Harvard

Zebra finches, beware! That tweeting noise you’re responding to might not be coming from another finch at all, but from a rubber tube-based bird-call-imitating device. The gizmo was devised by a team of physicists at Harvard University in an effort to understand the physics of bird song.  Read More

Graphene is pretty amazing stuff. Just a couple of months ago, we heard about how the one-atom thick sheets of bonded carbon atoms had been used to create the strongest pseudo-electric magnetic fields ever sustained in a lab – and that was just the latest use that had been discovered for it. Now, word comes from Harvard University and MIT that graphene could be used to rapidly sequence DNA.  Read More

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are in development at various research institutes and aerospace firms worldwide, with an eye toward someday being used in applications such as search and rescue operations, environmental monitoring, or exploration of hazardous environments... or spying, as seems to be the case with all things micro. Like insects, many of these MAVs fly by flapping a set of wings, so they need to be designed to cope with crosswinds or potential wing damage. Engineers at Harvard University have created a tiny automobile-style differential, to keep the two wings generating the same amount of torque. The device is literally one one-millionth the size of what you’d find in your car.  Read More

If they were real, the Transformers harking from Cybertron would be considered pretty remarkable pieces of machinery. But their transforming abilities are limited to just two forms. By combining origami and electrical engineering, researchers at MIT and Harvard are working to develop the ultimate reconfigurable robot – one that can turn into absolutely anything. To test out their theories, the researchers built a prototype that can automatically assume the shape of either an origami boat or a paper airplane when it receives different electrical signals.  Read More

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT have created an origami-inspired “smart sheet” that can fold itself into various shapes, without any external manipulation. The sheet is composed of rigid triangular tiles that are linked together by elastomer joints, and studded with flexible electronics and thin foil actuators (motorized switches). The scientists foresee a day when such sheets could be used to create things like smart tools, that could take the form of anything from a wrench to a tripod.  Read More

Utilizing human lung and blood vessel cells, researchers have created a device mounted on a microchip that mimics a living, breathing human lung. About the size of a rubber eraser, the device was developed by a team from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston. Because it’s translucent, researchers can watch the processes taking place inside of it – kind of difficult to do with an actual lung. It will be used for testing the respiratory effects of environmental toxins, aerosolized therapeutics and new drugs. Using conventional models, such tests can cost over US$2 million.  Read More

Earlier this year we looked at a technique to grow 3D cell cultures using magnetic forces to levitate cells while they divided and grew, forming tissues that more closely resemble those inside the human body. Now researchers at the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) have devised a new way to achieve the same goal by using "biological Legos".  Read More

Current computers operate using binary coding; thousands to trillions of small electrical circuits representing a binary digit (bit) of information that represent a "1" when the circuit is switched on and a "0" when switched off by means of an electronic switch. The future of computing is to move this to a quantum scale, where the weird properties of subatomic particles can be used to create much faster computers. A new device developed by Harvard scientists which uses nanostructured diamond wire to provide a bright, stable source of single photons at room temperature represents a breakthrough in making this quantum technology a reality.  Read More

New research has backed up the findings of another study we covered recently on Gizmag which found the average modern running shoe causes significant damage to the knees, hips and ankles compared to running barefoot. The new study found that people who run barefoot land on the ball or middle of the foot. This mitigates the potentially damaging impacts that can be equivalent to two or three times their body weight that shoe-wearing runners, who generally land on their heels, subject their bodies to.  Read More