Holograms are a ubiquitous part of our lives. They are in our wallets — protecting credit cards, cash and driver’s licenses from fraud — in grocery store scanners and biomedical devices. Even though holographic technology has been around for decades, researchers still struggle to make compact holograms more efficient, complex and secure. Researchers at…
Soft Robotics ‘Toolkit’ Features Everything a Robot-Maker Needs
Cambridge, Mass. – September 19, 2014 – A new resource unveiled today by researchers from several Harvard University labs in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin provides both experienced and aspiring researchers with the intellectual raw materials needed to design, build, and operate robots made from soft, flexible materials. View: Photos of the Day: Online Resource…
For Electronics Beyond Silicon, a New Contender Emerges
New transistor achieves “colossal” switchable resistance using quantum materials and physics developed in a fuel cell lab. Cambridge, MA – Silicon has few serious competitors as the material of choice in the electronics industry. Yet transistors, the switchable valves that control the flow of electrons in a circuit, cannot simply keep shrinking to meet the…
Programming Smart Molecules
Computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have joined forces to put powerful probabilistic reasoning algorithms in the hands of bioengineers. In a new paper presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference on December 7, Ryan P. Adams…
Seeing Depth Through a Single Lens
The slight differences between these two images provide enough information for a computer to mathematically create a brand-new image as if the camera had been moved to one side. Read: Seeing Depth Through a Single Lens By stitching these two images together into an animation, Crozier and Orth provide a way for amateur photographers and…
Designing a Cleaner Future
A slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, received major media attention in 2010 and 2011 when the outside world realized where computers go to die. In an area called Agbogbloshie, impoverished residents were burning broken electronic parts, discarded and dumped by wealthier nations, to extract the metal components. Crouched around bonfires, they inhaled toxic…