Tag: material sciences

  • Science & Tech

    Spiral swimmers may prove micro workhorses

    Harvard researchers have created a new type of microscopic swimmer: a magnetized spiral that corkscrews through liquids and is able to deliver chemicals and push loads larger than itself. Though other researchers have created similar devices in the past, Peer Fischer, a junior fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard, said the new nano-robot is…

    2–4 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    A collaboration with a long lifetime

    It was a crisp, classic fall day in Cambridge, but little of the golden afternoon sunlight trickled down to Cynthia Friend’s laboratory in the basement of the Harvard chemistry building. Yet sunlight and gold are key to an intriguing research project taking shape here, combining the expertise of Friend, a professor of chemistry and materials…

    4–6 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    ‘Armored’ bubbles can exist in stable nonspherical shapes

    Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated that gas bubbles can exist in stable non-spherical shapes without the application of external force. The micron- to millimeter-scale peapod-, doughnut-, and sausage-shaped bubbles, created by coating ordinary gas bubbles with a tightly packed layer of tiny particles and then fusing them, are described on the Web site of…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Scientists look inside antimatter

    “We have obtained the first glimpse inside an antihydrogen atom, and this is a significant step on the way to precision measurements that will allow matter/antimatter comparisons to be made,” says Gerald Gabrielse, professor of physics at Harvard and leader of the research team. Such comparisons could show why antimatter and matter have not destroyed…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    New type of matter may have been found

    In orbit around Earth, a satellite called the Chandra X-ray Observatory surveys the universe for sources of X-rays. Using Chandra, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has observed a star in the constellation Corona Australis that emits X-ray signals that some astronomers think come from an object made not out of atoms, or…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Why antimatter matters so much

    In 1995, experimenters made nine or 10 atoms of antihydrogen at the Center for European Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Since then, researchers have sought a method for making more antimatter, which would allow them to test fundamental theories of the universe. A team led by Gerald Gabrielse, Harvard professor of physics, is close to…

    1–2 minutes