Latest Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Stories

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Production method inspired by children's pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices. In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon...

New research at Harvard explains how bacterial biofilms expand to form slimy mats on teeth, pipes, surgical instruments, and crops. Through experiment and mathematical analysis, researchers have shown that the extracellular matrix (ECM), a mesh of proteins and sugars that can form outside bacterial cells, creates osmotic pressure that forces biofilms to swell and spread. The ECM mechanism is so powerful that it can increase the radius of some biofilms five-fold within 24 hours. The...

Physical equilibrium, assumed to be almost instant, may take months or years for particles in oil-water mixtures By studying the behavior of tiny particles at an interface between oil and water, researchers at Harvard have discovered that stabilized emulsions may take longer to reach equilibrium than previously thought. Much longer, in fact. "We were looking at what we thought would be a very simple phenomenon, and we found something very strange," says principal investigator...

Experts gather this week to discuss the efficient creation and delivery of nanoscale particles of drugs From targeted cancer chemotherapy to the guarantee of successful organ transplants, the 21st century may prove to be the age of big ideas in medicine. The drugs themselves, though, will be minuscule. Experts in chemistry, applied physics, materials science, and pharmaceutical science are gathering this week for the BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard University's symposium...

  Defying the laws of reflection and refraction Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction. The discovery, published this week in Science, has led to a reformulation of the mathematical laws that predict the path of a ray of light bouncing off a surface or traveling from one medium into...

Surprising phenomenon may lead to greater sensitivity in image sensor devices Engineers may soon be singing, "I'm going to wash that gray right out of my nanowires," thanks to a colorful discovery by a team of researchers from Harvard University and Zena Technologies. In contrast to the somber gray hue of silicon wafers, Kenneth B. Crozier and colleagues demonstrated that individual, vertical silicon nanowires can shine in all colors of the spectrum.The vibrant display, dependent on...

Microfluidics Lab at Harvard provides new core facility for undergraduate teachingWith little more than a conventional photocopier and transparency film, anyone can build a functional microfluidic chip.A local Cambridge high school physics teacher invented the process; now, thanks to a new undergraduate teaching lab at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), students will be able explore microfluidics and its applications.The Microfluidics Lab, developed by Dr. Anas...

Breakthrough elliptical cavity enables a wide range of applications in photonicsUtilizing a century-old phenomenon discovered in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, applied scientists at Harvard University have demonstrated, for the first time, highly collimated unidirectional microlasers.The result of a collaboration with researchers from Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, and the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Magdeburg, Germany, the advance has a wide range of...

Precipitation-controlling aerosols over the Amazon rainforest originate from the forest ecosystemA team of environmental engineers, who might better be called "archeologists of the air," have, for the first time, isolated aerosol particles in near pristine pre-industrial conditions.Working in the remote Amazonian Basin north of Manaus, Brazil, the researchers measured particles emitted or formed within the rainforest ecosystem that are relatively free from the influence of...

Advance in metamaterials leads to a new semiconductor laser suitable for security screening, chemical sensing and astronomyA collaborative team of applied scientists from Harvard University and the University of Leeds have demonstrated a new terahertz (THz) semiconductor laser that emits beams with a much smaller divergence than conventional THz laser sources. The advance, published in the August 8th issue of Nature Materials, opens the door to a wide range of applications in terahertz...