On Friday, September 6, more than a thousand students from about 100 universities will descend upon the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science to take part in HACKfest, a series of student-run, weekend-long software and hardware design competitions w

Researchers in psychology and neuroscience are working to connect specific regions of the brain with behaviors and abilities that depend on them. While advances in non-invasive imaging technologies have propelled this interdisciplinary work forward, there is no substitute for directly recording the electrical activity of the living brain.

Using direct human brain recordings, a research team from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Thomas Jefferson University has identified a new type of cell in the brain that helps people to keep track of their relative loc

When University of Pennsylvania nanoscientists created beautiful, tiled patterns with flat nanocrystals, they were left with a mystery: why did some sets of crystals arrange themselves in an alternating, herringbone style, even though it wasn’t the simplest pattern?

(This is the second in a series about University of Pennsylvania students who took their arguments in support of federal student financial aid to Washington this summer in a project organized by the Office of Student Registration and Financial Services. Other profiles feature students Kristin Thomas and Mounica Gummadi.)

The more parents speak to their children, the bigger their vocabularies are when they begin school. Research has indicated that richer parents speak to their children more often than poorer parents do, deepening the educational disadvantage facing many children living in poverty.

Catalysts are everywhere. They make chemical reactions that normally occur at extremely high temperatures and pressures possible within factories, cars and the comparatively balmy conditions within the human body. Developing better catalysts, however, is mainly a hit-or-miss process.

Physicist Charlie Johnson connects the biological to the digital, using graphene and carbon nanotubes to turn chemical interactions into electrical signals. Johnson will explain how attaching biological structures, such as antibodies, to these flat or rolled-up lattices of carbon atoms has enabled him and his colleagues to build new kinds of sensors, detecting things like Lyme disease bacteria.

John S. Swartley has been named associate vice provost for research and executive director of the Center for Technology Transfer at the University of Pennsylvania.