If you wear contact lenses you’re already familiar with hydrogels—a jelly-like material made from polymers soaked with water. But a new type of hydrogel developed at Harvard University promises to be far more robust than your corrective lenses, stretching up to twenty times its original length without breaking. More »
Growing human tissue is old hat, but being able to measure activity inside flesh is harder — any electrical probing tends to damage the cells. But a new breakthrough from Harvard researchers has produced the first “cyborg” tissue, created by embedding functional, biocompatible nanowires into lab-grown flesh. In a process similar to making microchips, the wires and a surrounding organic mesh are etched onto a substrate, which is then dissolved, leaving a flexible mesh. Groups of those meshes are formed into a 3D shape, then seeded with cell cultures, which grow to fill in the lattice to create the final system. Scientists were able to detect signals from heart and nerve cell electro-flesh made this way, allowing them to measure changes in response to certain drugs. In the near-term, that could allow pharmaceutical researchers to better study drug interaction, and one day such tissue might be implanted in a live person, allowing treatment or diagnosis. So, would that make you a cyborg or just bionic? We’ll let others sort that one out.
Harvard scientists grow human cells onto nanowire scaffold to form ‘cyborg’ skin originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Using an ultrathin wafer of silicon and gold to focus lightwaves, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have created a revolutionary new kind of camera lens that completely eliminates the image distortion created by traditional glass lenses. It could not only pave the way for lighter cameras that are still as capable as today’s swappable lens models, but even cameraphones that snap images as impressive as a DSLR. More »
Imaging has been defined by glass lenses for centuries, and even fiber optics haven’t entirely escaped the material’s clutch. Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences might have just found a way to buck those old (and not-so-old) traditions. A new 60-nanometer thick silicon lens, layered with legions of gold nanoantennas, can catch and refocus light without the distortion or other artifacts that come with having to use the thick, curved pieces of glass we’re used to — it’s so accurate that it nearly challenges the laws of diffraction. The lens isn’t trapped to bending one slice of the light spectrum, either. It can range from near-infrared to terahertz ranges, suiting it both to photography and to shuttling data. We don’t know what obstacles might be in the way to production, which leads us to think that we won’t be finding a gold-and-silicon lens attached to a camera or inside a network connection anytime soon. If the technology holds up under scrutiny, though, it could ultimtately spare us from the big, complicated optics we often need to get just the right shot.
Harvard makes distortion-free lens from gold and silicon, aims for the perfect image (or signal) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Early research has had DNA making circuits and little factories. We haven’t really seen DNA used as a storage medium, however, and it’s evident we’ve been missing out. A Harvard team led by George Church, Sriram Kosuri and Yuan Gao can stuff 96 bits into a DNA strand by treating each base (A, C, G, T) as though it’s a binary value. The genetic sequence is then synthesized by a microfluidic chip that matches up that sequence with its position in a relevant data set, even when all the DNA strands are out of order. The technique doesn’t sound like much on its own, but the microscopic size amounts to a gigantic amount of information at a scale we can see: about 704TB of data fits into a cubic millimeter, or more than you’d get out of a few hundred hard drives. Caveats? The processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than just transfers. All the same, such density and a lifespan of eons could have us turning to DNA storage not just for personal backups, but for backing up humanity’s collective knowledge. We’re less ambitious — we’d most like to know if we’ll be buying organic hard drives alongside the fair trade coffee and locally-sourced fruit.
Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 01:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In November of 2011, we talked a bit about a soft, flexible robot that was powered by compressed air. The Harvard University team that designed that soft and flexible robot is back with an updated version of the same air-powered robot that can camouflage itself. The camouflage properties can allow the robot to blend into its environment.
Just like the robot from last year, this soft and flexible bot moves when compressed air is pumped into cylinders in the legs. The camouflage system takes cues from those found in cephalopods such as the octopus and squid. In the current design, dye is pumped through small channels inside the robot to quickly allow it to blend into its environment.
According to the researchers working on the project, cold or hot fluid can also be pumped into the robot to allow it to thermally hide itself from heat sensing cameras. The robot currently uses an external reservoir for the dye, but researchers developing the robot say in the future it could be integrated inside the robots body.
[via BBC News]
Are animations of Curiosity’s Mars landing not enough to feed your space exploration appetite? Try this on for size: a group of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have generated what’s billed as a full-fledged simulation of the universe. Arepo, the software behind the sim, took the observed afterglow of the big bang as its only input and sped things up by 14 billion years. The result was a model of the cosmos peppered with realistically depicted galaxies that look like our own and those around us. Previous programs created unseemly blobs of stars instead of the spiral galaxies that were hoped for because they divided space into cubes of fixed size and shape. Arepo’s secret to producing accurate visualizations is its geometry; a grid that moves and flexes to mirror the motions of dark energy, dark matter, gasses and stars. Video playback of the celestial recreation clocks in at just over a minute, but it took Harvard’s 1,024-core Odyssey super computer months to churn out. Next on the group’s docket is tackling larger portions of the universe at a higher resolution. Head past the jump for the video and full press release, or hit the source links below for the nitty-gritty details in the team’s trio of scholarly papers.
Filed under: Science
Scientists create simulation of the universe, reenact 14 billion years in a few months (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink PhysOrg | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cornell University Library (1), (2), (3) | Email this | Comments
We’ve seen a number of options for controlling real worms, but never a worm robot, until now. Enter Meshworm, the latest creation from researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University. The bot is made from “artificial muscle” composed of a flexible mesh tube segmented by loops of nickel / titanium wire. The wire contracts and squeezes the tube when heated by a flowing current, but cut the power and it returns to its original shape, creating propulsion in a similar way to its living kin. Taking traditional moving parts out of the equation also makes it pretty hardy, as proven by extensive testing (read: hitting it with a hammer). DARPA is known for getting its fingers in all sorts of strange pies, and it also supported this project. We can’t see it being the fastest way of gathering intel, but the potential medical applications, such as next-gen endoscopes, sound plausible enough. Full impact tests in the video after the break.
Continue reading Researchers create Meshworm robot, beat it up (video)
Researchers create Meshworm robot, beat it up (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Biorobotics lab at Harvard has interests extending beyond robot hands. The team is doing some fascinating stuff in the medical field, as well, including the exploration of heart surgery while the heart itself is still beating. They’ve explored some motion compensating tools, and we just couldn’t take our eyes off of this one during our visit — not exactly the last thing you want to see before they put you under. Part of the reason the device is so large is due to the weighted motion compensating system built in making it look like the sort of tool they’d use if they ever needed to perform open heart surgery during Blade Runner.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Visualized: this motion compensated tool prototype will haunt your dreams originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Freescale Semiconductor’s MPL115A2 is a tiny thing that will sit quite comfortably on the tip of your finger. It’s hard not to marvel at the engineering that went into the creation of something so small, yet so sensitive. The little metal square is minute enough to be plunked into a cell phone, offering up location pinpointing technologies that supplement GPS, gauging positions based on changes in atmospheric pressure. Harvard’s Biorobotics team was clearly impressed when it discovered the technology, devising a fascinating implementation that extends beyond the walls of the cell phone. The sensors would go on to form the core of the department’s TakkTile open-source boards capable of bringing sensitive touch sensing to robot hands.
The I2C bus / USB-compatible boards incorporate several of the sensors, with the whole thing covered in 6mm of rubber, to help protect them. The rubber lends some durability to the TakkTile — in fact, if you click on after the break, you can see footage of the team placing a 25 pound dumbbell on the board and banging it with a hammer (which seems to be a fairly popular activity over there). Even with that extra layer, the TakkTile is still quite sensitive — as evidenced by the five gram weight in the video. In fact, it’s even possible to get it to detect a pulse by placing it against your wrist, though the team was unable to recreate that during our visit.
Also compelling is the price — bought in bulk, the tiny barometers will run you $1 a piece, making the tactile array relatively inexpensive to assemble. Once you buy one, you can also get the most bang for your buck by snapping off the rows for individual use, a possibility given the symmetry of the design. Or you can just make one yourself, as the department has opted to open-source the technology, to help make it even more readily accessible to interested parties.
Continue reading TakkTile turns digital barometers into open-source robot touch sensors
Filed under: Robots
TakkTile turns digital barometers into open-source robot touch sensors originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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