Harvard’s robot arm can grab squishy sea animals without hurting them

As you might imagine, you can’t just grab extra-soft sea creatures like jellyfish or octopuses when you want to study them. Not if you want them to remain intact, anyway. Thankfully, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have a far more delicate solution. They’ve created a robot arm (the RAD sampler) whose petal-like fingers can quickly […]

Harvard’s tiny robotic arm can make endoscopic surgery safer

Minimally invasive surgery is already amazing as it is, but a team of Harvard scientists have created a device that expands its possible applications even further. They designed a tiny robotic arm that lays flat while the endoscope is moving through narrow passages and pops up to reveal tools surgeons can use for the procedure. […]

Could Small-Town Harvards Revive Rural Economies?

In the mid-1970s, the town of Fairfield, Iowa, had a problem. Parsons College, which had been one of the town’s economic anchors for nearly a century, lost its accreditation in 1967 and shut down in 1973. The town faced the future of many rural towns across America: declining population and worsening economic fortunes. But local […]