Events

    2023 Oct 19

    Astronomy is for All of Us: Celebrating Women Astrophysicists and the History of Cosmic Discovery

    5:00pm to 8:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard College Observatory Plate Stacks, 47 Concord Ave., Cambridge

    During Massachusetts STEM Week, join us for an evening celebrating remarkable women in astronomy from across the galaxy. Enjoy a dynamic lecture on exciting applications of astronomy, explore a captivating exhibition in the Great Refractor, engage in family-friendly STEM activities, and cap off the night with fall refreshments and stargazing.

    • Remarks from Professor Lisa Kewley, Director, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
    • Welcome remarks from Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, highlighting...
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    2023 Apr 22

    Alfred Russel Wallace Is 200!

    1:00pm to 4:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Join the Harvard Museum of Natural History in celebrating the bicentenary of Alfred Russel Wallace’s birth.

    If you are not familiar with Alfred Russel Wallace, you are not alone. Wallace (1823–1913) holds a relatively obscure place in the history of science, despite discovering the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin.

    On the bicentenary of his birth and in celebration of Earth Day, the Harvard Museum of Natural History will spotlight Wallace’s contributions to our understanding of biodiversity and highlight why they are relevant...

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    2022 Apr 27

    The Descendants (A Novel)

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Ladee Hubbard is a writer whose most recent novel is “The Rib King” (Amistad, 2021). In this lecture, she will discuss her current project, a novel that examines the implications of the ways in which Black people in the United States have historically been represented as an internal threat to both public health and safety, placing the 1980s War on Drugs in dialogue with the larger history of African Americans being used in drug trials and medical experiments.

    ...

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    2021 Oct 14

    How Beer Made Kings in Early Egypt

    6:00pm to 7:15pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    The remains of a 5000-year-old brewery found in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos are providing insights into the relationship between large-scale beer production and the development of kingship in Egypt. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Abydos brewery produced beer on a truly industrial scale—something unparalleled in early Egypt. Matthew Adams will share findings from recent excavations at the brewery and will consider it in context as part of a broad pattern of royal activity at the site that served to define the very nature of kingship at the beginning of Egypt’s history...

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    2021 Jun 10

    How We Incarcerate Young People: A Conversation about Policy and Neuroscience

    4:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

    Across the United States, children under the age of 18 can be tried as adults in criminal court. Although the practice is condemned by international law, we are the only country in the world that sentences young people to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the same time, recent developments in neuroscience research demonstrate that the human brain is not fully developed until after the age of 25.

    This program will consider the ways we punish young people in the American criminal legal system and how our policies could be reformed. We will bring together a...

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    2021 Feb 17

    The Popularization of Doubt: Scientific Literacy & Alternative Forms of Knowledge in the Soviet Union after World War II

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

    Alexey Golubev, assistant professor of Russian history and digital humanities at the University of Houston, is working on a new book project: a history of Soviet efforts to produce mass scientific literacy after World War II, when tens and later hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet intelligentsia were recruited to communicate scientific knowledge to the public through popular science lectures, publications, public experiments and debates, and television shows.

    This mass scientific literacy campaign resulted in a diverse and autonomous network of people and ideas in...

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    2020 Oct 22

    National Fossil Day

    9:00am to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

    Celebrate National Fossil Day—a celebration organized by the National Park Service—by taking a closer look at museum fossils with Harvard paleontologists. What can we see on ancient seafloors? How do modern animals help us understand extinct animals? What fossils still amaze scientists? What is it like to be a practicing paleontologist? Bring your curiosity and questions to this online event for all ages!

    Learn more about and RSVP for National...

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    2020 Oct 15

    Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier

    7:00pm

    Location: 

    Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online

    The first person who will set foot on Mars is alive right now. We believe this, but even if we're wrong we know the first crew to arrive there will look nothing like the ones that landed on the Moon fifty years ago.

    Our world has changed for the better, and ASTRONAUTS tells the story of the women who built this better world. The main character and narrator is Mary Cleave, an astronaut you may not have heard of. It's not because so many people have been to space; only a few hundred have! It’s because this graphic novel isn’t about fame. No astronaut you'll ever meet took the...

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    2020 Sep 17

    Observatory Night: What Stars Are Made Of

    7:00pm

    Location: 

    Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online

    Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."

    It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...

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    2019 Sep 17

    Lecture and Book Signing: Assembling the Dinosaur

    6:00pm

    Location: 

    Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Join the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments for a free lecture and book signing by Lukas Rieppell, David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

    Dinosaur fossils were first found in England, but a series of late-nineteenth-century discoveries in the American West turned the United States into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. Around the same time, the United States also emerged as an economic powerhouse of global proportions, and large, fierce, and spectacular creatures...

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