Jan Van der Spiegel Elected to Chair of International Solid-State Circuits Conference
Jan Van der Spiegel, a professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, has been elected Conference Chair of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) for 2019 and 2020.
GRASP Lab’s ModQuad Robots on Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet
Imagine if you had construction materials that could move on their own. You could assemble a bridge to a nearby island without ever touching the water, or build a structure on top of a mountain without having to climb it. Engineers in the GRASP Lab are working toward this vision.
Penn-developed Robots Cameo on The Daily Show
If you caught The Daily Show on March 7, you might have spotted a familiar four-legged robot taking part in a futuristic court case. The robot’s name is Minitaur, and as noted in Technically Philly it is the product of Penn spin-off Ghost Robotics. Minitaur, Ghost Robotics’ flagship robot, is designed to deal with unpredictable […]
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 […]
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.
Self-Reflected: Bringing the Conscious Brain to Life
If you’re lucky enough to wander into the Your Brain exhibit at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, you’re in for a mesmerizing treat — a portrait of the brain, ironically, as it views a work of art. The stunning display, appropriately called Self Reflected, depicts a thin slice of the human brain scaled up by a factor […]
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 […]