In recent years, an entirely new class of robot—inspired by natural forms and built using soft, flexible elastomers—has taken the field by storm, with designs capable of gripping objects, walking, and even jumping. Yet despite those innovations, so-called “soft” robots still carried some “hard” parts. In particular, said Philipp Rothemund, a doctoral student working in…
Student Engineers an Interaction Between Two Qubits Using Photons
In the world of quantum computing, interaction is everything. For computers to work at all, bits—the ones and zeros that make up digital information—must be able to interact and hand off data for processing. The same goes for the quantum bits, or qubits, that make up quantum computers. But that interaction creates a problem—in any…
Study Uses Rings in Teeth to Understand the Environment Neanderthals Faced
Scientists are painting the clearest picture yet of what life may have been like for Neanderthals living in Southern France some 250,000 years ago, and to do it, they’re using an unlikely day-to-day record of what their environment was like—their teeth. A team of researchers showed that examining the teeth of Neanderthal infants could yield…
The “Holy Grail” of High-Pressure Physics
Nearly a century after it was theorized, Harvard scientists report they have succeeded in creating the rarest material on the planet, which could eventually develop into one of its most valuable. Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Isaac Silvera and postdoctoral fellow Ranga Dias have long sought the material, called atomic metallic hydrogen.…
Diamond Sensors Track Brain’s Signals
It’s one of the purest and most versatile materials in the world, with uses in everything from jewelry to industrial abrasives to quantum science. But a group of Harvard scientists has uncovered a new use for diamonds: tracking neural signals in the brain. Using atomic-scale quantum defects in diamonds known as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers to…