Through
4/26
Science & Technology
Penn Celebrates Opening of Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology
The University of Pennsylvania will officially open the region’s premier facility for advanced research, education, and innovative public/private partnerships in nanotechnology on October 4.
Penn, Carnegie Mellon Receive Grant for Transportation Research
The University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon University have received a $5.65 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant for a joint research center to conduct transportation technology research and development.
Penn Engineering's GRASP Lab, Wharton's Mack Institute Take Y-Prize Global
Last year, the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Wharton School’s Mack Institute helped take cutting-edge robots out of the lab and into the marketplace through the Y-Prize Competition.
Shadrack Frimpong of Penn Has a Vision for a Healthy Africa
Spending a summer break in Switzerland may conjure images of scaling snow-covered Alps.
Penn Researchers Use Facebook Data to Predict Users’ Age, Gender and Personality Traits
In the age of social media, people's inner lives are increasingly recorded through the language they use online. With this in mind, an interdisciplinary group of University of Pennsylvania researchers is interested in whether a computational analysis of this language can provide as much, or more, insight into their personalities as traditional methods used by psychologists, such as self-reported surveys and questionnaires.
Penn’s Center for Technology Transfer Launches Mobile App Contest
The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology Transfer (CTT), through its business incubator UPstart program, has launched a new mobile application design contest called the AppItUP Challenge.
Graphene Frontiers Awarded $745,000 NSF Grant for ‘Roll-to-Roll’ Graphene Production
Graphene Frontiers, a company developed through the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology Transfer, has been awarded a $744,600 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop roll-to-roll production of graphene, the “miracle material” at the heart of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Fish Skin Immune Responses Resemble That of the Gut, Penn Study Finds
Fish skin is unique in that it lacks keratin, the fibrous protein found in mammalian skin that provides a barrier against the environment. Instead, the epithelial cells of fish skin are in direct contact with the immediate environment: water.
Penn researchers determine three dinosaur species are actually one
Psittacosaurus (sih-TACK-oh-sore-us) is a genus of short, beak-faced dinosaurs that lived in Asia 120-125 million years ago, roaming China, Mongolia, Siberia, and possibly Thailand. The plant-eaters lived for about 10 million years in an era after Stegosaurus and before Tyrannosaurus rex, at a time when most dinosaurs were small.
Cultivating knowledge
[flickr]72157635183569499[/flickr] Photos by Scott Spitzer A stone’s throw from bustling 38th Street, just off Hamilton Walk, lies a carefully curated green oasis, and nearby, a soaring glass-walled structure where plants from the exotic to the mundane are cared for and studied.
In the News
The Washington Post
Forecast group predicts busiest hurricane season on record with 33 storms
A research team led by Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences is predicting the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season will produce the most named storms on record, fueled by exceptionally warm ocean waters and an expected shift from El Niño to La Niña.
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SciTechDaily
Satellite images capture extraordinary flooding in the United Arab Emirates
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences explains how three low-pressure systems formed a train of storms that battered the United Arab Emirates.
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WHYY (Philadelphia)
My Climate Story: Philly students take science from abstract to personal
The “My Climate Story” project at the Environmental Humanities Department helps students and teachers learn about climate change’s impact in everyday backyards, with remarks from Bethany Wiggin. The idea is credited to María Villarreal, a College of Arts and Sciences second-year from Tampico, Mexico.
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Technical.ly Philly
Penn professor on gen AI’s rapacious use of energy: ‘One of the defining challenges of my career’
Benjamin Lee of the School of Engineering and Applied Science says that hardware and infrastructure costs are growing at high rates for generative AI.
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Associated Press
Here’s why experts don’t think cloud seeding played a role in Dubai’s downpour
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that many people blaming cloud seeding for Dubai storms are climate change deniers trying to divert attention from what’s really happening.
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Big Think
Can we stop AI hallucinations? And do we even want to?
Chris Callison-Burch of the School of Engineering and Applied Science says that auto-regressive generation can make it difficult for language learning models to perform fact-based or symbolic reasoning.
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Salon.com
“Record-shattering” heat wave in Antarctica — yep, climate change is the culprit
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that persistent summer weather extremes like heat waves are becoming more common as people continue to warm the planet with carbon pollution.
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CNET
How the solar eclipse will affect solar panels and the grid
Benjamin Lee of the School of Engineering and Applied Science says that the electrical grid will have to figure out how to match supply and demand during brief windows where the energy source goes away.
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Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Scientists struggle to explain ‘really weird’ spike in world temperatures
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that tendencies to exaggerate climate science in favor of “doomist” narratives helps no one except the fossil fuel industry.
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Vox.com
Spring is here very early. That’s not good
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that plant-flowering, tree-leafing, and egg-hatching are all markers associated with spring that are happening sooner.
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