The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that Hansjörg Wyss (Harvard MBA, '65), the entrepreneur and philanthropist who enabled the Institute's creation in 2009 with a $125 million gift, has donated a second $125 million gift to the University to further advance the Institute's pioneering work.
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Dr. Aaron Ames, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is part of multi-university team that has received a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research into cyber-physical systems (CPS).
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The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail's exceptional flexibility is due to its structure, made up of bony, armored plates, which slide past each other.
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In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.
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Dubbed “Flipperbot”, the robot has been presented today, 24 April, in IOP Publishing’s journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, and was designed to test how real-life organisms, such as seals, sea turtles and mudskippers use flippers and fins to move on surfaces such as sand.
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Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources.
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Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers have unveiled a life-like, autonomous robotic jellyfish the size and weight of a grown man, 5 foot 7 inches in length and weighing 170 pounds.
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Watching a flock of thousands of starlings take to the sky is a spectacular sight. As the flock changes direction, it looks like a formation of suspended iron filings guided by an invisible magnet in the sky.
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A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate.
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The device doesn’t look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer. But the technology behind it, and the long-range possibiliti...
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