Cartilage injuries are difficult to repair. Current surgical options generally involve taking a piece from another part of the injured joint and patching over the damaged area, but this approach involves damaging healthy cartilage, and a person’s cartilage may still deteriorate with age.

A team of Penn engineers has used a pattern of nanoscopic grooves on a tiny strip of gold to turn infrared light into mechanical action, a technique that could lead to more sensitive night-vision cameras and additional compact chemical-analysis techniques.

The quintessential piece of origami might be a decorative paper crane, but in the hands of an interdisciplinary Penn research team, it could lead to a drug-delivery device, an emergency shelter, or even a space station.

Since the time of Linnaeus and even before, biologists and naturalists have been keen to organize living things into distinct groups. Now the modern technology of rapid DNA sequencing has revolutionized that categorizing task, providing a window into the relationships among species about which little was once known.

Hurricane Sandy caught the public and policymakers off guard when it hit the United States’ Atlantic Coast last fall. Because much of the storm’s devastation was wrought by flooding in the aftermath, researchers have been paying attention to how climate change and sea-level rise may have played a role in the disaster and how those factors may impact the shoreline in the future.

The allure of personalized medicine has made new, more efficient ways of sequencing genes a top research priority. One promising technique involves reading DNA bases using changes in electrical current as they are threaded through a nanoscopic hole.

A team of University of Pennsylvania engineers has used a pattern of nanoantennas to develop a new way of turning infrared light into mechanical action, opening the door to more sensitive infrared cameras and more compact chemical-analysis techniques.

In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west coast of North America. Though it was powerful enough to cause a tsunami as far as Japan, a lack of local documentation has made studying this historic event challenging.

For the first time in nearly a decade, a team from the Department of Bioengineering took the top prize in the School of Engineering Applied Science’s Senior Design Project Competition.

What makes people change the way they behave? It’s a question that cuts to the core of human nature, and one that has been approached by researchers from many different fields.