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 […]
Penn Researchers Show that Cells’ Perception of Stiffness is a Matter of Time
The relative stiffness of a cell’s environment is known to have a large effect on that cell’s behavior, including how well the cell can stick or move. Now, a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers demonstrates the role timing plays in how cells perceive this stiffness.
Penn Engineers’ Gold Nanorods Key to Measuring Materials’ Squishiness at the Nanoscale
Rheology is the science of studying how soft materials and complex fluids deform and flow under stress. These materials are everywhere in biology, and since their relative stiffness or squishiness is relevant to diseases, such as cancer, there is a need to accurately measure just how squishy they are. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s […]
Penn Engineers Test Drug Transfer Using Placenta-on-a-Chip
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science have demonstrated the feasibility of their “organ-on-a-chip” platform in studying how drugs are transported across the human placental barrier.