Penn Engineers have developed a liquid assembly line process that controls flow rates to produce particles of a consistent size at a thousand times the speed.

The relative stiffness of a cell’s environment is known to have a large effect on that cell’s behavior, including how well the cell can stick or move. Now, a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers demonstrates the role timing plays in how cells perceive this stiffness.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science have demonstrated the feasibility of their “organ-on-a-chip” platform in studying how drugs are transported across the human placental barrier.

Current computer systems represent bits of information — the 1’s and 0’s of binary code — with electricity. Circuit elements, such as transistors, operate on these electric signals, producing outputs that are dependent on their inputs.

Network science examines how the actions of a system’s individual parts affect the behavior of the system as a whole. Some commonly studied networks include computer chip components and social media users, but University of Pennsylvania engineers are now applying network science to a much older system: the human body.

When a cancer patient receives a bone marrow transplant, time is of the essence. Healthy stem cells, which can restart the production of blood cells and immune system components after a patient’s own are compromised, need to make their way from the circulatory system into the bones as quickly as possible.

In mammals, including humans, the cells that contract the heart muscle and enable it to beat do not regenerate after injury. After a heart attack, there is a dramatic loss of these heart muscle cells and those that survive cannot effectively replicate.

Dropping a smartphone on its glass screen, which is made of atoms jammed together with no discernible order, could result in it shattering. Unlike metals and other crystalline materials, glass and many other disordered solids cannot be deformed significantly before failing and, because of their lack of crystalline order, it is difficult to predict which atoms would change during failure.

With streaming movies and UltraHD television taking more and more bandwidth, there is a race to deliver data into people’s homes as quickly as possible. Light-based fiber optic connections promise far faster data rates than standard electricity-based coaxial cables, so making laser sources smaller, cheaper and more stable is a high priority for engineers.

Filtration membranes are, at their core, sponge-like materials that have micro- or nanoscopically small pores. Unwanted chemicals, bacteria and even viruses are physically blocked by the maze of mesh, but liquids like water can make it through.