Picking things up and putting them down is a mainstay of any kind of manufacturing, but fingers, human or robotic, are not always best for the task at hand.    

In early June, Penn engineers were among the 23 teams that brought the world’s most advanced humanoid robots to Pasadena, Calif., for the ultimate test: the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals. There, robots had to pass a gauntlet of eight tasks that simulate what a rescue robot might be called on to perform in a crisis situation.

By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone In any textbook diagram, a group of red blood cells, skin cells or nerve cells will typically be identical in size. But, just as no two people are quite the same height and weight, in a population of real cells there are larger and smaller individuals.

If a man has a map, he can know where he is without knowing which way he is facing. If a woman has a compass, she can know which way she’s facing without knowing where she is. Animals from ants to mice to humans use both kinds of information to reorient themselves in familiar places, but how they determine this information from environmental cues is not well understood.

Crystalline materials have atoms that are neatly lined up in a repeating pattern. When they break, that failure tends to start at a defect, or a place where the pattern is disrupted. But how do defect-free materials break?

Penn astronomers are celebrating the dedication of a new planet-hunting telescope known as Minerva-Red.

The senior design classes held in each of the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s six departments are an opportunity for University of Pennsylvania students to put their skills to the test, by picking a real-world problem and developing a new piece of technology to solve it.

Two teams from the School of Engineering and Applied Science are participating in a pair of National Science Foundation (NSF) projects designed to advance cyber­physical systems with medical applications.

When Amtrak 188 derailed in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia on May 12, eight people died and more than 200 were injured. The official investigation into the accident is still ongoing, but the train’s 106 mile-per-hour speed—more than double the limit for the curved section of track it derailed on—is widely assumed to be the prime factor.   

University of Pennsylvania astronomers are celebrating the dedication of a new planet-hunting telescope known as Minerva-Red. Installed at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona, Minerva-Red is part of the Minerva project, an array of low-cost telescopes that are designed to discover planets orbiting stars other than the sun.