What the matter with dark matter? and energy

So what is this" dark matter" and energy business? well for starters they are polar opposites from each other in the way, that they react to each other and to the universe. First dark matter is actually an element and what scientists believe keeps our galaxies from breaking apart on their high speed travels around the cosmos. Dark energy on the other hand is another mystery for that is believed to be the cause of the effect that the universe is spreading apart at an accelerated rate. This was one of the topics recently touched on by the science Friday show. here are some links and related articles. enjoy! ...........Don't forget to follow me on twitter @myerlink................

Dark Energy, Dark Matter

In the early 1990's, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the Universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the Universe had to slow. The Universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the Universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the Universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.

Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a "cosmological constant." Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.

What Is Dark Energy?

Universe Dark Energy-1 Expanding Universe

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

NASA/STSci/Ann Feild

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the Universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 70% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy. Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the Universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the Universe.

Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation

This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter.

Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual") particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong - wrong by a lot. The number came out 10¹²⁰ times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this "quintessence," after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues.

A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the Universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters. But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be? How could it correctly describe the motion of the bodies in the Solar System, as Einstein's theory is known to do, and still give us the different prediction for the Universe that we need? There are candidate theories, but none are compelling. So the mystery continues.

The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data.

What Is Dark Matter?

Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster Revealed

One of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen is captured in this new composite image of Abell 2744. The blue shows a map of the total mass concentration (mostly dark matter).

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the Universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~70% dark energy, ~25% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the Universe to make up the 25% required by the observations. Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.

However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or "MACHOs". But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

These are all great articles on other closely related topics from our friend at NASA and othe space partners. Thanks GUYS!!!!!!

Recent Discoveries

March 2, 2012	Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation
January 10, 2012	El Gordo
January 10, 2012	Farthest Protocluster of Galaxies Ever Seen
October 13, 2011	New Dark Matter Census Survey
June 22, 2011	Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster Revealed
May 19, 2011	GALEX Helps Confirm Nature of Dark Energy
April 12, 2011	Abell 383
March 14, 2011	Hubble Rules Out One Alternative to Dark Energy

Fighting for planetary research

Nasa science chief 'fighting' for planetary research

, BBC News website, The Woodlands, Texas

John Grunsfeld took over the science chief post in January

Related Stories

• Europe still keen on Mars missions
• Where now for Mars exploration?
• Nasa budget slashes Mars funding

Nasa's science chief has told planetary scientists he is "in there fighting for you" after the swingeing cuts proposed to the robotic exploration budget.

Former astronaut John Grunsfeld was speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

He faced more than 1,000 researchers at a special session to explain the 21% cut to planetary science in President Obama's latest budget request for Nasa.

The decision forced the agency to pull out of joint Mars missions with Europe.

Mr Grunsfeld took over as science chief on 4 January this year, after the key budgetary decisions had already been made. He has previously admitted he was disappointed when he learned of the proposals for planetary science.

"The Nasa budget was really the result of some tough choices and national priorities," he told his audience.

"The fact that the Nasa's planetary budget took such a great hit was one of those tough priority settings," and added: "It was a strategic decision."

Where the James Webb telescope has benefited, planetary science has lost out

The planetary exploration budget funds robotic missions to other bodies in the Solar System, such as Mars, the Moon and the outer planets.

The proposal for the Financial Year 2013 reduced the planetary science budget from $1.5bn to $1.2bn. The cuts would, in the words of one scientist, plunge the field into its biggest crisis since the 1980s and is considered likely to lead to the loss of up to 2,000 hi-tech jobs.

Although planetary science was a loser in general, Mars exploration was singled out for particular cuts, receiving $360.8m, which amounts to a reduction of almost 40% from the FY2012 estimate.

This kind of funding drop precludes Nasa from starting new missions in this part of its portfolio.

After the speech, Mr Grunsfeld fielded a question from Jim Bell, a planetary scientist and current president of the Planetary Society, a space advocacy organisation in California.

Prof Bell, who was one of the lead investigators on the Mars rovers mission, implored Mr Grunsfeld and Nasa's director of planetary science Jim Green to "fight back" against the plans, even if "you lose your jobs" because, he said, "it's the right thing to do".

In response, Mr Grunsfeld recalled a time in 2004 when he had considered resigning from Nasa's astronaut corps over a decision not to save the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

He said: "History repeats itself… I decided on 4 January not to flee - I'm in there fighting for you."

'Weak' community?

Dr Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, pressed Mr Grunsfeld on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The mission comes under a different budget at Nasa and represents the agency's successor to the HST. But it has already been delayed by several years and costs have ballooned by about $1.5bn.

Dr Sykes asked: "JWST went from $519m to $628m… it was about $100m that was contributed by the planetary science division to JWST. Is there a rationale for that level of contribution?"

The Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover) could be the last surface mission for a while

Mr Grunsfeld replied that it was not a valuable exercise to try to "trace the dollars" and that if different divisions of science at Nasa were to fight, "we all lose".

After the session Dr Sykes told me: "Budgets are a conservative process and if you have a flat pot of money and something goes up and something comes down… it's a conservative process."

He added: "There is a little question about what's the motivation, or the policy underpinning that - who knows?"

But at a community forum at the LPSC on Tuesday, scientist and author Andy Chaikin said the cuts had occurred because "the planetary community is seen in some circles as being weak".

He added that the plans would be "starving the pipeline that sustains education and research in planetary science".

Spreading the pain

Mr Grunsfeld said that it would have been a mistake to spread cuts equally across Nasa's science portfolio: "The one way you can make sure that Nasa's dollars are less efficient is to take operating missions and those in development and say, 'you were going to launch in 2016, but now you can't go until '17 or '18.

"For the agency that means it's going to cost $200-$300m more. Planetary science happened to be in a place where we had just launched [Mars Science Laboratory], we had just launched [the Juno mission to Jupiter] and they could take the hit and not create a situation where there was a mission well through development that was going to get cut and it would have cost hundreds of millions more."

However, one researcher told me: "That's like saying things are coming to an end."

Many scientists are angry that the proposals ride roughshod over the results of the Planetary Decadal Survey, which laid out a vision for future exploration based on the priorities of the planetary science community.

This identified the goal of returning samples from Mars as a science priority. Joining Europe on its ExoMars programme, which aims to send landers to Mars in 2016 and 2018, would have led down that road.

However, some at Nasa had been reluctant to commit to so many costly "flagship" missions with a foreign agency, and have now got their wish.

The FY2013 budget proposal shifts funds to human spaceflight and space technology, in line with the agency's major commitments going forward to fund the development of a huge new rocket and capsule system to take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations such as the Moon and asteroids.

But at the community forum session here at the LPSC, Dr Laurie Leshin from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, said that it made no sense for Nasa to cut the scientists who were vital for supporting such missions, including allowing them to land safely at their destinations.

At the event, Prof Steve Squyres, who chaired the Planetary Decadal Survey, said the community had to put on a united front in order to fight the plans, not as scientists who studied Mars or outer planets, "but as space scientists".

The RED PLANET

Many people have many different ideas about our neighbor Mars. Some believe that the red planet has martians living there and have been for a long time underground due to the surface being bombarded by radiation. Others believe that there used to be a civilization long ago but due the natural geological processes stopping and because the red plane has a smaller surface area than earth and therefore losses heat much more quickly the planets natural processes stopped and then the sun has drenched the planet mars in deadly radiation for millions of years. Well many of these questions will be answered with the new rover mission. For about fifteen years we have had two ROVS on the surface of the red planet. This new rover is twice the size of the first two and has many new upgrades. for one the new rover will be able to analyze rock and detritus for and signs of water and life along with many other really neat abilities. For more on the new rovers abilities and other NASA new check out their web site......http://www.space.com

This artist's concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. Curiosity launched toward the Red Planet on Nov. 26, 2011. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech View full size image

NASA newest Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, launched toward the Red Planet on Nov. 26 at 10:02 a.m. EST (1502 GMT). The car-size spacecraft is the largest, most ambitious rover ever bound for Mars and is expected to seek out signs that Mars may once have been habitable for life.

Follow SPACE.com's complete coverage of the Mars Science Laboratory's launch and cruise to Mars in this story archive:

Latest NASA Update (Nov. 26):

"A signal from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, including the new Curiosity rover, has been received by officials on the ground. The spacecraft is flying free and headed for Mars after separation from the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that started the spacecraft on its journey to the Red Planet. Liftoff was on time at 10:02 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida."

Planet Mars

Visions of Mars

Robot explorers transform a distant object of wonder into intimate terrain.

Photograph by NASA/JPL/Cornell University

(Hear an interview with John Updike.)

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination.The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. Even after Copernicus proposed, in 1543, that the sun and not the Earth was the center of the local cosmos, the eccentricity of Mars's celestial motions continued as a puzzle until, in 1609, Johannes Kepler analyzed all the planetary orbits as ellipses, with the sun at one focus.

In that same year Galileo first observed Mars through a telescope. By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini was able to observe certain features accurately enough to calculate the planet's rotation. The Martian day, he concluded, was forty minutes longer than our twenty-four hours; he was only three minutes off. While Venus, a closer and larger planetary neighbor, presented an impenetrable cloud cover, Mars showed a surface enough like Earth's to invite speculation about its habitation by life-forms.

Increasingly refined telescopes, challenged by the blurring effect of our own planet's thick and dynamic atmosphere, made possible ever more detailed maps of Mars, specifying seas and even marshes where seasonal variations in presumed vegetation came and went with the fluctuating ice caps. One of the keenest eyed cartographers of the planet was Giovanni Schiaparelli, who employed the Italian word canali for perceived linear connections between presumed bodies of water. The word could have been translated as "channels," but "canals" caught the imagination of the public and in particular that of Percival Lowell, a rich Boston Brahmin who in 1893 took up the cause of the canals as artifacts of a Martian civilization. As an astronomer, Lowell was an amateur and an enthusiast but not a crank. He built his own observatory on a mesa near Flagstaff, Arizona, more than 7,000 feet high and, in his own words, "far from the smoke of men"; his drawings of Mars were regarded as superior to Schiaparelli's even by astronomers hostile to the Bostonian's theories. Lowell proposed that Mars was a dying planet whose highly intelligent inhabitants were combating the increasing desiccation of their globe with a system of irrigation canals that distributed and conserved the dwindling water stored in the polar caps.

This vision, along with Lowell's stern Darwinism, was dramatized by H. G. Wells in one of science fiction's classics, The War of the Worlds (1898). The Earth-invading Martians, though hideous to behold and merciless in action, are allowed a dollop of dispassionate human sympathy. Employing advanced instruments and intelligences honed by "the immediate pressure of necessity," they enviously gaze across space at "our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas."

In the coming half century of Martian fancy, our neighboring planet served as a shadowy twin onto which earthly concerns, anxieties, and debates were projected. Such burning contemporary issues as colonialism, collectivism, and industrial depletion of natural resources found ample room for exposition in various Martian utopias. A minor vein of science fiction showed Mars as the site, more or less, of a Christian afterlife; C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938) invented an unfallen world, Malacandra. Edgar Rice Burroughs's wildly popular series of Martian romances presented the dying planet as a rugged, racially diverse frontier where, in the words of its Earthling superhero John Carter, life is "a hard and pitiless struggle for existence." Following Burroughs, pulp science fiction, brushing aside possible anatomical differences, frequently mated Earthlings and Martians, the Martian usually the maiden in the match, and the male a virile Aryan aggressor from our own tough planet. The etiolated, brown-skinned, yellow-eyed Martians of Ray Bradbury's poetic and despairing The Martian Chronicles (1950) vanish under the coarse despoilment that human invasion has brought.

But all the fanciful Martian megafauna—Wells's leathery amalgams of tentacles and hugely evolved heads; American journalist Garrett Serviss's 15-foot-tall quasi red men; Burroughs's 10-foot, 4-armed, olive-skinned Tharks; Lewis's beaver-like hrossa and technically skilled pfifltriggi; and the "polar bear-sized creatures" that Carl Sagan imagined to be possibly roaming the brutally cold Martian surface—were swept into oblivion by the flyby photographs taken by Mariner 4 on July 14, 1965, from 6,000 miles away. The portion of Mars caught on an early digital camera showed no canals, no cities, no water, and no erosion or weathering. Mars more resembled the moon than the Earth. The pristine craters suggested that surface conditions had not changed in more than three billion years. The dying planet had been long dead.

Two more Mariner flybys, both launched in 1969, sent back 57 images that, in the words of the NASA release, "revealed Mars to be heavily cratered, bleak, cold, dry, nearly airless and generally hostile to any Earth-style life-forms." But Mariner 9, an orbiter launched in 1971, dispatched, over 146 days, 7,000 photographs of surprisingly varied and violent topography: volcanoes, of which the greatest, Olympus Mons, is 13 miles high, and a system of canyons, Valles Marineris, that on Earth would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles. Great arroyos and tear-shaped islands testified to massive floods in the Martian past, presumably of water, the sine qua non of life as Earth knows it. In 1976 the two Viking landers safely arrived on the Martian surface; the ingenious chemical experiments aboard yielded, on the question of life on Mars, ambiguous results whose conclusions are still being debated into the 21st century.

In the meantime, our geographical and geological intimacy with Mars grows. The triumphant deployment of the little Sojourner rover in 1997 was followed in 2004 by the even more spectacular success of two more durable rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. In four years of solar-powered travels on the red planet, the twin robots have relayed unprecedentedly detailed images, including many clearly of sedimentary rocks, suggesting the existence of ancient seas. The stark, russet-tinged photographs plant the viewer right on the surface; the ladderlike tracks of Spirit and Opportunity snake and gouge their way across rocks and dust that for eons have rested scarcely disturbed under salmon pink skies and a pearlescent sun. In this tranquil desolation, the irruption of our live curiosity and systematic purpose feels heroic.

Now the Phoenix mission, with its surpassingly intricate arm, scoop, imagers, and analyzers, takes us inches below the surface of dust, sand, and ice in Mars's north polar region. Spoonfuls of another planet's substance, their chemical ingredients volatilized, sorted, and identified, become indexes to cosmic history. Meanwhile, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the newest of three operational spacecraft circling the planet, feeds computers at the University of Arizona with astoundingly vivid and precise photographs of surface features. Some of these false-color images appear totally abstract, yet they yield to knowledgeable eyes riches of scientific information.

The dead planet is not so dead after all: Avalanches and dust storms are caught on camera, and at the poles a seasonal sublimation of dry ice produces erosion and movement. Dunes shift; dust devils trace dark scribbles on the delicate surface. Whether or not evidence of microbial or lichenous life emerges amid this far-off flux, Mars has become an ever nearer neighbor, a province of human knowledge. Dim and fanciful visions of the twinkling fire planet have led to panoramic close-ups beautiful beyond imagining.

John Updike's fiction and poetry have long revealed an interest in science. His latest novel is titled The Widows of Eastwick.

New tech in the robot world.

In new mass-production technique, robotic insects spring to life

February 15, 2012

Production method inspired by children's pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices

Cambridge, Mass. - February 15, 2012 - A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet.

Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices.

In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton (a plastic film), titanium, brass, ceramic, and adhesive sheets have been laminated together in a complex, laser-cut design. The structure incorporates flexible hinges that allow the three-dimensional product—just 2.4 millimeters tall—to assemble in one movement, like a pop-up book.

The Harvard Monolithic Bee (or "Mobee") pops up within an assembly scaffold, which performs more than 20 origami assembly folds. Photos courtesy of Pratheev Sreetharan.

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The entire product is approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, and dozens of these microrobots could be fabricated in parallel on a single sheet.

"This takes what is a craft, an artisanal process, and transforms it for automated mass production," says Pratheev Sreetharan (A.B. '06, S.M. '10), who co-developed the technique with J. Peter Whitney. Both are doctoral candidates at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Sreetharan, Whitney, and their colleagues in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at SEAS have been working for years to build bio-inspired, bee-sized robots that can fly and behave autonomously as a colony. Appropriate materials, hardware, control systems, and fabrication techniques did not exist prior to the RoboBees project, so each must be invented, developed, and integrated by a diverse team of researchers.

Less than a year ago, the group was using a painstaking and error-prone method to fold, align, and secure each of the minuscule parts and joints.

"You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue," explains Sreetharan. "Then, with that tiny ball of glue, you'd go in under a microscope like an arthroscopic surgeon and try to stick it in the right place."

"Until recently, the manual assembly process was the state of the art in this field," Sreetharan adds.

By the numbers

• Folding joints: 22
• Assembly scaffold folding joints: 115
• Total device folding joints: 137
• Number of brass pads for "glue" points: 52
• Total number of "glue" points: 24
• Mass: 90 mg
• By mass, one U.S. quarter = 63 Harvard Monolithic Bees
  

The same result can now be achieved—without human error—through locking mechanisms and dip soldering. The new process also enables the use of cured carbon fiber, which is rigid and easy to align, rather than uncured carbon fiber, which Sreetharan compares to "wet tissue paper."

"Our new techniques allow us to use any material including polymers, metals, ceramics, and composites," says principal investigator Rob Wood, an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

"The ability to incorporate any type and number of material layers, along with integrated electronics, means that we can generate full systems in any three-dimensional shape," Wood says. "We've also demonstrated that we can create self-assembling devices by including pre-stressed materials."

The implications of this novel fabrication strategy go far beyond these micro-air vehicles. The same mass-production technique could be used for high-power switching, optical systems, and other tightly integrated electromechanical devices that have parts on the scale of micrometers to centimeters.

Moreover, the layering process builds on the manufacturing process currently used to make printed circuit boards, which means that the tools for creating large sheets of pop-up devices are common and abundant. It also means that the integration of electrical components is a natural extension of the fabrication process—particularly important for the size- and weight-constrained RoboBees project.

"In a larger device, you can take a robot leg, for example, open it up, and just bolt in circuit boards. We're so small that we don't get to do that. I can't put a structural mechanism in here and have it serve no electrical function."

Pointing to the carbon-fiber box truss that constitutes the pop-up bee's body frame, Sreetharan says, "Now, I can put chips all over that. I can build in sensors and control actuators."

A small portion of the CAD design for the Harvard Monolithic Bee illustrates the complexity of folds and joints necessary for its assembly. Using the old, manual process, every one of those parts would have to be cut, folded, assembled, and glued by hand. The bottom image illustrates the 18 layers of laser-cut materials that create the pop-up structure. Images courtesy of Pratheev Sreetharan.

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Essentially, tiny robots can now be built by slightly bigger robots. Designing how all of the layers will fit together and fold, however, is still a very human task, requiring creativity and expertise. Standard computer-aided design (CAD) tools, typically intended for either flat, layered circuit boards or 3D objects, do not yet support devices that combine both.

Once the design is complete, though, fabrication can be fully automated, with accuracy and precision limited only by the machining tools and materials.

"The alignment is now better than we can currently measure," says Sreetharan. "I've verified it to better than 5 microns everywhere, and we've gone from a 15% yield to—well, I don't think I've ever had a failure."

The full fabrication process will be described in the March issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. Co-authors and collaborators, beside Whitney, Sreetharan, and Wood, include Kevin Ma, a graduate student at SEAS; and Marc Strauss, a research assistant in Wood's lab.

The Harvard Office of Technology Development is now developing a strategy to commercialize this technology. As part of this effort, they have filed patent applications on this work and are engaging with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and companies to identify disruptive applications in a range of industries.

The work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the National Science Foundation (through the Expeditions in Computing program), and the Wyss Institut

Entertainment

Built 1998

B 018 is a music club, a place of nocturnal survival. In the early months of 1998, the B 018 moved to the "Quarantaine", on a site that was better known for its macabre aura. The "Quarantaine" is located at the proximity of the port of Beirut. During the French protectorate, it was a place of quarantine for arriving crews. In the recent war it became the abode of Palestinian, Kurdish and South Lebanese refugees (20,000 in 1975). In January 1976, local militia men launched a radical attack that completely wiped out the area. The slums were demolished along with the kilometer long bordering wall that isolated the zone from the city. Over twenty years later, the scars of war are still perceptible through the disparity between the scarce urban fabric of the area and the densely populated neighborhoods located across the highway that borders the zone. The B 018 project is, first of all, a reaction to difficult and explosive conditions that are inherent to the history of its location and the contradictions that are implied by the implementation of an entertainment program on such a site. B 018 refuses to participate to the naïve amnesia that governs the post-war reconstruction efforts. The project is built below ground. Its façade is pressed into the ground to avoid the over exposure of a mass that could act as a rhetorical monument. The building is embedded in a circular concrete disc slightly above tarmac level. At rest, it is almost invisible. It comes to life in the late hours of the night when its articulated roof structure constructed in heavy metal retracts hydraulically. The opening of the roof exposes the club to the world above and reveals the cityscape as an urban backdrop to the patrons below. Its closing translates a voluntary disappearance, a gesture of recess. The building is encircled by concrete and tarmac rings. The automobiles' circular travel around the club and the concentric parking spots frame the building in a carousel formation. At night, the continuous motion of the visitors' cars animates the parking and becomes an integral element of the club's scenario. The entrance is located at the south end of the low-lying metal construction where a stair leads to two concessive "airlock" spaces manned by scowling bouncers. Strewn across the concrete pavement floor of the underground hall, the sofas with collapsible backs serve as elevated dancing surfaces that stage the performers.