L. Mahadevan teamed with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to develop a hair-brushing robot. The robotic arm has a sensorized soft brush, camera with force feedback, and closed-loop control.
The robot, which can identify different hair types and groom accordingly, could be an assest in assistive-care settings. MIT News shares a video of the robot in action.
Congratulations to graduating senior Ella Frigyik, Gonzalo Giribet Lab, awarded the Hoopes Prizefor her senior thesis, “Phylogeographic investigation into the New Zealand harvestman genus Algidia (Arachnida: Opiliones: Triaenonychidae)”.
The cognitive processes underlying the foraging decisions of large mammals in nature are not well understood, in part because it has been difficult to disentangle the effects of sensory perception and memory on the animals’ movements. Nathan Ranc (Ph'D '...
Congratulations to Professor Andrew Davies and postdoctoral fellow Tyler Coverdale awarded Harvard's Star-Friedman Challenge for Promising Scientific Research for their proposal, “Anthropocene...
Professors Naomi Pierce and Benton Taylor along with seven other Harvard research teams will share $1 million in the seventh round of the Climate Change Solutions Fund (CCSF). The award was established by President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust in 2014 to support research and policy initiatives intended to reduce the risks of climate change.
Naomi Pierce won for her proposal, "Prospecting for Functional Materials in the Entomology...
Animals are constantly moving and behaving in response to instructions from the brain. But while there are advanced techniques for measuring these instructions in terms of neural activity, there is a paucity of techniques for quantifying the behavior itself in freely moving animals. This inability to measure the key output of the brain limits our understanding of the nervous system and how it changes in disease.
A new study by researchers at Duke University and Harvard University introduces an automated tool that can readily capture behavior of freely behaving animals and...
Professor Peter Girguis teamed with researchers at University of Minnesota to examine collected samples of carbonate rocks from the Del Mar East methane seep. The study published in The ISME Journal: Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology discovered that deep-sea bacteria are dissolving the rocks, releasing excess carbon into the ocean and atmosphere.
“If CO2 is being released into the ocean, it’s also being released into the atmosphere, because they’re constantly...