Media Coverage

The Food Channel
Soon you’ll be able to drink your wine and eat it, too. That is, eat the package it comes in. Within a year or two, edible packaging for a variety of foods will be available for purchase thanks to the work of some smart people at the Harvard Wyss Institute and Indiana-based company Monosol...

The Register
Engineers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have built an experimental synthetic intestine using currently available chip technology. The gut-on-a-chip is about the same size as a USB stick and consists of a central tube that is lined with a single layer of human intestinal epithelial cells to mimic the human body...

CNET News
Researchers at Harvard and Children's Hospital Boston have teamed up to create a microfluidic device that harvests and cultures circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples. Such cells are shed by primary tumors and circulate in the bloodstream. They sometimes cause metastases, or new recurrences of cancer distant from the original tumor...

Science
Life is a constant balancing act, especially if you're a tightrope walker. The best athletes make treading a circus high wire or a low-hanging slackline look effortless, but they're actually juggling complex challenges of perception and motor control. Now researchers have constructed a mathematical explanation of how such nimble acrobats remain upright...

Live Science
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 University, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices...

ABC News
Would you drink a juice box and then eat the box? Within one to two years you will be able to, thanks to new products from Monosol and the Harvard Wyss Institute...

The Guardian
Pouring your milk then eating the bottle sounds less than tempting, but edible packaging is being touted as food technology's next Big Thing. It's not entirely new, of course. Heston Blumenthal's been at it for years, wrapping palatable paper around packets of soup and urging us to eat salted caramels wrapper and all...

Turkish News
Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created a gut-on-a-chip microdevice lined by living human cells that mimics the structure, physiology, and mechanics of the human intestineeven supporting the growth of living microbes within its luminal space....

R&D
An ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced is being funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania aims to develop...

New Scientist
The human gut is a hectic place - muscles are continually contracting, cells are constantly being lost and grown, and the entire surface is teeming with bacteria. This complexity has made the gut tricky to study using cells grown in a Petri dish. A "gut-on-a-chip" could help with that...