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 […]

Mark Yim is featured in Discovery’s “These Flying Robots Stick Together”

Uncovering Shoddy Science

Konrad Kording, professor in the Department of Bioengineering, and colleagues have a new technique for identifying fraudulent scientific papers by spotting reused images. Rather than scrap a failed study, for example, a researcher might attempt to pass off images from a different experiment to give the false impression that their own was a success.

Matt Blaze: A New Model of Voting Threats

An article published in Ars Technica quotes associate professor of Computer and Information Science Matt Blaze on the way threats to election security are changing.

Dan Huh is featured in Science News’ “A fake organ mimics what happens in the blink of an eye”

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins is profiled in Nature Methods’ “The Author File: Jennifer Phillips-Cremins”

Mayur Naik: Building Better Software

In many industries and academic fields, more people are finding it helpful to know some basic programming, but not all of them want to get full degrees in computer science. Meanwhile, as modern software ecosystems grow more and more complex, even those who do spend their undergraduate years studying computer science cannot learn everything. As […]

Penn Engineers Present New ‘Eye-on-a-Chip’

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dan Huh and colleagues presented their research on a new ‘eye-on-a-chip,’ an artificial organ composed of living cells and a blinking, hydrogel eyelid. Researchers could potentially use the eye as a model to study conditions such as dry eye disease, and to […]

Looking for Patterns in the Folded Genome

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins and colleagues recently collaborated on a new technique, published in Nature Methods, of searching for folding patterns in the human genome. A profile of Phillips-Cremins, published in the same journal, explores the path of interests that led her to this type of research.

Vivek Shenoy: Mathematical Models for the Mechanical Body

While they can seem imperfect on the surface, our bodies are in fact finely tuned machines. Joint surfaces glide effortlessly across one another. Tendons and muscles work together to control our movements, letting us run laps, hold conversations, scarf down cheesesteaks and play piano. This complex collection of biological levers, springs and pulleys is enough […]