Science & Technology

Hurricane Sandy caught the public and policymakers off guard when it hit the United States’ Atlantic Coast last fall. Because much of the storm’s devastation was wrought by flooding in the aftermath, researchers have been paying attention to how climate change and sea-level rise may have played a role in the disaster and how those factors may impact the shoreline in the future.

The allure of personalized medicine has made new, more efficient ways of sequencing genes a top research priority. One promising technique involves reading DNA bases using changes in electrical current as they are threaded through a nanoscopic hole.

A team of University of Pennsylvania engineers has used a pattern of nanoantennas to develop a new way of turning infrared light into mechanical action, opening the door to more sensitive infrared cameras and more compact chemical-analysis techniques.

In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west coast of North America. Though it was powerful enough to cause a tsunami as far as Japan, a lack of local documentation has made studying this historic event challenging.

Adrian Morrison, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, has had plenty of experience writing about his area of academic expertise, REM sleep.

Two University of Pennsylvania professors have won the chance to pursue their research full-time this fall.

WHO:             Jonathan Shepherd, director of the Cardiff University Violence and Society Research Group

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has selected the University of Pennsylvania to be an Emerging Leaders in Science & Society, ELISS, founding partner campus.  Three other universities were also chosen, Stanford, University of Washington, and Purdue.

In a unique, interdisciplinary collaboration, the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine’s Working Dog Center, The School of Arts and Science's Department of Physics and Astronomy, Penn Medicine’s Division of Gynecologic Oncology and the Monell Chemical Senses Center have joined together to study ovarian cancer detection by dogs and e-sensors.

Anyone who has flown in an airplane knows about turbulence, or when the flow of a fluid — in this case, the flow of air over the wings — becomes chaotic and unstable. For more than a century, the field of fluid mechanics has posited that turbulence scales with inertia, and so massive things, like planes, have an easier time causing it.