Harvard

Digital data storage is far from permanent. The data on your hard drive or flash drive probably won't last more than a few decades, but Harvard researchers have created what they say is a much longer-term alternative using spots of glowing dye.

Tardigrades are notoriously hardy microscopic creatures, but one thing they’re not good at is fossilizing. Now an exceptionally well-preserved, “once-in-a-generation” tardigrade fossil has been found in amber, and assigned to a new species and genus.

A new company called Colossal plans to revive the woolly mammoth and reintroduce the species to the Arctic. And it isn’t meant to be just a tourist-trap Jurassic Park either – the aim is to restore a long-lost ecosystem to help fight climate change.

New research has found a correlation between air quality in office environments and workers’ cognitive function. The study found low ventilation rates and increased levels of particulate matter were linked with reduced performance on cognitive tests.

Among other things, the mantis shrimp is known for having the fastest punch of any animal. Harvard scientists have now built a mechanism that simulates that punch, and they believe that it could lead to new capabilities for human technologies.

Eardrum perforations are painful, impair hearing and are tricky to repair. The PhonoGraft, developed at Harvard, is a 3D-printed implant that can patch up damage by encouraging natural cells to regrow, and now it’s ready for commercial production.

Controversial physicist Avi Loeb is on the hunt for aliens again. His new Galileo Project aims to track unexplained oddities in the sky, study interstellar objects, and even examine the "possibility" of alien satellites watching us from orbit.

It’s tricky detecting gravitational waves – these spacetime ripples are often drowned out by background vibrations from earthquakes and human activity. Now a pair of astrophysicists has proposed a new location that would be far quieter – the Moon.

When someone has suffered a stroke, they often have difficulty relaying commands from their brain to other parts of their body, such as their limbs. A new robotic system, known as NCyborg, may one day help them regain the ability to do so.

Ordinarily, if you're building something, you don't want the materials to buckle under pressure. In a new Harvard University-designed system, however, that buckling action allows flat-packed objects to be twisted into useful three-dimensional forms.

Researchers have developed a face mask that can detect SARS-CoV-2 in a wearer’s breath within just 90 minutes. The sensor technology can be programmed to detect any kind of virus or toxin and is small enough to be integrated into clothing fabrics.

A browsable 3D map of just one millionth of the cerebral cortex has been created using 225 million images and a whopping 1.4 petabytes of data, illustrating the immense complexity of the human brain.