harvard

Your reputation as a tough, hard-nosed business go-getter may take a hit if you spend a lot of time using your little smartphone. A study conducted by researchers at Harvard Business School suggests that using devices with small screens can cause people to behave less assertively than those using larger screens.

"Grounded in research showing that adopting expansive body postures increases psychological power, we hypothesized that working on larger devices, which forces people to physically expand, causes users to behave more assertively," reads the abstract of the paper, titled "iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects Our Behavior."… Read more

When you think of the word "crystal," you think, perhaps, of wedges of quartz stone, ice crystals, and salt -- not organic flowing forms or flowers. But by manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, Harvard postdoctoral fellow Wim L. Noorduin has managed to control the growth of barium carbonate crystals to form very controlled sculptures of flowers, with petals, stems, and leaves.

How the crystal forms depends on the mixture of chemicals in a solution. As the chemical gradients react, the pH can change, causing the crystals to grow away from or toward the gradient, enabling Noorduin to coax the forms into leaves radiating outward, a ling, thin stem, or the petals of the flower head. … Read more

After more than a decade of work, Harvard University researchers have finally gotten the so-called "RoboBee" to take flight.

According to the scientists, the robot -- which is half the size of a paperclip and weighs less than a tenth of gram -- was able to hover for a few moments and then flew on a "preset route through the air."

"This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years," Robert J. Wood, principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project, said in a statement. "It's really only because of this lab's recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well."… Read more

It's no secret that the standard hand-eye coordination tests doctors use to monitor neuromuscular deficits -- typically when a patient is injured or as a patient ages -- can be subjective, relying on, say, descriptions of reflexes and cognitive status such as "mild," "moderate," and "severe."

So researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, the Beth Israel Medical Center, and Hebrew SeniorLife have been developing what they call a rapid neuroassessment device, nicknamed NeuroAssess, to measure neuromuscular performance quantitatively instead of qualitatively.

They've recently tested it on 150 … Read more

As if pulling a storyline from the movie "Jurassic Park," a Harvard University professor says it would be possible to clone the long-extinct Neanderthal. One little hitch is that he'd need a woman willing to carry the offspring.

Contrary to a flurry of headlines following his interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, however, Harvard molecular geneticist George Church is not currently taking applications from would-be surrogate moms.

"The real story here is how these stories have percolated and changed in different ways," Church, a well-respected genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Boston Herald following a slew of recent impossible-to-ignore headlines such as "I can create Neanderthal baby, I just need willing woman," and, from the Daily Mail, "Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man - Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby." … Read more

Steven Sinofsky, who recently left Microsoft after running the Windows division for six years, tweeted this morning that he will teach at Harvard Business School this spring.

"Excited to return to @HarvardHBS to teach again this spring!" Sinofsky wrote. "New perspectives, recharge, share experiences, write."

In response to a question on Twitter, Sinofsky said he intends to teach "product development" as well as write articles about the topic.

Sinofsky has some history at Harvard Business School. He served as a "visiting scholar" there in 1998. He also co-authored a book on organizational … Read more

In addition to slithering, crawling, and flying just about anywhere, what if robots could camouflage themselves? This tentacled prototype can be made to look like -- or stand out from -- its background with a simple injection of dyes.

Developed by engineers at Harvard University's Whitesides Research Group, the "soft machine" silicone quadruped crawls along on pressurized gases fed through an umbilical cord.

Users can send different dyes through channels in the robot's body, allowing it to blend in or stand out in startling fashion, such as glowing in the dark. Color changes take about 30 seconds, but don't require further power to sustain the disguise. … Read more

Science can be rather disheartening.

You sidle up to a potential lover and you're told there's no chemistry. You want to make yourself beautiful for the next potential lover and physics makes your eyes resemble pig buttocks.

And yet, just occasionally, scientific exploration of our biology can turn up a helpful hint that lifts us from our daily pall.

Indeed, my all-too-rare reading of Science magazine has turned up something that for you will be peace of mind and for Amazon will surely be the next great business segment.

For instead of shoving your data onto a hard … Read more

From snakes to fish to cheetahs, we've seen a veritable Noah's Ark of biomimetic robots in recent years, and now researchers have turned to the lowly earthworm for inspiration.

Meshworm is a squishy, sluglike droid that stretches and squeezes its artificial muscles to move forward. This peristalsis is similar to how worms travel and how your guts move food around. … Read more