Hunting Lions
A small segment of a much larger scene arranged in three horizontal registers, this relief illustrates a tense moment during a lion hunt. While Ashurbanipal (668-631 BC), the son of Esarhaddon (shown on the massive stele at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East), strikes a fatal blow to one leaping lion, his spare horse is attacked by another. The multiple arrows in the attacker suggest that it had been left for dead and was not expected to rise. The king survived and appears elsewhere with his hunting trophies. In other scenes, the king hunts wild donkeys (onagers) and gazelle.
Visit the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East to see the exhibition
Watch the making of the Art of Intimidation Augmented Reality Experience
Ifugao hingat (earrings)
Harvard’s Peabody Museum cares for one of the largest collections of Philippines cultural heritage in the United States. Most items are associated with the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), including these Ifugao hingat (earrings) collected by William Cameron Forbes on Luzon Island. Made of spiraled brass, hingat were historically worn by warriors to mark their bravery and ferocity. Hoop earrings with scalloped edges may be worn singly or linked together in chains and combined with other ornaments to denote status or wealth. Over time, the design of hoop earrings has expanded to resemble the sun rays of the Philippine flag, symbolizing the provinces that revolted against Spanish colonization.
Today, Curator of Oceanic Collections Dr. Ingrid Ahlgren works with Filipino and Filipino-American communities to highlight contemporary voices in understanding these collections.
To learn more view the new online exhibition Balikbayan | Homecoming and visit the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
History of Computing
Students and faculty have always relied upon the latest instruments for calculating and computing. From Babbage’s engine, to the MARK I, to modern microprocessors, crunching numbers were an essential part of teaching and research.”
Visit the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments to learn more
Archaeopteryx lithographica
MCZ 1526
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
The Archaeopteryx lithographica is part of a specimen selection made by the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology to illustrate key concepts in evolution and represent the evolutionary convergence between non-avian dinosaurs and modern birds.
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see more fossils
The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants: Hens and Chickens
Echeveria secunda, Number 96
L. & R Blaschka, 1889
Succulent plants have thickened leaves that retain water in arid climates.
Harvard University Herbaria
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the Glass Flowers
Blaschka Glass Invertebrates: Sea Anemone
Many years before they were commissioned by Harvard University to make the Glass Flowers, father and son artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka meticulously shaped glass into lifelike models of marine and terrestrial animals. Renowned for their beauty and exacting detail, the Blaschka invertebrate models were commissioned by universities and museums throughout world during the nineteenth century.
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the Blaschka glass sea creatures
Blaschka Glass Invertebrates: Predatory Sea Slug
Tethys fimbria
MCZ SC 314
Ward Catalog Number 482
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the Blaschka glass sea creatures
Blaschka Glass Invertebrates: Pulse Coral
Xenia umbellata
Ward Catalogue Number 19
MCZ SC 16
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
On display at Harvard Museum of Natural History
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see more Blaschka glass sea creatures
Blaschka Glass Invertebrates: Atlantic White-Spotted Octopus
MCZ SC 381
Ward Catalog Number 572
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
On display at Harvard Museum of Natural History
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see more Blaschka glass sea creatures
Red-Spotted Horseshoe Worm
This organism was photographed by Gonzalo Giribet. Professor Giribet’s primary research focuses on the evolution, systematics and biogeography of invertebrate animals, including the use of morphology and next generation sequencing techniques. Current projects in the Giribet lab include a comprehensive study of the harvestmen of New Zealand, their systematics and biogeography, and a textbook on invertebrates. They also work on other projects on systematics and biogeography of arthropods, mollusks and onychophorans, among other groups. He is also interested in homology-related issues and the use of genomic-level data for inferring phylogenies.
Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see more arthropods
Skin organoid generated from iPSC with innervated neurons
Image shows a skin organoid with hair follicles sprouting. The skin organoid is a structure that contains layers of skin as well as skin appendages like glands and hair follicles. Here in this image, hair follicles are labeled green and touch receptor cells (Merkel cells) are labeled magenta. Neurons labeled in yellow, wrap around the organoids and innervate the hair follicles as well as Merkel cells.
T cells (blue) on biomaterial scaffold (orange)
T cells (blue) on biomaterial scaffold (orange). This has multiple uses, such as an injectable cancer vaccine and to create more efficient CART-T therapies. T cells (blue) are stimulated by their interactions with fibers in the micro-scaffold (orange) in a way that mimics their expansion by antigen-presenting cells (APCs), producing higher-quality T cells for immunotherapy treatments.
Spiral ganglion neurons of the cochlea
Spiral ganglion neurons in the cochlea are shown with their cell bodies in red, extending cyan axons upwards towards mechanosensitive hair cells, also in red. Our sense of hearing begins with the activity of these cells and is formed with astounding precision, culminating in our perception of diverse sound stimuli.
Six layers of excitatory neurons, color-coded by depth
A Harvard team, led by Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman, helped create the largest 3D brain reconstruction to date, showing in vivid detail each cell and its web of connections in a piece of temporal cortex about half the size of a rice grain. Published in Science, the study is the latest development in a nearly 10-year collaboration with scientists at Google Research, combining Lichtman’s electron microscopy imaging with AI algorithms to color-code and reconstruct the extremely complex wiring of mammal brains. The paper’s three first co-authors are former Harvard postdoc Alexander Shapson-Coe, Michał Januszewski of Google Research, and Harvard postdoc Daniel Berger. The ultimate goal, supported by the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, is to create a comprehensive, high-resolution map of a mouse’s neural wiring, which would entail about 1,000 times the amount of data the group just produced from the 1-cubic-millimeter fragment of human cortex.
Global Health Education and Learning Incubator’s (GHELI) studio
The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) at Harvard University supports teaching and learning about cutting-edge, multidisciplinary global health challenges. They provide opportunities to explore, experiment, and innovate in the multimodal environment, with a special focus on visual tools that promote conceptual understanding and effective communication. This image shows one of their low-stakes studios where they design and prototype short-form media content, develop new pedagogical approaches, and build integrative learning experiences that can be used in classroom or online learning. https://gheli.harvard.edu/about-us
Geospatial Distribution of Tweets by Language
Promoting well-being is one of the key targets of the Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. Many national and city governments worldwide are incorporating Subjective Well-Being (SWB) indicators into their agenda, to complement traditional objective development and economic metrics. In this study, we introduce the Twitter Sentiment Geographical Index (TSGI), a location-specific expressed sentiment database with SWB implications, derived through deep-learning-based natural language processing techniques applied to 4.3 billion geotagged tweets worldwide since 2019. Our open-source TSGI database represents the most extensive Twitter sentiment resource to date, encompassing multilingual sentiment measurements across 164 countries at the admin-2 (county/city) level and daily frequency. Based on the TSGI database, we have created a web platform allowing researchers to access the sentiment indices of selected regions in the given time period. (Nature: Yuchen Chai, Devika Kakkar, Juan Palacios & Siqi Zheng)
Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) faculty director, Louise Ivers, with partners in Uganda
The Harvard Global Health Institute engages in partnerships with organizations, communities, and individuals around the world to exchange knowledge, collaborate on issues, and strengthen the global health community. We collaborate with practitioners involved in the delivery and administration of care at every level to identify critical issues, craft practical solutions, and ensure those solutions reach those who need them most.
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative – UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees)
The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative worked with relief organizations on the border of Chad and Sudan on a research project on the refugee crisis in Darfur. HHI’s aim is to relieve human suffering in war and disaster by conducting interdisciplinary, practice-based research and education that can be used by scholars, policymakers, NGOs, and others to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in order to:
• Improve the effectiveness of humanitarian strategies for relief, protection, and prevention
• Instill human rights principles and practices in these strategies.
• Educate and train the next generation of humanitarian leaders.