picture of the American higher education system. Attention is directed exclusively at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, and other Ivy-League universities, which make up only a small percentage of the university landscape in the US. In this euphoria, it is intentionally overlooked that the majority of colleges and universities displays an intellectually modest standard and hardly contributes to academic progress. Much of what we celebrate as "globalization" and "adjustment to international standards" is in reality the adjustment to US-American provincialism (Fröhlich interview)."

An open-source online learning platform that will feature teaching designed specifically for the web. Features will include: self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories. The platform will also serve as a ..