Faster than the speed of light. Stronger than a sheet of graphene. It’s the Philadelphia Science Festival, back for a second year.

PHILADELPHIA — Benjamin Garcia has been named the first Presidential Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, effective June 1.  The announcement was made by Penn President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price.

PHILADELPHIA — Treatments for childhood cancers are increasingly successful with cure rates approaching 80%, but success often comes with a downside for the surviving men: the cancer treatments they received as boys can leave them sterile as adults.

At first blush, art and math couldn’t seem more different from one another: free-flowing creative expression versus rigid rule-based analysis. But the histories of the two disciplines are deeply intertwined. The mathematicians of the medieval Middle East developed algebra and represented the patterns they found there in woven tapestries and mosaic tessellations.

PHILADELPHIA — As nanotechnology becomes ever more ubiquitous, researchers are using it to make medical diagnostics smaller, faster and cheaper in order to better diagnose diseases, learn more about inherited traits and more.

We live in a world of waves. The radio waves hitting your car’s antenna and the light coming in through its windshield, the X-rays that can detect a tumor, and the gamma radiation that can destroy it are all different facets of the same phenomenon: electromagnetism. As one of the fundamental forces of nature, its imprint can be felt on almost everything in the universe.

The smartphone you have in your pocket or purse is literally hundreds of times more powerful than the room-sized computers that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Hardware design has accelerated exponentially since then, roughly doubling every two years the number of circuits that can fit on a computer chip.

PHILADELPHIA — Computational sprinting is a groundbreaking new approach to smartphone power and cooling that could give users dramatic, brief bursts of computing capability to improve current applications and make new ones possible.

PHILADELPHIA -- The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits.

PHILADELPHIA — Four University of Pennsylvania faculty members are among this year’s Sloan Fellowship recipients. Since 1955, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has granted yearly fellowships to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them the next generation of scientific leaders.