Events

Virtual Summer Science Week: Spineless Wonders (Session 2)

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Dates: August 2–6

Children entering grades 1–4

Grades 1–2 meet 9:30–10:30 am
Grades 3–4 meet 11:00 am–12:00 pm

Fees: $63 members/$70 nonmembers

Instructor: Javier Marin

Come explore—virtually—the amazing world of insects, spiders, and other invertebrates at the museum! During live Zoom sessions, see a tarantula up close, help find millipedes, and listen to the hiss of a giant...

Virtual Summer Science Week: Earth Explorers (Session 2)

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Dates: July 26–30, 2021

Children entering grades 1-4

Grades 1-2 meet 9:30am–10:30am
Grades 3-4 meet 11:00am–12:00pm

Fees: $72 members/$80 nonmembers (includes a small packet of special materials mailed to your home).

Instructor: Arielle Moon

Dig into earth science with this virtual museum experience. Explore volcanoes, crystals, and fossils! During the live, small-group Zoom sessions, experiment with “lava,” solve a sandy mystery, and...

Summer Science Week: All Together Now—Exploring Ecology

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Dates: July 19–23

For children entering grades 3-6

Grades 3-4 meet 9:30am–10:30am
Grades 5-6 meet 11:00am–12:00 pm

Fees: $63 members/$70 nonmembers

Instructor: Javier Marin

Join us as we explore the relationships between living things and the places they live, virtually! During these live, small-group Zoom sessions, learn about how animals, plants and their environments are...

Virtual Summer Science Week: Earth Explorers (Session 1)

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Dates: July 12–16

Children entering grades 1-4

Grades 1-2 meet 9:30am–10:30am
Grades 3-4 meet 11:00am–12:00pm

Fees: $72 members/$80 nonmembers (includes a small packet of special materials mailed to your home).

Instructor: Arielle Moon

Dig into earth science with this virtual museum experience. Explore volcanoes, crystals, and fossils! During the live, small-group Zoom sessions, experiment with “lava...

Virtual Summer Solstice 2021

Location:

Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online

Join us on Sunday, June 20 to learn about the scientific and cultural significance of the summer solstice, enjoy musical performances and explore activities to do at home. Stay tuned for the full details!

Learn more about and register for this virtual event.

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...

Observatory Night: All That Glitters is Gold

Location:

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online

The cosmic origin of gold has fascinated humans for millennia. In this talk, Professor of Astronomy Edo Berger will explore the long-standing question of how gold (and other rare elements) are created in the universe, showing that this process is intimately connected to the collision of neutron stars (the remnants of powerful supernova explosions)—and the production of gravitational waves.

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian sponsors Observatory Nights on the third Thursday of select months. Observatory Nights feature a nontechnical lecture intended for...

Wild Collection and Propagation of Rare and Endangered Plants

Location:

Arnold Arboretum—Online

In Massachusetts alone, plants make up more than half of the total native species that are officially considered Endangered, Threatened, and Rare. In this talk, we will focus on how ex-situ plant conservation, coordinated plant collection efforts, and plant propagation play vital roles in preserving biodiversity and slowing the deleterious effects of climate change.

We will discuss how collection trips are planned—and how citizen science now plays a role in these efforts—while providing a behind-the-scenes look at the planning process. A large focus will be plant propagation...

After-School Animal Encounters: Movement

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Can you slither, hop, jump, climb, or even fly? How would you do these things with zero, two, four, or even a hundred legs? As winter melts away and warmer springtime weather blows in, all animals big and small are as excited to get out and move around as we are! Join human museum staffers Javier and Ryan in this live 45-minute family program as they discuss and take a look at some of our amazing animals in motion.

Advance registration for this family friendly program is required.

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My Octopus Teacher: Virtual Panel Discussion

Location:

Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard—Online

"My Octopus Teacher", Oscar winner for Best Documentary, follows filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster as he develops an unusual bond with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest. Come hear four experts discuss the unique human/animal connection captured in this film.

Learn more about and RSVP for My Octopus Teacher: Virtual Panel Discussion.

Tree Mob: Dredging to Renew the Ponds

Location:

Arnold Arboretum—Online

Maintaining ponds is messy business! Join Associate Project Manager Danny Schissler to learn about the history and upcoming restoration of two of the Arnold Arboretum's most well-loved water bodies, Faxon and Rehder Ponds. Both provide habitat for wildlife and visual delight for humans, and also are part of an essential drainage network within the Arboretum’s landscape.

Learn more about...

What Spiders Have to Say

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Consider the spider: eight legs, eight eyes, and a brain the size of a poppy seed. These are some of nature’s most amazing and charismatic creatures, and yet we know so little about their worlds. Paul Shamble will discuss the lives, habits, and marvelous morphologies of these animals—from sensory structures and cognition to locomotion and behavior. Understanding these creatures helps us better understand evolution and diversity—and leads us to ask what it means that even tiny animals inhabit complex lives.

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Prosociality in Hybrid Societies of Humans, Agents, and Robots

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

Ana Paiva is a computer science professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and is investigating the design of intelligent interactive systems by creating “social agents'' that can interact with humans in a natural manner. Over the years, she has developed this field by engineering social agents that exhibit specific capabilities, including emotions, personality, culture, nonverbal behavior, empathy, and collaboration, among others.

Join Paiva to learn about her current investigation into the conditions and mechanisms that drive societies of agents and...

Flap, Hop, Caw

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Celebrate International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day by taking a virtual swoop through the Peabody Museum. These smart birds play games with each other, display anger and friendliness, and appear in cultural tales from around the world. Flap like a real raven with museum educator Javier Marin and learn more about the birds’ characteristics. Find ravens drawn or carved in Alaskan Native art, enjoy a read-aloud Tlingit tale and make a paper craft with Andy Majewski.

Ages: 5–7 (with an adult, if needed)

Cost: $3 members; $5...

Bark: Get to Know Your Trees

Location:

Arnold Arboretum—Online

Due to popular demand, we are offering another session of this free webinar. Led by naturalist and conservationist, Michael Wojtech, you'll learn to identify tree species by their bark and discover why such a variety of bark characteristics exist. Why do some species have smooth bark, while on others it is thick and broken? Why does bark peel? Join us to find out!

Learn more about and RSVP for "Bark: Get...

After-School Animal Encounters: Humans and Animals

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Life on planet Earth can sometimes seem unbelievably diverse and resilient, yet we’re more aware than ever of how connected all living beings are to one another. This special Earth Week edition focuses on some of the challenges animals face today, and on what we humans—young and old—can do to help. This event will be fun for the whole family so bring your questions and sense of wonder, and join Javier, Ryan, and some of our amazing animals as they lead you in a live 45-minute program.

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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’...

A Week-Long Celebration of Earth Day

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Join the Harvard Museum of Natural History in celebrating Earth Day with engaging sustainability-themed virtual events and activities for all ages. Join the conversation as Harvard students and experts weigh in on our most pressing environmental challenges, on cutting-edge research, and on promising paths to a more sustainable future. Introduce young minds to environmental science with our live museum animals and HMSC Story Time. Find out how to reconnect with nature and record the biodiversity in your local area. Or, simply indulge in our staff recommendations for...

Body Builders: How Animals Regenerate New Parts

Location:

Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online

Regeneration is a remarkable phenomenon in which an animal can regrow parts of its body that are lost or damaged by injury. Humans, for example, can repair some organs, but some animals can rebuild their entire bodies from small pieces of tissue. How do these animals accomplish this feat? And why is it that humans cannot regenerate as well as these animals can? Studies of how regeneration works at the molecular and cellular level are beginning to answer the first question. To answer the second question, we have to understand how regeneration has evolved.

Mansi Srivastava will...

Brine to Batteries: The Extractive Frontiers of the Global Energy Transition

Location:

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online

Thea Riofrancos’s current project, “Brine to Batteries: The Extractive Frontiers of the Global Energy Transition,” explores the politics of the transition to renewable energy through the lens of one of its key technologies: lithium batteries. Based on multisited fieldwork following lithium’s global supply chains from the point of extraction in the Chilean desert, “Brine to Batteries” will be the first scholarly account of the rapidly moving processes shaping the contours of the next energy system—and those of our planetary future.

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114 Mount Auburn Street
6th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
T (617) 495-1585 | F (617) 495-0754