Natural Sciences

On Sunday, Sept. 29, Earth welcomed 2024 PT5, a “mini-moon” temporarily captured by the planet’s orbit that’s set to depart on Monday, Nov. 25.

(Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL)

Kathleeen Morrison, Fernanda Jiménez, and Julie Ellis present to the Penn community at CLALS. The program was also available to online participants; behind them, Carolina Angel Botero, Emilio Latorre, and Keith Russell present via Zoom.

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Marija Drndić of the School of Arts & Sciences and Dimitri Monos of the Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia led a team of researchers who developed a new nanostructure platform that allows for more precise detection and control of biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins. This exciting new platform signals a new era of synthetic biology, paving the way for enhanced DNA sequencing and protein conformation detection.

(Image: Courtesy of artist) 

Jen Wilcox has returned to the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and to the School of Engineering and Applied Science following three years in at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she served in the Biden Administration as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

(Image: Courtesy of Jen Wilcox)

Image: Maggie Chiang for OMNIA

Hugo Ulloa and Daisuke Noto of the School of Arts & Sciences have unearthed findings that address long-standing mysteries in the mechanics of fluids in confined, tight spaces: how their boundaries affect heat as it emanates from one place and dissipates throughout the space. The image above is a lab-scale hydrothermal system modeled utilizing a Hele-Shaw cell of 10 cm tall, 20 cm long and 4 mm gap. The interior of the Hele-Shaw cell is filled with degassed, deionized water heated from the bottom and cooled from above. A green laser sheet crosses the middle plane of the cell to visualize the motions of micro-scale particles seeded on the water, allowing researchers to estimate the fluid velocity and temperature.

(Image: Courtesy of Daisuke Noto)

Lipid nanoparticles present one of the most advanced drug delivery platforms to shuttle promising therapeutics such as mRNA but are limited by the time it takes to synthesize cationic lipids, a key component. Now, Michael Mitchell and his team at the School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a faster way to make cationic lipids that are also more versatile, able to carry different kinds of treatments to target specific organs.

(Image: iStock / Dr_Microbe)

(Image: iStock/Nigel Jarvis)

This image visualizes the Milky Way and its surrounding “halo” of stars. Most stars in the Milky Way lie in the disc (like the Sun, for example), but stars from past collisions end up in the halo, a large “cloud” of stars that extends outwards in all directions. These halo stars have been enhanced in this image, but in reality would be very dim compared to the disc. The halo appears messy and “wrinkly” here, a sign that a merger has occurred relatively recently.

(Image: Halo stars: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, T Donlon et al. 2024; Background Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar)

Image: iStock/Kichigin