New GRASP Project Aims to Leverage ‘Embodied Intelligence’ via a Robotic Squirrel
It takes about a year before human infants master their own motor skills well enough to walk. Legged robots don’t have it so easy. Only the most advanced can walk with a smooth, natural gait, and even those can be stymied by a small pile of rubble or sand. A team of researchers, led from […]
Penn and Lehigh Research Team Seeks Alternative Ammonia Production Methods for Sustainable Fertilizers
A Penn Engineering team from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, including John M. Vohs, Carl V. S. Patterson Professor and Chair, Raymond J. Gorte, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor, and Aleksandra Vojvodic, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation, is collaborating with Lehigh University’s Steven McIntosh on research that seeks an alternative production […]
Using Statistics to Uncover the Truth About Individual Cells
Researchers at Penn have developed a better method for interpreting data from single-cell RNA sequencing technologies. This research is built on a collaboration between The Wharton School, Mingyao Li at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Arjun Raj’s group at the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Researchers Make Complex 3-D Surfaces with 2-D sheets
Researchers have developed a way to create flat sheets of a rubbery material that expand into three-dimensional geometries, such as a human face, when exposed to heat. The research, done by Hillel Aharoni and Randall Kamien of the School of Arts and Sciences and Yu Xia, Xinyue Zhang, and Shu Yang of the School of Engineering […]
Penn and Drexel Research Team Use Noninvasive Brain Stimulation to Study Language
Danielle Bassett, Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow, recently collaborated on a study that explores how the brain completes open-ended and close-ended language tasks. She worked with colleagues at Drexel University, including former lab member John Medaglia, and at Penn, including Roy Hamilton, associate professor and director of Perelman School of Medicine’s Laboratory for Cognition and […]
Paving the Way for Safer, Smaller Batteries and Fuel Cells
Research led by Karen I. Winey, TowerBrook Foundation Faculty Fellow, professor and Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, and Edward B. Trigg, then a doctoral student in her lab, introduces a new and versatile kind of solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) that has twice the proton conductivity of the current state-of-the-art material.
An Innovative Approach to Better Energy Storage
Led by Shu Yang, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, a Penn/Drexel research team has engineered a way to manipulate nanomaterials to stand up vertically on a scale that has potential for industrial applications.
Earthquakes at the Nanoscale
Robert Carpick collaborates with Cornell postdoctoral researcher Kaiwen Tian and Penn alumni David Goldsby to publish a paper in Physical Review Letters which attempts to tackle the devastation of earthquakes by investigating the laws of friction at the smallest possible scale, the nanoscale.
Penn Engineers’ Liquid Assembly Line Makes Drug Microparticles a Thousand Times Faster Than Ever Before
Pharmaceuticals owe their effects mostly to their chemical composition, but the packaging of these drugs into specific physical formulations also need to be done to exact specifications. For example, many drugs are encapsulated in solid microparticles, the size and shape of which determine the timing of the drug’s release and its delivery to specific parts […]
Calculus III for Cells
Last year, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania revealed surprising insights into how cells respond to surface curvature. Specifically, they investigated how cells respond to cylindrical surfaces, which are common in biology. They found that cells change the static configurations of their shapes and internal structures. Now, the researchers, led by Kathleen Stebe and recent […]