A team of material scientists, chemical engineers and physicists from the University of Pennsylvania has made another advance in their effort to use liquid crystals as a medium for assembling structures.

Penn’s Center for Technology Transfer and its company-formation program, UPstart, launched an ambitious contest in September, aimed to gather the best mobile application ideas from throughout the University community.

The idea of growing replacement tissue to repair an organ, or to swap it out for an entirely new one, is rapidly transitioning from science fiction to fact.

The heart maintains a careful balancing act; too soft and it won’t pump blood, but too hard and it will overtax itself and stop entirely. There is an optimal amount of strain that a beating heart can generate and still beat at its usual rate, once per second.

Current solar panels need two materials to work: one that absorbs light and excites electrons, and another that gets those electrons to flow in one direction, producing electrical current.

The University of Pennsylvania, through its Center for Technology Transfer and its UPstart company formation program, has announced a new partnership with IP Group PLC, developer of intellectual property-based businesses. 

The hippocampus in the brain is associated with remembering events and tracking locations. Until recently, researchers had been unable to determine whether the same sets of neurons were involved in both of these processes.

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form “geotags” for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.

WHO:            Alison Sweeney                     Assistant Professor of Physics

The blood stem cells that live in bone marrow are at the top of a complex family tree. Such stem cells split and divide down various pathways that ultimately produce red cells, white cells and platelets.