Events

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

    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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    Virtual Exhibit: Women of the Museum, 1860–1920: Behind-the-Scenes at the Museum of Comparative Zoology

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    For the first time in the museum’s history, women who labored in the collections, offices, and labs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in the late 19th century are being revealed in a unique online exhibit from the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. The exhibit is curated by Reed Gochberg, Assistant Director of Studies and a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University.

    Women like Elizabeth Hodges Clark, Elizabeth Bangs Bryant, and Elvira Wood persevered diligently behind-the-scenes, gaining unparalleled expertise in what were previously thought to be men’...

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

    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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    Enduring Unethical Lessons from the Past: Learning from the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

    Location: 

    Harvard Medical School—Online

    The United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is used as a case study of the exploitation of communities of color at the hands of medical professionals. What are the lessons learned and how far has medical ethics really come in terms of the treatment of Black and other communities of color? Lillie Head, president of Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, and Riggins R. Earl, Jr...

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    Diving with a Purpose: A Fifteen-Year Odyssey

    Location: 

    Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

    Diving with a Purpose is an organization dedicated to the documentation and protection of African slave-trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African Americans. Jay Haigler and Albert José Jones will share a documentary on the organization’s work and recent discoveries. They will discuss the importance of submerged heritage resources in advancing the fields of maritime archaeology and ocean conservation and the need for a better understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and its global, cultural, and social-economic impact on society.

    ...

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    National Fossil Day

    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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    Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier

    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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    Wonderful Cambrian Beasts

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

    Earth is home to a vast diversity of organisms that collectively define the modern biosphere. How did this diversity come to be? Javier Ortega-Hernández will discuss his approach to answering this question by studying organisms that lived more than half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Period (485–541 million years ago). By focusing on the earliest-known animals—some of the most versatile to ever exist—Ortega-Hernández aims to reconstruct the early evolutionary history of major animal groups and contribute to our understanding of Earth’s biodiversity.

    ...

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    Observatory Night: What Stars Are Made Of

    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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    The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe

    Location: 

    Online Event

    Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet empire, the West faces a new era of East-West tensions. Any vision of a modern Russia integrated into the world economy and aligned in peaceful partnership with a reunited Europe has abruptly vanished. Two opposing narratives vie to explain the strategic future of Europe, one geopolitical and one economic, and both center on the same resource: natural gas. In The Bridge, Thane Gustafson, an expert on Russian oil and gas, argues that the political rivalries that capture the lions share of media attention...

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    The Ancient Maya Response to Climate Change: A Cautionary Tale

    Location: 

    Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Ancient Maya civilization suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be investigated and debated. Paleoenvironmental research over the past twenty years has revealed that the demise coincided with a prolonged, intensive drought that extended across the region, providing compelling evidence that climate change played a key role in the collapse of the Maya. Billie Turner will examine this evidence and the complex social and environmental conditions that affected Maya societies.

    ...

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    The Ancient Maya Response to Climate Change: A Cautionary Tale

    Location: 

    Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge

    Ancient Maya civilization—known for its cities, monumental architecture, ceramics, hieroglyphic writing, and advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy—suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be investigated and debated. Paleoenvironmental research over the past twenty years has revealed that the demise coincided with a prolonged intensive drought that extended across the region, providing compelling evidence that climate change played a key role in the collapse of the Maya.

    In this lecture, Billie Turner will examine...

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    Lecture and Book Signing: Assembling the Dinosaur

    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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    Exhibition Tour: Small Steps, Giant Leaps

    Location: 

    Edison and Newman Room, Houghton Library, Harvard Yard, Cambridge

    Join curator John Overholt for a guided tour of the exhibition Small Steps, Giant Leaps to learn about the ways early modern science inspired and made possible the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.

    Tours are free and open to the public. No reservation is required.

    Exhibition Tours are also offered on the following dates:

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    Exhibition Tour: Small Steps, Giant Leaps

    Location: 

    Edison and Newman Room, Houghton Library, Harvard Yard, Cambridge

    Join curator John Overholt for a guided tour of the exhibition Small Steps, Giant Leaps to learn about the ways early modern science inspired and made possible the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.

    Tours are free and open to the public. No reservation is required.

    Learn more about Exhibition Tour: Small Steps, Giant Leaps.

     

     

    ... Read more about Exhibition Tour: Small Steps, Giant Leaps

    Exhibition Tour: Small Steps, Giant Leaps

    Location: 

    Edison and Newman Room, Houghton Library, Harvard Yard, Cambridge

    Join curator John Overholt for a guided tour of the exhibition Small Steps, Giant Leaps to learn about the ways early modern science inspired and made possible the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.

    Following this tour will be a a screening of The Right Stuff (1983) at the Harvard Film Archive at 5:30pm

    An Exhibition Tour will also be offered on...

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