Wyss Institute

Water filters can get dirty and lose their effectiveness quickly. Now researchers have tested a new nature-inspired membrane that filters liquids using other liquids, making for a more efficient and longer-lasting membrane.

Wyss Institute's forays into soft robots have borne more ripe fruit in the shape of a soft robotic arm fit for use on submarines to handle delicate marine life like coral and jellyfish. This isn't the Harvard institute's first, but its latest iteration moves with "unprecedented dexterity."

A team of scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute has just presented its latest creation in the field of robotic exoskeletons, a fully wearable soft exosuit that automatically tweaks its level of assistance on the fly. ​

If robots are ever going to work alongside humans in the real world, they're going to need a softer touch. Harvard researchers have developed a new method for producing small-scale squishy robots, and demonstrated it by creating a flexible robotic peacock spider, driven by a microfluidics system.

It's difficult to study how the heart reacts to diseases and medications. Researchers at Harvard have now grown a model of a human left ventricle that spontaneously beats, marking a substantial step towards engineering entire hearts for more accurate testing of new treatments.

​When scientists are using submersibles to study deep-sea organisms, it's understandable that they'd want to harmlessly capture fragile-bodied animals in order to get a closer look at them. Well, Harvard University's Rotary Actuated Dodecahedron (RAD) sampler is designed for just such a purpose.

Harvard engineers have developed the world’s smallest Delta robot, dubbed the MilliDelta. As its name suggests, the new robot measures just a few millimeters, and could lend a hand in precise picking, packing, manufacturing and surgery on the micro scale.

While investigating the side effects of antibiotics and how bacteria can develop resistance to them, researchers from MIT and Harvard have found that the drugs can actually work against the body, weakening the immune system’s ability to fight off the bugs.

​Engineered bacteria can be great little workhorses, but they could be dangerous if they were to ever escape from their intended environments. To keep the critters in check, scientists from Harvard’s Wyss Institute have developed two types of “kill switches” that can be embedded in their genomes.

​When the Dusky Arion slug feels threatened, it secretes a mucus that makes it almost impossible to remove from whatever surface it happens to be on. Inspired by that, scientists have created an adhesive gel that could conceivably be used in the human body.

In ​Complete Locked-In State (CLIS) patients with fully functional brains are trapped in bodies that they have no control over. Now a team at the Wyss Center has found a way to monitor the brain activity of CLIS sufferers in a way that allows them to answer simple yes/no questions.

In a newly published study, Harvard researchers have taken another step forward in the development of a soft exosuit, isolating the suit's load-bearing benefits and determining that it can result in energy savings of almost 23 percent.​