Items tagged with Harvard
Soon the expression “I wish I could have been a fly on the wall” will be more than just an idiom. A team of Harvard scientists is building a bee-inspired micro aerial vehicle (MAV) robot. The robot is intended for “basically any situation where you want to have low cost and distributed sensing [that] would be too difficult or too dangerous for a human."Why is the MAV modeled after an insect? For most drones, hovering consumes as much energy as flying. As long as the drone is in the air, it eats up its small battery. Scientists discovered that they could save a considerable amount of energy if the drone rested in between flights like insects do. The MAV has a electrostatic patch that consists...
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We have a lot of respect for Jen-Hsun Huang, the fiery boss of NVIDIA who once famously told analysts that the GPU maker was going to "open a can of whoop ass" on Intel, which at the time was talking a big game about Nehalem and Larrabee. He's done some wonderful things at NVIDIA, the company he co-founded over two decades ago, and it's earning him props from Harvard.In a new study in the November issue of Harvard Business Review, Mr. Huang was named the 29th best-performing CEO in the world. That's high praise, especially coming from one of the most esteemed universities on the planet (Harvard Business Publishing is a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University).Breaking it down by category,...
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For regular consumers, wearable tech can prove to be a boon for a multitude of reasons - it could improve our fitness and in some cases, increase our productivity. That being the case, it's no secret that the same could really prove useful when put into action in military situations. This is something the Pentagon has been mulling for some time. As Reuters reports, wearable tech is progressing so rapidly, that it just doesn't make sense for the government to go on its own and develop its own tech. Says Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, "I've been pushing the Pentagon to think outside our five-sided box and invest in innovation here in Silicon Valley and in tech communities across the country....
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The consortium governing the planning and construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope — which will be the worlds largest optical telescope when completed — has approved its $500 million assembly phase, which is roughly half of the project's $1 billion overall budget. The massive celestial-gazing instrument and its support facility will be built in Chile, on the Las Campanas Peak in the Andes mountain range. A seven-mirror telescope spanning 25.5 meters, or nearly 84 feet, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will focus six times the amount of light that is harnessed by the biggest optical telescopes in operation today. As described on the project website, the GMT will have “six off-axis 8.4 meter...
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Speaking of 3D printing, researchers at Harvard University have developed a 3D-printable battery that’s just 1mm wide; the tiny component will ostensibly be used to power computers and even robotic drones of commensurate size, from hearing aids to the (frankly, quite terrifying-sounding) Robobees that have also been developed at the university. The team built the tiny battery with a custom 3D printer and ink, according to Gigaom, with a nozzle that’s just 30 microns wide. As you can see in the brief video, the machine prints comb-like parts, using multiple layers of “nanoparticle-packed paste”; when two “combs” are interlocked, they form an electrode and can...
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