In 2018, the physics world was set ablaze with the discovery that when an ultrathin layer of carbon, called graphene, is stacked and twisted to a “magic angle,” that new double layered structure converts into a superconductor, allowing electricity to flow without resistance or energy waste. Now, in a literal twist, Harvard scientists have expanded on that superconducting system by adding a third layer and rotating it, opening the door for continued advancements in graphene-based superconductivity.
The work is described in a new paper in Science and can one day help lead toward superconductors that operate at higher or even close to room temperature. These superconductors are considered the holy grail of condensed matter physics since they would allow for tremendous technological revolutions in many areas including electricity transmission, transportation, and quantum computing. Most superconductors today, including the double layered graphene structure, work only at ultracold temperatures.
“Superconductivity in twisted graphene provides physicists with an experimentally controllable and theoretically accessible model system where they can play with the system’s properties to decode the secrets of high temperaturesuperconductivity,” said one of the paper’s co-lead authors Andrew Zimmerman, a postdoctoral researcher in working in the lab of Harvard physicist Philip Kim.
For all the recent advances in integrated lithium niobate photonic circuits—from frequency combs to frequency converters and modulators—one big component has remained frustratingly difficult to integrate: lasers.
Long haul telecommunication networks, data center optical interconnects, and microwave photonic systems all rely on lasers to generate an optical carrier used in data transmission. In most cases, lasers are stand-alone devices, external to the modulators, making the whole system more expensive and less stable and scalable.
Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in collaboration with industry partners at Freedom Photonics and HyperLight Corporation, have developed the first fully integrated high-power laser on a lithium niobate chip, paving the way for high-powered telecommunication systems, fully integrated spectrometers, optical remote sensing, and efficient frequency conversion for quantum networks, among other applications.
Cuts, scrapes, blisters, burns, splinters, and punctures — there are a number of ways our skin can be broken. Most treatments for skin wounds involve simply covering them with a barrier (usually an adhesive gauze bandage) to keep them moist, limit pain, and reduce exposure to infectious microbes, but they do not actively assist in the healing process.
More sophisticated wound dressings that can monitor aspects of healing such as pH and temperature and deliver therapies to a wound site have been developed in recent years, but they are complex to manufacture, expensive, and difficult to customize, limiting their potential for widespread use.
Now, a new, scalable approach to speeding up wound healing has been developed based on heat-responsive hydrogels that are mechanically active, stretchy, tough, highly adhesive, and antimicrobial: active adhesive dressings (AADs). Created by researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Harvard John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and McGill University, AADs can close wounds significantly faster than other methods and prevent bacterial growth without the need for any additional apparatus or stimuli. The research is reported in Science Advances.
To build more aerodynamic machines, researchers are drawing inspiration from an unlikely source: the ocean.
A team of evolutionary biologists and engineers at Harvard University, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of South Carolina, has shed light on a decades-old mystery about sharkskin and, in the process, demonstrated a new, bioinspired structure that could improve the aerodynamic performance of planes, wind turbines, drones, and cars.
The research is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Sharks and airplanes aren’t actually all that different. Both are designed to efficiently move through fluid (water and air), using the shapes of their bodies to generate lift and decrease drag. The difference is, sharks have about a 400-million-year head start on the design process.
“The skin of sharks is covered by thousands and thousands of small scales, or denticles, which vary in shape and size around the body,” said George Lauder, the Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology and professor of biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, a co-author of the research. “We know a lot about the structure of these denticles — which are very similar to human teeth — but the function has been debated.”
One of the biggest challenges in developing integrated photonic circuits—which use light rather than electrons to transport information—is to control the momentum of light. Colors of light travel at different speeds through a material but in order for light to be converted between colors, it needs to have the same momentum or phase.
Many devices have been designed to momentum-match or phase-match light at various points throughout an integrated circuit but what if the phase-matching process could be circumvented all together in certain cases?
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, together with collaborators from the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, have developed a system to convert one wavelength of light into another without the need to phase match.
The research was published in Nature Communications.
“For any wavelength conversion process to be efficient, it has to be carefully designed to phase match, and it only works at a single wavelength,” said Marko Loncar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper. “The devices shown in this work, in contrast, do not need to satisfy the phase-matching requirement, and can convert light in a broad colorrange.”
Harvard researchers have designed a new type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable and self actuated. It can change size, volume and shape; it can fold flat to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the next task.
Harvard’s First Black Faculty Deans Let Go Amid Uproar Over Harvey Weinstein Defense
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard said on Saturday that a law professor who has represented Harvey Weinstein would not continue as faculty dean of an undergraduate house after his term ends on June 30, bowing to months of pressure from students. The professor, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, who is a lecturer […]
DeRoy E. Larsen Hall, een kunst, architectuur en Ingenieursbibliotheek bij de Harvard University. Een ontwerp uit 1966 van het architectenbureau Caudill Rowlett Scott.
(Harvard College (1780- ). Class of 1862. (1882). The Fifth Report of the Secretary of the Class of 1862 of Harvard College : December, 1882. Boston, MA: Harvard University. Rare Book LD 2148 .F5 1882)
Bisexual activist and scholar Robin Ochs just announced the successful conclusion of a project she has been working on for 7 ½ years in collaboration with Amy Benson of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.
Back issues of Bi Women (now the Bi Women Quarterly) (1983-2009) and of North Bi Northwest (a publication of the Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network) are now archived and available via Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. They have been digitized, and are searchable and available to the public.
Here’s the press release from Harvard’s Schlesinger Library:
Boston is home to the longest-lived bisexual women’s periodical in the world. Bi Women Quarterly, a grassroots publication, began in September 1983 as a project of the newly-formed Boston Bisexual Women’s Network.
Staffed entirely by volunteers, and containing essays, poetry, artwork, and short fiction on a wide range of themes, Bi Women Quarterly provides a voice for women who identify as bisexual, pansexual, and other non-binary sexual identities.
Robyn Ochs, editor of Bi Women Quarterly since 2009, donated the only complete collection of this publication to Schlesinger Library several years ago with the agreement that it would be preserved, and digitized in a searchable format. The digitized collection at Schlesinger covers the years 1983 to 2010.
We are delighted to announce that this project is complete, and this resource is now available to researchers and to the general public through Harvard’s catalog.
Making the voices of bi women accessible will hopefully provide researchers primary material with which to begin to fill this gap.
Issues of Bi Women Quarterly from 2009 to the present can be found online a BiWomenBoston.org. These more recent issues will be added to the Library’s collection in the near future.
Reverend Edmund Harrison Oxley Sr. D. D. was born in Trinidad on January 30, 1881. He earned a senior Cambridge certificate at Queens Royal College before immigrating to the United States in 1903. He graduated from Harvard University in 1909, earning prizes in debate and elocution. When Reverend Oxley was called to serve at what was then St. Andrew Mission in 1912 there were 31 parishioners. Through his efforts the mission grew in membership and it became a corporate parish, recognized by the diocese. A new church building was planned and celebrated groundbreaking at 8th and Mound in 1915. Services for the community were also added: a nursery for free child care for working mothers, a free labor bureau and a branch of the Cincinnati Settlement School of music. As a community advocate he also provided leadership on various community committees aimed at providing services for the Black community.
Jay Lynn Gomez(formerly Ramiro Gomez) was born in 1986 to Mexican immigrant parents in San Bernardino, California. In her Domestic Scenes series, she paints domestic workers within the images of wealthy lifestyles taken from home décor magazines. Using acrylic paint, Gomez adds nannies, gardeners, and day laborers to full-page advertisements from magazines, bringing forth the often invisible labor of those who work behind the scenes to make such luxurious lifestyles possible for the privileged.
Starting in 2009, Gomez worked as live-in nanny for a Los Angeles family for two years. During this time, she began the Domestic Scenes series, documenting her daily experiences and observations of other workers in the home and the neighborhood.
“Gomez’s treatment of the figures, who are nondescript and without discernible facial features, addresses the perception of invisibility and interchangeability of the workers while foregrounding the friction of their position as a universal concern within domestic labor. In an acute synthesis of stylistic treatment with concept, the artist mutes the individuals within the homes, yet she names each figure and describes his or her actions in the title of the piece, highlighting the worker’s presumed anonymity within this hierarchical class structure.” (p.120)
In March 2021, Gomez announced that she is a trans woman. At the time of the publication of Home—So Different, So Appealing, she had not yet identified as trans woman, and is listed under her former name, Ramiro Gomez.
Image 1: Ironies, 2013, Acrylic on magazine leaf, 11” x 8 1/2” Description: A woman with dark hair sitting in a chair with a dog across from her in front of a bookcase.
Image 2: Domestic Scene,Beverly Hills, 2013, Acrylic on two magazine leaves, 11 ½" x 16” Description: A woman with long dark hair standing and looking out the window in a luxurious living room.
Image 3: Alma and Owen, 2013, Acrylic on magazine leaf, 11”x 8 1/2” Description: A woman with dark hair standing in the luxurious living room while a small boy with blond hair crawls on the floor in front of her.
Home–So different, So appealing Chon A. Noriega, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Pilar Tompkins Rivas. Los Angeles, California: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Houston, Texas: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, [2017] Distributed by University of Washington Press. 288 pages: illustrations English HOLLIS number: 990152435020203941
This post was written by Keith Muchowski, who is an Instruction/Reference Librarian at the Ursula C. Schwerin Library, New York City College of Technology (CUNY), in Brooklyn, NY. He blogs at thestrawfoot.com. Keith also provided the image above of Nora E. Cordingley’s 1931 naturalization card.
Nora E. Cordingley died on March 14, 1951. The name may not be familiar, but Ms. Cordingley was active for three decades in one of the most significant projects in presidential librarianship: the collection, preservation and dissemination of the letters, papers, and hundreds of thousands of other items related to the short, strenuous life of Theodore Roosevelt. When the twenty-sixth president died on January 6, 1919, his family, friends, and close associates formed the Roosevelt Memorial and Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Associations. One of the first moves of the RMA and WRMA was purchasing the East 20th Street site upon which Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858, and where he lived until his early teens. The groups also bought the neighboring lot where young Theodore’s uncle, Robert B. Roosevelt, resided. Roosevelt House, as it was originally called, opened to great fanfare on October 27, 1923, what would have been Theodore Roosevelt’s sixty-fifth birthday. The institution had two missions: to be a museum & library and to serve as something of a center for American Studies. Ironically however one of Roosevelt House’s most important players in these years was not American, but Canadian: Nora Evelyn Cordingley.
Ms. Cordingley was born in Brockville, Ontario on January 23, 1888. She came to New York City to attend Queens College, from which she seems to have graduated around 1910. Cordingley was a student in the first class of the Library School of The New York Public Library in 1911. The NYPL’s new initiative was not a library program as we know it today, but more a vehicle to train para-professionals who would go on to work in various support services. (The New York Public Library program lasted fifteen years. It was merged along with the New York State School at Albany to become part of Columbia University’s new School of Library Service.) Somewhere in these years—the chronological record is unclear—Cordingley, her parents, and her sister settled in Tuckahoe just north of New York City in Westchester County. Cordingley worked as an assistant in the library of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The work was probably unrewarding, but in all likelihood it was through this position that she got her break, for it happened to be at the Metropolitan Life Tower at 1 Madison Avenue and 23rd Street that the Roosevelt Memorial Association opened its headquarters in 1919. It was there in 1921 that the RMA offered Ms. Cordingley a job as a cataloger with the Bureau of Roosevelt Research and Information.
Memorial officials had been collecting material even in these years before the House opened in 1923. By 1921, the year she hired on, the RMA had gathered nearly 15,000 individual items. The items were as disparate as the life they represented and included many of the over 100,000 letters that Roosevelt penned, various editions of the nearly three dozen books he authored, positive and negative political cartoons that captured his unique physical bearing and caricaturist’s dream of a visage, scrapbooks, political campaign ephemera, speeches, a vast film archive, and much more. One must remember that this was something of a new and original enterprise; presidential libraries did not exist at tis time and would not for another two decades when another Roosevelt, Franklin D., created the first one at his home in Hyde Park. The Theodore Roosevelt Collection only grew after the opening of the house in 1923. Assessing the RMA’s work in 1929, a decade after its founding, Director Hermann Hagedorn told an audience at the American Library Association conference in Washington D.C. that a New York Public Library official had informed him that Bureau of Roosevelt Research and Information was the largest library dedicated to one individual in the United States. The work continued into the 1930s. Meanwhile, Ms. Cordingley became became a naturalized American in 1931. In 1933-34 she served as chairperson of Museums, Arts & Humanities Division of the Special Libraries Association.
After twenty years on East 20th Street the Roosevelt Collection moved to Harvard’s Widener Library in 1943. When the collection relocated, so did Ms. Cordingley. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and continued her work. She gave an address on the rarities within the collection at the Bibliographical Society of America conference in January 1945. One of her many projects in these years included assisting with the organization and eventual publication of Roosevelt’s correspondence. Starting in 1948, the Harvard Library, Roosevelt Memorial Association and Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a project to edit and annotate Theodore Roosevelt’s 150,000 letters. Harvard University Press published volumes one and two of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt in April 1951. These were the first installments of what would eventually be an eight volume undertaking. About 10% of Roosevelt’s total output—nearly 15,000 some odd letters—were eventually published in the set over the next several years. Sadly, Nora was not there to see any of it. Nora Evelyn Cordingley died of a heart attack in her office in Harvard’s Widener Library on March 14, 1951.
Bibliography:
Cordingley, Nora E. “Extreme Rarities in the Published Works of Theodore Roosevelt.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 39, no. 1, 1945, pp. 20-50.
Hagedorn, Hermann. “Building Up the Roosevelt Memorial Collection.” Bulletin of the American Library Association, vol. 23, no. 8, 1929, pp. 252–254.
Roosevelt Memorial Association: A Report of Its Activities, 1919-1921, Roosevelt Memorial Association, New York, 1921.
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![Harvard University, 1941 [via].](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kqx1dj1QOT1qa64fuo1_1280.jpg "Harvard University, 1941 [via].")
![Harvard University, 1961 [via].](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kw5ov0G5fv1qa64fuo1_400.jpg "Harvard University, 1961 [via].")
