It seems like scientists are all about immortality these days. It’s not just plants and people that are getting the treatment, though. A team of Harvard engineers are developing a way of producing color that could produce paint that never fades, and displays that never go dark.
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Do you like Wikipedia? Are you a fan of obscenely wealthy educational institutions with unspeakable power? Then you’ll love the job listing that just went up at Harvard. They’re hiring a Wikipedian-in-Residence. It pays by the hour.
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Navigating a new campus is all part of the nostalgic movie montage that is freshman year of college. The changing leaves! The quaint Gothic architecture! The… drone tour guide? That’s the concept behind Skycall, a playful prototype that’s designed to help visiting Harvard students find their way around MIT’s notoriously confusing campus—which has been called "one of mankind’s most difficult and disorienting labyrinths."
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It may be hard to believe, but that transparent disk in the photo above is actually a fully functioning speaker. A team of researchers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have pioneered a never before seen application of ionic conductivity by creating a see-through artificial muscle that can produce sounds spanning the entire audible spectrum. While ionic conduction isn’t a novel idea, it’s been considered impractical due to the fact that ionic materials react poorly to high voltage. The team, which included postdoctoral research fellows Jeong-Yun Sun and Christoph Keplinger (pictured above), circumvented that obstacle by placing a layer of rubber between two sheets of transparent conductive gel, allowing the system to work with both high voltage and high actuation, two qualities necessary for sound reproduction. Theoretically, soft machine technology such as this can be used to do much more than play Grieg’s Peer Gynt, particularly in the fields of robotics, mobile computing and adaptive optics. To watch it in action, check out the video after the break.
Via: The Verge
Humans have long wished to see through the eyes of other animals—like Bran Stark’s Warg ability, say—but so far the best we’ve achieved is mounting GoPros on them
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Tony Stark used exotic composites, metal alloys, and other Hollywood-only make-believe materials to build his armor-plated Iron Man suit. But researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, constrained by the limitations of reality, took a different approach with a muscle-enhancing exoskeleton that could one day be as comfy to wear as your favorite pair of jeans.
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There’s hardly a shortage of animal inspired robots, but few are as tiny as Harvard’s autonomous RoboBee. The robotic insect has been around for a while, but researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering only recently managed a minor breakthrough: controlled flight. Using new manufacturing and design processes, the team has managed to keep the coin-sized bug aloft by independently manipulating the robot’s wings with piezoelectric actuators and a delicate control system.
“This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years,” explains Professor Robert J Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Now that we’ve got this unique platform, there are dozens of tests that we’re starting to do, including more aggressive control maneuvers and landing.” There’s more to be done, however. The tiny machine still requires a tether for power and control, and researchers are still studying nature to suss out how insects cope with flying through wind and the elements. Eventually, the team hopes to outfit the RoboBee with lightweight batteries, an internal control system and a lighter chassis. For now, however, they’re just happy to learned to steer. Check out the insect in action after the break.
Filed under: Robots
Source: Harvard
This three-fingered manipulator has just about everything you could ever want in a robotic hand. It’s relatively low-cost, it’s powerful, it’s capable of picking up objects both large and small, and it’s robust. In fact, we’ve already seen the thing used as a tee for an aluminum bat. The hand, which was developed by researchers at iRobot, Harvard and Yale, was created as part of DARPA’s ARM Hardware (ARM-H), a program track focused on the creation of inexpensive, dexterous hands. According to its creators, the key here is “function rather than trying to mimic a human hand,” which helped bring down the cost of building the three-fingered grasper. Check out a video of the Ninja Turtle-esque gripper getting put through its paces — and strengthening its core with a 50-pound kettle bell — after the break.
Filed under: Robots
You know something? The phrase “I don’t give a rat’s ass” might not be too accurate, considering how the rear end of a rat has a tail hanging from it, but in the near future, we might soon see a variant of that particular phrase appear. In fact, Harvard researchers have recently published in PLOS ONE that they were running experiments to study and evaluate the effectiveness of transcranial focused ultrasound being used to trigger specific actions in an animal.
In order to achieve their goal, they placed an anesthetized rat in the lab, where an ultrasound device was carefully positioned over its scalp, with a human subject wearing an EEG cap which was hooked up to said ultrasound. It takes some time to fine tune the situation, but once successful, it functioned as a brain-to-brain interface, allowing the human being to actually move the rat’s tail using telepathy. Of course, the practical applications of this particular research remain rather limited for obvious reasons as this point in time, but could we be looking at a highly advanced model in the future, where we telepathically control a rat to infiltrate a building, acting as a “spy” for us?
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Intel Starts Shipping Haswell Chips to PC Manufacturers, Firefox Beta Introduces Changes To Do Not Track Options, 
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