Good things come in small packages. This is especially true in the world of portable wireless communications systems. Cell phones, wearables, and implantable electronics have shrunk over time, which has made them more useful in many cases. But a critical component of these devices - the antenna - hasn't followed suit. Researchers haven't been able to get them much smaller, until now.

  Tiny robots have been helping researchers study how climate change affects biodiversity. Developed by Northeastern University scientist Brian Helmuth, the "robomussels" have the shape, size, and color of actual mussels, with miniature built-​​in sensors that track temperatures inside the mussel beds.

Liquid metals can be fairly good atom thieves. Scientists use a liquid metal technique to selectively remove elements from a block of well-mixed metals and create intricate structures. However, researchers didn't know how the technique worked. Now, scientists know that due to the preferential mixing of the soon-to-be-removed element with the liquid metal, the uniform solid alloy is transformed into two phases in a manner that is similar to what i...

Northeastern's Danielle Levac develops video games to make physical therapy more fun, motivating, and rewarding for patients—especially for children with movement impairments, such as those with cerebral palsy. Levac, professor of physical therapy in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, invited a group of fifth-grade students from Boston's Ellis Mendell Elementary School to visit her lab last week.

Valkyrie has recently landed at Northeastern, marking the first time that the 6-foot-2-inch, 275-pound humanoid robot has interacted with the public. There was a demo: As part of an hourlong presentation, the robot walked across the carpet in the event space on the 17th floor of East Village, turned to face the audience, and then waved, eliciting a surge of laughter.

Imagine a polymer with removable parts that can deliver something to the environment and then be chemically regenerated to function again. Or a polymer that can lift weights, contracting and expanding the way muscles do. These functions require polymers with both rigid and soft nano-sized compartments with extremely different properties that are organised in specific ways.

Per­haps no startup was launched for a more intriguing reason than that of Northeastern’s Hanchen Huang. “MesoGlue was founded by Huang and two of his PhD stu­dents: They had a dream of a better way of sticking things together.” Those “things” are every­thing from a computer’s cen­tral pro­cessing unit and a PCB to the glass and metal fil­a­ment in a light bulb.