Victoria Hwang and Annie Stephenson use bird plumage as the inspiration for their work on structural color. It turns out that replicating some of nature's most impressive colors is actually pretty tricky.

In this episode, PhD student Dakota McCoy, who studies Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, asks why birds of paradise evolved to have brightly colored feathers. Then she asks an even bigger question: Why did some of these brightly colored birds also develop super-black feathers?

The new age of big data was supposed to make decisions easier, and in some ways it has. Data tells you how much you’re going to like a new film on Netflix. Data lets you know when you can stop running on that treadmill. Data helps predict hurricanes...

Catherine Hartmann was first exposed to Buddhism in a church Bible study group. “We were reading a book about other world religions and why they were wrong,” Hartmann says. According to the PhD candidate in the study of religion, the...

What do birds and aerospace engineers have in common? Both have invented incredibly dark, “super-black” surfaces that absorb almost every last bit of light that strikes them. Of course scientists worked intentionally to devise these...

In the summer of 2010, shortly after she graduated from Harvard College, Christine Baugh started working at a neuroscience research lab at Boston University. Young men would come into the lab suffering from chronic pain, depression, and even early...

As Houghton Library turns 75, former and current GSAS students look back at the objects that inspired their research.

Thenesoya V. Martín De la Nuez vividly remembers what it was like in 1997 to hear legendary Louisiana isleños singer and wood carver Irvan Perez sing the décima, a creolized version of the traditional Spanish ten-line improvised narrative poem.