[ad_1] It’s made using keratin extracted from recycled wool. Keratin is a fibrous protein that’s found in hair, which, of course, has a habit of returning to its natural form. The researchers shaped a single chain of keratin into a spring-like structure. They twisted two of those together and used many such “coiled coils” to […]
Category: harvard
Harvard and Sony built a tiny surgery robot inspired by origami
[ad_1] In a microscopic tracing test, the researchers found that the mini-RCM was 68 percent more accurate than a hand-controlled tool. The robot also successfully completed a mock version of a precise procedure in which a surgeon inserts a needle through an eye to “inject therapeutics into the tiny veins at the back of the […]
Harvard’s transforming robotic fabric could lead to therapeutic wearables
[ad_1] To eliminate the need for an external machine, they weaved electronically-conductive silver-plated threads into the material they used for the STATs. The threads serve as the smart fabric’s heater and sensor elements, enabling the temperature and pressure changes needed to switch Novec 7000’s phase from liquid to vapor and vice versa. The study’s co-first […]
Harvard shrank its insect-inspired microrobot to the size of a penny
[ad_1] Kaushik Jayaram/Harvard SEAS “The wonderful part about this exercise is that we did not have to change anything about the previous design,” said Kaushik Jayaram, first author of the paper on HAMR-JR. “We proved that this process can be applied to basically any device at a variety of sizes.” The researchers also wanted to […]
Robot bees can crash into walls without taking damage
[ad_1] The trick was to improve the power density through refined materials. The actuators are made with dielectric elastomers that deform under an electric field and have good insulating properties. Their upgraded electrode conductivity helps them operate at the same 500Hz as the stiff actuators found on other bots this size. They’re easy to assemble […]
Lab cultured ‘steaks’ grown on an artificial gelatin scaffold
[ad_1] In the body, cells don’t just sit there in a pile. They get physical support from water, collagen proteins and nutrients, which help the cells grown and align. “To grow muscle tissues that resembled meat, we needed to find a ‘scaffold’ material that was edible and allowed muscle cells to attach and grow in […]
How a Harvard class project changed barbecue
[ad_1] Desora co-founder and CTO, Yinka Ogunbiyi, knows first-hand the challenges of “low-and-slow” barbecue in the dead of winter. Along with CEO, Michel Maalouly, Ogunbiyi spent hours in the cold every weekend attempting to perfect a grill design as part of an engineering course at Harvard in 2015. The goal was to outperform what many […]
Harvard student deported based on friends’ social media posts
[ad_1] Ajjawi added that an officer asked him to unlock his laptop and phone for searches, and left with them for five hours before raising questions about the teen’s social media friends. He’s retaining a lawyer in hopes of reversing the visa decision. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be completely unique. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee […]
Papercraft-inspired math turns any sheet into any shape
[ad_1] The team started by establishing the constraints on lengths and angles that need to be met for producing any given cut pattern, and then use a numerical optimization approach to determine the generic patterns themselves (such as their orientation, number and size). From there, it’s a matter of using mechanical analysis to manage the […]
Harvard’s camera can show you the world through the eyes of a shrimp
[ad_1] Paul Chevalier, one of the co-authors of the study published in Science, explained how polarization can help us: “Polarization is a feature of light that is changed upon reflection off a surface. Based on that change, polarization can help us in the 3D reconstruction of an object, to estimate its depth, texture and shape, […]