Media Coverage

Payvand Iran News
President Obama today named 94 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Three Iranian-Americans are among the recipients...

New York Times
While other scientists successfully shrank beakers, tubes and centrifuges into diagnostic laboratories that fit into aluminum boxes that cost $50,000, George Whitesides had smaller dreams. The diagnostic tests designed in Dr. Whitesides’s Harvard University chemistry laboratory fit on a postage stamp and cost less than a penny. His secret? Paper...

Wired
...One project, if it ever happens, could give us an idea. In 2008, researchers at Penn State announced that they’d sequenced most of the genome of the woolly mammoth, extinct for 10,000 years, from samples of its hair. That prompted Harvard geneticist George Church to claim that for around $10 million he could resurrect the mammoth...

Daily Mail
Scientists have taken a leaf from the carnivorous pitcher plant to develop a super-slippery material which could be used for self-cleaning windows and the ultimate non-stick frying pan. Experts inspired by the pitcher plant's virtually frictionless leaves copied its molecular structure to create a material which repels almost all liquids...

BBC Radio 4
Ehsan Masood asks if an intergovernmental panel can protect biodiversity. He looks at how the slippery surface of the pitcher plant might be harnessed to make new nonstick coatings and at a substance isolated from invasive harlequin ladybirds that could be the next antimalarial drug...

New Scientist
Water, oil, blood and insects alike slide swiftly off a new super-slippery material inspired by a carnivorous plant. Scientists searching for clever materials sometimes borrow ideas from nature. Lotus leaves, for example, are famously water repellant, thanks to their textured surfaces which trap a cushion of air for water to slide down...

Discover Magazine
Tak-Sing Wong from Harvard University has created a synthetic material so slippery that it makes a duck’s back look like a sponge. It is “omniphobic” – it repels everything. All manner of liquids, from water to blood to crude oil, roll straight off it. Ice cannot form on it. It even heals itself when damaged. It’s an extraordinary material and it was inspired by the lips of a flesh-eating plant...

BBC
You have to wonder what's going on in the DNA of Harvard genetics professor George Church. What extra bit of code does he have that the rest of us don't? If genes tell the story of a person's life, then some altered sequence of 'A's, 'C's, 'G's and 'T's must be at play, because his brain works like almost no one else's...

Technology Review
Earlier this year, I had breakfast with George Church, professor of genetics and director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School. A pioneer in developing DNA sequencing technologies, and in researching everything from epigenetics and microbiomics to synthetic biology, Church has co-founded or advises over 20 companies...