The rapid movement of lithium ions along the 2D vertical channels in the T-Niobium oxide (T-Nb2O5) thin film results in unique property changes and a chase transition. The blue and purple polyhedra show T-Nb2O5 lattices, without and with lithium, respectively. The bright green spheres represent lithium ions.
(Image: Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics / Patricia Bondia)
Leading the charge: new research unveils the future of energy-efficent power delivery
Penn’s Andrew Rappe and collaborators explore high-quality thin films to propel power into the future.
The European Space Agency’s latest astrophysics mission, Euclid, lifted off on a Space X Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA, at 17:12 CEST on 1 July 2023. Euclid has now started its month-long journey to Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in the opposite direction from the Sun.
(Image: iStock / Robert Michaud)
Euclid Space Telescope launches exciting new possibilities
Professors of physics and astronomy Bhuvnesh Jain, Mark Trodden, and Gary Bernstein discuss the coming research findings from the European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope.
Masoud Akbarzadeh of the Weitzman School of Design leads a multidisciplinary group of architectural designers, structural engineers, computer scientists, and more in his Polyhedral Structures Laboratory. He explores ways in which polyhedral geometries that frequently occur in nature can be used to make stronger and lighter structures, all while using fewer materials. Akbarzadeh discusses a recent study drawing inspiration from dragonfly wings.
(Image: iStock / yanikap)
Nature-inspired designs give rise to stronger, lighter systems
Weitzman’s Masoud Akbarzadeh discusses a recent multidisciplinary study that draws inspiration from dragonfly wings to redesign a Boeing 777 to be lighter, stronger, and more sustainable.
Michael Mann, Penn’s inaugural Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and collaborators found that the effects of climate change on the intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme weather events like wildfires, could lead to massive increases in all three.
(Image: iStock/Marc Bruxelle)
Climate change’s impact on extreme weather events
Michael Mann and collaborators investigated the effects of climate change on the intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme weather events like wildfires, and found that “worst-case” scenario could lead to significant increases in all three.
The concept of a brain-computer interface was first proposed and experimented upon in the 1970s by Jacques Vidal, who demonstrated that humans could control a cursor on a computer screen using their brain waves.
(iStock /Tatiana Sozonova)
Challenges and advances in brain-computer interfaces
Following FDA approval for tech startups to begin human clinical trials for brain-computer interfacing technologies, Penn Today met with Anna Wexler of the Perelman School of Medicine to discuss the promising possibilities and potential pitfalls of neurotechnology.
Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Philip Tetlock and researchers from the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, and Yale, discuss AI and its application to their work.
Laser tomography of champagne glasses: (left and right) counter-rotating convection cells self-organize at the air-champagne interface, and (center) stabilized eddies in a surface-treated glass.
(Image: FabienBeaumont, GérardLiger-Belair, and GuillaumePolidori)
Exploring the relationship between cooking and scientific discovery
Penn physicist Arnold Mathijssen and colleagues have authored a review article discussing the history of food innovations and the current scientific breakthroughs that are changing the way we eat.
“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”
(Image: iStock/Matt Grehan)
Three things to know about a sustainable energy breakthrough
Penn Engineering’s James Pikul explains how a new method of harnessing energy by using water trapped in the air is possible and discusses the implication of the research.
Research led by the School of Arts & Sciences’ Joshua Plotkin and Taylor Kessinger sheds light on the impact of social contexts and multilayered societies on promoting cooperative behavior.
Candida albicans is a species of yeast that is a normal part of the human microbiota but can also cause severe infections that pose a significant global health risk due to their resistance to existing treatments, so much so that the World Health Organization has highlighted this as a priority issue. The picture above shows a before (left) and after (right) fluorescence image of fungal biofilms being precisely targeted by nanozyme microrobots without bonding to or disturbing the tissue sample.
(Image: Min Jun Oh and Seokyoung Yoon)
Nanorobotic system presents new options for targeting fungal infections
Researchers from Penn Dental and Penn Engineering have developed a nanorobot system that precisely and rapidly targets fungal infections in the mouth.
