125th anniversary: A walk through Hopkins history
Frank Shivers likens the beginnings of The Johns Hopkins University to the tale of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or, perhaps more accurately, Connecticut Doctors in Lord Baltimore's City.
   Prior to Hopkins' founding in 1876, the Baltimore area was not devoid of colleges, medical schools or doctors for that matter. So, when it was announced that the new university and hospital proposed for the city would be led by a group of New England-educated men, Shivers says, Baltimoreans didn't exactly throw their arms open in a show of hospitality.
   "You've got to understand this was post-Civil War, when many Southerners gravitated to Baltimore because they could get jobs here and numerous residents were sympathetic to the South," says Shivers, author, historian and instructor at the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education. "So here were all these Southerners who were quite happy with the way things were, and then in comes this new institution [with] largely Yale alumni in leadership. They viewed it as a group of Yankees coming to town." Full story...

Spherical motor allows ball-based 3-D movement
Engineers at Johns Hopkins have invented a globe-shaped motor that is capable of rotating in any direction. The device, which uses electromagnets controlled by a computer, could give robotic arms greater flexibility and precision and might even allow the lowly computer mouse to guide the hand of the computer user, instead of the reverse.
   These advances could come about because the new spherical motor permits a wide range of unhindered mechanical motion. "A conventional motor turns on an axis, moving in one direction," Gregory S. Chirikjian, an associate professor in the Whiting School's Department of Mechanical Engineering, explains. "What we've developed is a new type of spherical motor. Basically, there's a ball inside, and we can rotate it in any direction we want." Full story...

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