Glass is mysterious. It is a broad class of materials that extends well beyond the everyday window pane, but one thing that these disparate glasses seem to have in common is that they have nothing in common when it comes to their internal structures, especially in contrast with highly ordered and patterned crystals.

Overconfidence sounds like an inherently bad trait to have, but when it comes to natural selection, some evolutionary psychologists have suggested it could be advantageous in finding a mate.

Metamaterials, precisely designed composite materials that have properties not found in natural ones, could be used to make light-bending invisibility cloaks, flat lenses and other otherwise impossible devices.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) receives around 50,000 grant applications each year, disbursing more than $7 billion in research funds. Only one in five projects receive awards, but the winners are not judged solely on the scientific merits of their proposed research. Applicants must also show how their work will improve society.

MQ: Transforming Mental Health, a new United Kingdom-based charitable organization that supports mental health research, announced Wednesday the first major investment of its new flagship research program, PsyIMPACT. A team of University of Pennsylvania researchers is amo

On Nov.

Yesterday, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann helped celebrate the launch of the Penn Center for Innovation, a new initiative that will provide the infrastructure, leadership and resources needed to transfer promising Penn inventions, know-how and related assets into the marketplace for the public good.  

By Madeleine Stone @themadstone 

The AppItUP Challenge, the app development contest run by the Penn Center for Innovation and its business incubator, UPstart, has a new slate of semi-finalists.

The race to make computer components smaller and faster and use less power is pushing the limits of the properties of electrons in a material. Photonic systems could eventually replace electronic ones, but the fundamentals of computation, mixing two inputs into a single output, currently require too much space and power when done with light.