Featured series 
Tag: School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
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Campus & Community
Engineering Idol
The winner of this year’s ES100-100hf senior engineering design project course competition aimed straight for the heart by recording an electrical “ballad.” The runners-up (a tie for second), meanwhile, worked themselves to the bone and relied on “heavy metal” riffs. All three, narrowed down from a group of more than a dozen talented Harvard seniors,…
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Campus & Community
Transplanted cells regenerate muscles
Biological engineering, which once excited the medical community, has been fraught with the difficulties of keeping transplanted cells alive and getting them to integrate with a host’s body. Researchers at Harvard University’s Department of Engineering and Applied Science may have solved these problems. “We transplant the cells on a scaffold that keeps them alive, then…
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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…
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Science & Tech
Making the world’s smallest gadgets even smaller
You may not have noticed, but the smallest revolution in world history is under way. Laboratories and factories have begun to make medical sensors and computer-chip components smaller than a single blood cell or the periods on this page. Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry, has been making such diminishingly small things for years. He…
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Campus & Community
Drops in drops hold practical promise
A team of Harvard researchers has developed a technique that allows the precise formation of double emulsions – droplets within droplets – that offers new ways to deliver drugs, nutrients, and other consumer and industrial products. The team, led by Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics David Weitz, devised a technique…
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Science & Tech
Student makes cableless cable
Matthew DePetro ’05 earned top honors for his senior design project, “Wireless Cable Television.” The first-prize entry “untethers” standard cable TV and even eliminates the need for a wall outlet. “All of the rooms that I have lived in at Harvard have such crummy standard TV reception that something as simple as watching the 11…
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Campus & Community
Brighter model for global warming
To environmental chemist Scot Martin, chemistry is a way of understanding the Earth and some of its most pressing problems. From global warming to heavy metal pollution in groundwater, Martin, named Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Chemistry last July, is using the tools of chemistry to shed light on how natural processes interact with human…
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Campus & Community
Harvard scientists develop ‘plug and play’ laser
Engineers and applied physicists have demonstrated the feasibility of a new type of plug-in laser that could lay the groundwork for wide-ranging security applications. Their Raman injection laser, described in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, combines the advantages of nonlinear optical devices and semiconductor injection lasers with a compact “plug and play”…
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Campus & Community
Warming world would see fewer summer breezes
A group of climate researchers has shown that a warming globe over the next 50 years could result in fewer appearances of summer’s cleansing winds over the Northeast and Midwest United States, resulting in worsening air pollution in the regions. Loretta J. Mickley, a research associate at the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Daniel…
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Health
Snaring secrets of the Venus flytrap
While “speed” is not a word most people associate with the plant kingdom, the Venus flytrap closes its v-shaped leaves in just one-tenth of a second – fast enough to accomplish a feat thousands if not millions of backyard barbecuers fail at each summer: snaring a fly. So how can a plant pull this off?…
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Campus & Community
Quantum network to deliver secure messages
Talked about for decades, a quantum code key system joined to the Internet has now been demonstrated. It sends encoding and decoding keys as light pulses between Harvard and Boston universities and BBN Technologies, a hi-tech company in Cambridge, Mass. The network started operating in June 2004. “Our team has been able to develop a…
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Campus & Community
Researchers observe ozone killer
Harvard researchers have implicated a particular molecule in the destruction of Earth’s ozone layer. The molecule, made up of two chlorine atoms and two oxygen atoms, is called a chlorine monoxide dimer or chlorine peroxide, Cl-O-O-Cl. It has a crucial role in the process by which chlorine destroys atmospheric ozone. Though a variety of chemicals…
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Science & Tech
Tiniest droplets produced from triangular nozzles
Ultra-tiny taps – which could, in theory, create drops just 8 billionths of a millimeter in size – might prove a boon for technologies that employ sprays of costly materials. For instance, triangular taps could boost the resolution of ink-jet printers, which work by squirting fine droplets of ink onto surfaces. They could also cut…
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Science & Tech
Light propagates via wires more slender than its own wavelength
A research team led by Harvard’s Eric Mazur and Limin Tong, a visiting professor from Zhejiang University in China, reported on their work with nanowires in the Dec. 18, 2003 issue of the journal Nature. “You wouldn’t normally imagine that a baseball could pass through a garden hose, but these nanowires appear able to handle…
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Campus & Community
Surgery done on a single cell
A superprecise scalpel that can be used to operate on an individual cell is now a reality thanks to experimenters at Harvard University. “Ultrashort laser pulses [up to 1,000 a second] produce a spot as hot as the sun,” notes Eric Mazur, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics. “Normally, that kind of heat would vaporize…
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Campus & Community
War stories of a soldier/scientist
Kevin Kit Parker’s 9 mm pistol lay on the table next to the laptop as he typed. He was stripped to the waist in the 130-degree heat, sweating and writing while he waited for a flight home from Afghanistan.
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Campus & Community
Building circuits measured in molecules
Yu Huang, a doctoral student in Professor Charles Lieber’s lab, has used fluid flows to arrange tiny bits of wires that are just billionths of a meter wide into millimeter-long lengths. By switching the direction of subsequent flows, Huang has been able to create grids of these wires that could function as electronic circuits. The…
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Science & Tech
McElroy says it’s time to stop seeing global warming as political issue
Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies and director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment, is among the scientists who since the 1970s have been using paleoclimatic data to chart changes in the earth’s atmosphere. To obtain these data, researchers drill several kilometers down into polar ice sheets and extract gases from the…
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Health
Students develop system to fight TB
A new system developed by Harvard undergraduates delivers anti-tuberculosis drugs through an inhaler, increasing the likelihood that patients will take them over longer periods, and reducing the side effects of pills and injections. To test and market the system, the group has formed a nonprofit corporation called MEND (MEdicine in NeeD). “It’s the beginning of…
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Science & Tech
New use found for black silicon
In 1999, Harvard researchers used laser pulses to etch the surface of silicon, the most common substance used in electronic devices. By accident, they created a material that efficiently traps light. Called black silicon, it holds amazing potential for efficiently converting sunlight to electricity, for communicating by light, and for monitoring the environment for evidence…
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Science & Tech
Students tackle Harvard Square parking problems
A group of students who studied parking problems in Harvard Square issued wide-ranging recommendations, including installing wireless access-control gates at the more than 50 lots across the University, increasing parking fees in Cambridge coupled with increased enforcement of permits, establishing satellite parking lots and shuttles to encourage people to park there, and installing robotic –…
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Science & Tech
Harvard researchers stop, restart, light
Albert Einstein theorized that light cannot travel faster than 186,282 miles per second. But he never said it couldn’t go slower. Lene Hau, a physics professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, says Einstein would “probably be stunned” at the results of her recent experiments. Working in her laboratory at the…
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Science & Tech
Black silicon: A new way to trap light
Eric Mazur, Harvard College Professor and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, and his students were studying what kinds of new chemistry can occur when lasers shine on metals, like platinum. One day, they decided to put a chip of gray silicon into a vacuum chamber, add some halogen gas, and scan it with ultrashort,…
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Science & Tech
Exploring big and small possibilities of the information revolution
” ‘System-on-a-chip’ is the new buzzword today,” said Professor Woodward Yang in 1999. “It’s really not that far away.” As Yang sees it, the computer revolution is really just beginning. Systems are poised to become smaller, more portable, and found everywhere from traditional desktops to cell phones and pagers. Yang in 1999 said researchers are…