Worldwide Week at Harvard continued Wednesday with a conversation at Longfellow Hall on the future of cities. The panel, which included members of the design, planning, technology, and economic communities, took a broad approach, tackling a variety of issues facing urban leaders.

Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Development and Urbanism and chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, began by looking at the limitations of city planning. Climate change, for...

Humans find validity in the tangible — what we can see, hear, and touch becomes real. But some of the most essential, and even most beautiful, components of life on this planet cannot be seen by the naked eye.

Now, two Harvard University scientists have captured and brought to light the “invisible,” and stunning, life force everywhere around us: microbes. Deeply inspired, the researchers have concentrated their work on life-forms of the microbial world, which have a defining role in our evolution.

“There is intrinsic beauty in the way we can talk about microbes and the...

In 1985, when Carl Sagan was writing the novel Contact, he needed to quickly transport his protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway from Earth to the star Vega. He had her enter a black hole and exit light-years away, but he didn’t know if this made any sense. The Cornell University astrophysicist and television star consulted his friend Kip Thorne, a black hole expert at the California Institute of Technology (who won a Nobel Prize earlier this month). Thorne knew that...

The Center for African Studies, in partnership with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University Asia Center, the East Asian Legal Studies Program, and our partners...