In the inaugural award ceremony held Wednesday in Berlin, Robert Wood, together with the American mathematician Sam Payne, received the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, and British astrophysicist Catherine Heymans received the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award.

The prestigious prizes, which are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMFT), recognize extraordinary scientists with outstanding future potential.

As an electrical engineer and roboticist, Wood has made numerous critical contributions to the field of robotics, and specifically to the subfield of soft...

Devah Pager, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Sociology of Public Policy, died Friday at her home in Cambridge surrounded by family and friends. She was 46.

A pioneering scholar whose work deeply influenced thinking on mass incarceration and racial discrimination in employment, Pager also mentored dozens of students in their research and career ambitions.

“She was a force of nature who accomplished a superhuman quantity and quality of work in a tragically short amount of time, and her impact on scholarship and policy is hard to overstate,” said Jason Beckfield, chair of the...

The past 70 years have been good for corn production in the Midwestern U.S., with yields increasing fivefold since the 1940s. Much of this improvement has been credited to advances in farming technology, but researchers at Harvard University are asking if changes in climate and local temperature may be playing a bigger role than previously thought.

In a new paper, researchers found that a prolonged growing season due to warmer temperatures, combined with the natural cooling effects of large fields of plants, have had a major contribution to improved corn production in the U.S.

“Our...

When the Cold War ended, the U.S. stood as the world’s pre-eminent power and looked forward to a new age of peace and prosperity. But a foreign policy overly focused on spreading American values dashed that promise, argues Stephen M. Walt in his new book, “The Hell of Good Intentions.”

Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School, says that failures linked to a strategy of “liberal hegemony” championed by Washington’s foreign policy elite have undermined the goal of advancing ideals like democracy and free markets and diminished the nation’s...