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A pair of Harvard researchers discovered that falling raindrops on other planets remain similar in size and behavior despite widely different atmospheric conditions, according to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets last month. Kaitlyn “Kait” Loftus, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Earth and Planetary Sciences, and environmental science professor Robin D. Wordsworth used computer models to study raindrop shape, falling speed, and evaporation speed, ultimately determining that raindrop size is relatively constant across disparate planetary environments. ...

Harvard researchers announced Wednesday they will postpone a test flight for a controversial environmental engineering project — the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment — after pushback from an Indigenous peoples’ group in Sweden. Through the project, known as “SCoPEx,” School of Engineering and Applied Sciences engineering professor Frank N. Keutsch’s research group plans to release a small amount of particles into the stratosphere to test whether those particles could reflect sunlight back to space. According to the Keutsch research group’s we...

In normal times, Environmental Engineering senior Elieen R. Egolf ’21 would have conducted most of her thesis research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Active Learning Labs. But with labs mostly closed due to the pandemic, she took an unusual approach to her research in an unusual location: she built a robot composter in the basement of her home in Colorado. Sourcing food waste from a local composting facility, Egolf amassed about 89 gallons of material to test her invention and woke up at 6:00 a.m. every other day for six weeks to conduct testing. On Friday, she and oth...

UPDATED: March 11, 2021 at 2:15 p.m. Eighteen Harvard affiliates — including Cornel R. West ’74, Steven A. Pinker, and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. — signed on as founding members of a new nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending academics’ freedom of expression. The Academic Freedom Alliance, which officially launched Monday, arose out of conversations among professors at Princeton University about free speech on college campuses. By invitation, 17 current Harvard faculty and one incoming Harvard Law School professor joined the initiative. Keith E. Whittington — a prof...

Like many rising seniors at Harvard each year, Jenna D. Lang ’21 spent the summer before her final year searching for post-graduate job opportunities. This year’s senior class, however, is graduating into a job market that looks radically different from what it did a year ago. When Lang reached out to one small media company she hoped to work for, she learned that the coronavirus pandemic had left it struggling to hold on its existing employees, let alone hire new graduates. “I’ve run into that problem a couple of times with smaller organizations — that they’re j...