Recently, atop a Chilean mountain, scientists from around the world marked the dedication of the Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created.

PHILADELPHIA -- Mathematical scientists from around the world, including 16 from the University of Pennsylvania, have been named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society for 2013, the program's initial year.  This inaugural class of 1,119 Fellows represents more than 600 institutions.  

Blood clots can help or hurt, depending on where they occur. When you get a cut, platelets swarm to the site of an injury and join together, forming a clot that stops the bleeding. But for individuals with the disease atherosclerosis, injury occurs within the wall of an artery and fatty tissue builds up inside these walls and eventually bursts.

PHILADELPHIA — The disease atherosclerosis involves the build up of fatty tissue within arterial walls, creating unstable structures known as plaques. These plaques grow until they burst, rupturing the wall and causing the formation of a blood clot within the artery.

Alison Sweeney is one of the newest faculty members in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, but until she came to Penn, she didn’t fit into either of those disciplinary boxes.

PHILADELPHIA — Making uniform coatings is a common engineering challenge, and, when working at the nanoscale, even the tiniest cracks or defects can be a big problem. New research from University of Pennsylvania engineers has shown a new way of avoiding such cracks when depositing thin films of nanoparticles.  

PHILADELPHIA — The colors of a butterfly’s wings are unusually bright and beautiful and are the result of an unusual trait; the way they reflect light is fundamentally different from how color works most of the time.

Baboon females actively work to maintain close social bonds but, like humans, some seem to be better at it than others. With the strength of baboons’ social network closely tied to their health and reproductive success, a team of Penn researchers wanted to get at the root of this variation.

Anyone who has had a pet instinctively knows what several physical and mental health studies have shown: people who have a companion animal have lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression than the general population.