The Simons Foundation has awarded a $38.4 million grant to establish the Simons Observatory, a new astronomy facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert that will merge and expand existing efforts to explore the evolution of the universe from its earliest moments to today.

This is the second of two features introducing the University of Pennsylvania’s 2016 President’s Innovation Prize winners.

Stem cells hold promise for regenerative medicine because they can turn into any type of tissue, but the need to harvest them from human embryos has stymied research in this field. One way around this issue is to turn back the clock on differentiated cells, reverting them to a stage before they grew into a specific type.

This is the first of two features introducing the University of Pennsylvania’s 2016 President’s Innovation Prize winners. A rough estimate of the amount of steps taken in a day might be enough for the average fitness tracker or smartwatch user, but, for people with movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease, more fine-grained data could be life changing.

Induced pluripotent stem cells hold promise for regenerative medicine because they can, in theory, turn into any type of tissue and because they are made from a patient’s own adult cells, guaranteeing compatibility.

In the drive to miniaturize electronics as much as possible, physicists and engineers are beginning to contend with the role of individual atoms when it comes to measuring the performance of a device. How fast or efficiently a nanoscale transistor can transport an electron may rely on atomic features that are at the limits of what can be visualized by even the most advanced microscopes.

PERCH, the Penn Engineering Research and Collaboration Hub, a new research facility, is beginning to take shape.

After being in the public’s science-fictional imaginings for decades, virtual reality finally seems poised to enter the mainstream. The world’s top tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Facebook, are ramping up their investments in the technology, and long-awaited virtual reality headsets, such as the Oculus Rift, are now becoming available to consumers.

The School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania has launched PERCH, the Penn Engineering Research and Collaboration Hub, a new research facility in the forthcoming Pennovation Center.

The transistor is the most fundamental building block of electronics, used to build circuits capable of amplifying electrical signals or switching them between the 0s and 1s at the heart of digital computation. Transistor fabrication is a highly complex process, however, requiring high-temperature, high-vacuum equipment.