Engineers at the Harvard Microrobotics lab use insects as inspiration to build tiny robots that could one day help emergency rescue teams on the field. Watch the video…

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Photographer Amanda Means gave a public talk at the Harvard Museum of Natural History to explain her work. Watch the video…

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What do plastic tubes, strings and tin cans have in common? According to Chris and Meredith Thompson, they can all be musical instruments! At the 2008 Cambridge Science Festival, the Thompson twins show an audience of kids how fun the science of sound can be.

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If you leave a piece of human brain at room temperature, and wait to see what happens…it will simply melt and disappear. Indeed, 80% of our brain is just made out of fat and water. That’s what Katerina Mancevska, the Assistant Director of Tissue Processing at the New-York Brain Bank explains.

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Imagine a world where you could defy any laws of physics, from gravitation to electromagnetism. Not a world of superheroes in comic books, but a world where liquids and solids would become super-cool matter.

In this world you would plug magnets under your feet and levitate to go to work. Electrical wires would never get hot and any liquid would squeeze through impossibly small holes. Spinning your glass of wine at a Friday night party would have it mimic a Swiss cheese pattern. Instead of seeing a single whirlpool at the center of your glass, you would observe a multiple of tiny vortices. Public parks would host water fountains spouting upward under the simple action of a light beam. You would have to watch after your coffee to make sure it doesn’t flow out of your cup by itself. And passing through walls to go from one room to another would just be routine.

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In October of 2006, I interviewed Jonathan Whitlock, a post-doctorate associate at the Picower Institute at that time. On that day, he lighted up my fascination for memory, and its mechanisms in the human brain. At the end of the interview, he launched that he was erasing rats’ memory. And the whole story began.

Whitlock explained me he had trained a rat to avoid the dark side of a two- compartment box by giving him mild foot shocks whenever he entered that side. After the rat learned that task, Whitlock used an array of electrodes to listen in on many places at the same time in his hippocampus. Once he eavesdrops on the hard-to-detect signal of the memory forming, he manipulated it with the goal of impairing the memory.

“The idea is to watch the initial changes set in motion by learning, and reverse those changes applying the inverse patterned electrical stimulation,” he explained. When Whitlock put the rat back in the box, he said he didn’t remember he had to avoid the dark side. He got trained again and the responses to learning reappeared. His brain was intact and hadn’t been damaged.

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In NeuroMatrix, the most recent videogame developed by Morphonix LLC, a software company based in California, you play a secret agent infiltrating a neuroscience research facility. Your mission: understand why scientists can’t communicate anymore. You track down the Nanobots that have invaded their brains. If you fail, the Nanobots and the secret entity that spawned them will take over the Earth, reprogramming the human brain into docile submission.

This NIH-funded action videogame not only has 11 to 14 year-old kids play in a 3D real-time environment, but it has them learn about how their brain works at the same time.

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Your desk lamp doesn’t understand you. You wish it could be more sensitive to your needs. You wish it could move freely like an animated lamp from the PIXAR cartoon company. Well, perhaps one of these days you will put your old lamp in the trash and replace it with one that communicates with you.

Crazy? Maybe not. Imagine a lamp that would “feel” when you want more light. Sensing your needs, it would slowly bend its graceful neck, bringing its illumination closer to your page to better suit your eyes, because it “understands” your movements.

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It starts with a white dot on the gum. You know, those annoying canker sores that itch in the mouth. In some countries, it only needs one week to get worse. A hard fever strikes you and if your immune defenses are too weak, it can destroy the hard and soft tissue of your mouth. When it is not treated in time, it perforates your cheek; and if you’re lucky, you’re not part of the 70% to 80% of the victims it kills. But as a survivor, most of the time, you stay disfigured forever.

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Behind a tiny door on the campus of Harvard University, hidden in a building at the far end of the Yard, a magician will reveal his tricks to you with no hesitation – enthusiasm, even. This magician has no magic wand, no black hat or cape. He coifs his ash blond hair with gel and wears Prada glasses, jeans and T-shirts. Although he moves his hands rapidly when he talks, he doesn’t intend to misdirect or confuse you.

Sean Garner has been called a magician by the scientific community because he and his colleagues achieved a revolutionary trick of quantum physics: they managed to manipulate light in a way it has never been done before. The Harvard scientists have almost stopped a pulse of light in one part of space and made it reappear two tenths of a millimeter away. They have changed light into matter, and matter into light again. This trick holds promise for the manipulation of light as a carrier of information, because it is easier to work with in its matter state.

Researchers cannot now readily control optical information during its journey, except to amplify the signal to avoid fading. The new work of Garner and his colleagues marks the first successful manipulation of coherent optical information.

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On a rainy evening on January 17, 2007, Walter Bender, president for the software development at the non-profit One Laptop Per Child association (OLPC), arrives at the MIT Museum in Cambridge around 6:30 p.m. He parks his Peugeot mountain bike against the wall, on the left side of the Museum temporary door.

His yellow helmet in one hand, he climbs the stairs leading to the Soap Box event conference room, balancing his steps to the rhythm of his k-way trousers hiss. The atmosphere is convivial, less than fifty people, men, women and children joined the event, and sit in arc in front of the soapbox. While John Durant, director of the MIT Museum introduces him, Bender pulls two green and white plastic laptops out of his backpack. When he opens them, the two antennas give the laptops a frog silhouette.

Here they stand, on a tiny podium, the famous $100 laptops.

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