A study done by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences study examined how people naturally interact with novel objects without specific goals. The principal investigator was Buse Aktas, a robotics researcher and artist. Aktas examined how people used touch to reach goal. Participants engaged with everyday items and unfamiliar objects, and people made up their own goals. This led to a dynamic biomorphic structure. The researchers identified four main interaction patterns such as passive observational, active perceptual, constructive, and hedonic. The object type and its responsiveness influenced the interaction style. These insights could inform the design of intuitive human-machine interfaces, using materials to elicit specific behaviors and feedback. The author of this article was Anne J. Manning writing for the Harvard Gazette for September 22, 2025.

Article Citation:

Manning, A. J. (2025, September 22). How we touch. Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2025/09/how-we-touch

Join Dr. Gloria Wu on this week's episode of Doctors Take the Mic as we discuss the psychology behind smell and the effect it has on people.

In a Harvard Gazette article from September 30, 2025, Alvin Powell discusses the Cosmos trial, which found that cocoa supplements reduced the risk of cardiovascular death in older adults by 27%. The study suggests that cocoa flavanols lower chronic inflammation, known as "inflammaging," which contributes to age-related diseases. While dark chocolate contains flavanols, the researchers emphasize that concentrated cocoa extracts, rather than candy, are responsible for the protective effects on blood vessels.

Article Citation:

Powell, A. (2025, September 30). You want chocolate. you need flavanols. Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/you-want-chocolate-you-need-flavanols/

In this episode of Doctors Take the Mic, Dr. Gloria Wu discusses the health benefits of walking 10000 steps a day.

Listen to Dr. Gloria Wu compare the lesser-known Nordic diet to one of the most popular cuisines in the U.S. in this episode of Doctors Take the Mic. She goes over nutrients, food groups, health changes, and more!

In this episode of Doctors Take the Mic, Dr. Gloria Wu discusses a downside to artifical intelligence's recent rise to fame: deep faking nudity and inappropriately using photos of children. Listen to Dr. Wu's advice on keeping yourself and your kids safe, as well as stories from others on why they decided to no longer put photos of their children on the internet.

In this episode of Doctor's Take the Mic, Dr. Gloria Wu explains ROUGE, a key metric used to evaluate the quality of text in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. She breaks down how ROUGE measures recall, precision, and overlap to assess how well AI-generated responses match human-written references.

In this episode of Doctor's Take the Mic, Dr. Gloria Wu reports from the 2025 Endocrine Society meeting in San Francisco and explores how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is transforming AI accuracy and reliability. She breaks down how RAG works, why it matters for large language models, and what tools like BLEU scores reveal about AI performance.

In this episode of Doctor's Take the Mic, Dr. Gloria Wu shares how the EPA's North Carolina lab shutdown is leading to an unusual pet adoption opportunity—offering lab-raised albino rats and rare zebrafish to the public.

In this episode of Doctor's Take the Mic, Dr. Gloria Wu unpacks the major shift away from artificial food dyes as companies like Kraft Heinz and General Mills respond to health concerns, regulatory changes, and consumer demand for cleaner labels. From the challenges of replicating vibrant colors like green Jello to the FDA's upcoming bans, it's a colorful look at the future of what's on your plate.