Swine flu! It’s the panic du jour, far less dangerous than eating poorly cooked chicken or getting in a car, yet apparently infinitely more scary. And now Harvard will take $2.49 to scare you on your iPhone. More »
There are two things everyone knows about Steve Jobs. He pushes his employees to make some pretty impressive—and market-changing—products. He’s also a horrible person to work for. Now the Harvard Business Review confirms, once again, the latter. More »
Harvard professor David Edwards wrote a graphic novel envisioning a future world where people ingested their food by smelling, or “whiffing,” it. That vision begot Le Whif, the chocolate inhaler.
Forget the opportunistic naming conventions for a moment, and focus on the tech and potential of the iShoe. Designed Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, the iShoe could one day help doctors and NASA scientists detect balance problems before a fall occurs. Currently, the iShoe only diagnoses balance issues, but Lieberman theorises that future versions (iShoe 3G?) will actively correct bad balance with sensory stimulation. If you know anything about falls (300,000 hip fractures per year, 24% over 50 die within one year) or what happens when astronauts return home from space (10 days of wobbly knees), the iShoe couldn’t come soon enough.
A team at MIT and Harvard Medical School has worked out how to cast bricks of artificial tissue into different shapes, and then get them to assemble automatically. The “living Lego bricks” are cast of polyethylene glycol—a biocompatible polymer—and solidified with light exposure. The self-assembling part happens when the bricks absorb water and are then agitated in a bath of mineral oil: The oil/water mix means the bricks move around and can be fixed when they’re in the right place with more light (as shown in the picture here, rod-shaped bricks in red stuck to a central green-stained piece).
