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From seed sowing to harvest
Xavier Watkins-Wright washing cucumbers and peppers.

Xavier Watkins-Wright washes freshly picked cucumbers and peppers at Penn Farm.

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From seed sowing to harvest

Five undergraduates spent their summer interning at Penn Farm, where they practiced regenerative agricultural techniques and learned about environmental and food justice.

Liana F. Wait

The Mancos Commons rises
Person holding a printing type at an old-fashioned printing press.

Printing type at the Mancos Common Press.

(Image: Courtesy of the Weitzman School of Design)

The Mancos Commons rises

A historic preservation project in the Colorado town of Mancos led by Weitzman professors Frank Matero and Matt Neff includes a printing press inspired by Penn’s Common Press and an affordable mixed-use housing space.

From the Weitzman School of Design

Why Tesla wants to have the EV plug standard
Tesla charging stations lined up in a parking lot.

(Image: iStock/sanfel)

Why Tesla wants to have the EV plug standard

John Paul MacDuffie, a professor of management at the Wharton School whose research examines vehicle and mobility innovations, explains the ongoing push by Tesla to establish its electric vehicle plug as an industry standard.
Nature-inspired designs give rise to stronger, lighter systems
Wing of a dragonfly close up.

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.
Climate change’s impact on extreme weather events
Conceptual image of a city hit by extreme heatwave

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.
Three things to know about a sustainable energy breakthrough
Photo of lightening striking a city at night.

“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.
In MATTERS course, art materials are traced to their source
students standing on a hill of seashells

Students with Kaitlin Pomerantz and site host and Bayshore Center Facilities Manager Scott Eves in Shell Pile, New Jersey, learning about sand mining and marine aquaculture.

(Image: Lucia Thome)

In MATTERS course, art materials are traced to their source

Through an innovative new course in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, students explore the life cycles of the materials frequently used in art and design—from paints to potting soil.