The Experiment Fund, a venture fund created by Harvard alumni and based here in Cambridge, recently celebrated its first year in business.

“There are basically two approaches to venture capital investing,” said Xfund Partner Harry Weller ‘94, who is also General Partner of New Enterprise Associates. “One is to ‘spray and pray,’ and the other is to make fewer, more selective investments. We back big, bold experiments.”

Computer scientist Salil Vadhan has been named a Simons Investigator!

An applied mathematician by training, Prof. Vadhan studies topics at the interface of cryptography and complexity theory. The goal of his research is to design systems that can withstand adversarial behavior, within the limits of efficient computation. Major areas of focus include pseudorandomness and interactive, zero-knowledge proofs—proofs that reveal no information beyond the validity of the proof itself.

He also studies data privacy and is working to develop new algorithms that allow social scientists to interrogate large data sets while preserving the personal information they contain.

Read more about Prof. Vadhan’s work.

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” wrote the poet E. E. Cummings: “carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower here placing / an inch of air there… / without breaking anything.”

With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard laboratory—and not at the scale of inches, but microns.

Find out how they’re grown.

Photo courtesy of Wim L. Noorduin, Harvard SEAS.

Engineer John Hutchinson has been elected to the Royal Society. He’s an expert in materials engineering, especially buckling and cracking behaviors.

A laser harp. An automatic fish feeder. A self-balancing electric vehicle. A secret-knock-detecting door. A mind-controlled car… You won’t believe some of the design projects our students created this year. Read about the SEAS Design & Project Fair.

(Photos by Eliza Grinnell, Harvard SEAS Communications.)

Mind control at the SEAS Design & Project Fair! (May 3rd, 11 to 3)

A group of undergraduate students in ES 50 created a device that reads brain waves and transmits them wirelessly to rotate a large pink pyramid on demand.

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, the robot was inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second. Read more about this work.

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, the robot was inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second. Read more about this work.