The Restoring Active Memory project run by the University of Pennsylvania has just released human intracranial brain recording and stimulation data for 102 new patients and a new spatial-navigation task developed by researchers at Columbia University.

Michele W. Berger ・November 1, 2017

Filtration membranes are, at their core, sponge-like materials that have micro- or nanoscopically small pores. Unwanted chemicals, bacteria and even viruses are physically blocked by the maze of mesh, but liquids like water can make it through.

Evan Lerner, Patricia Quigley ・November 1, 2017

Read a few lines of Chaucer or Shakespeare and you’ll get a sense of how the English language has changed during the past millennium. Linguists catalogue these changes and work to discern why they happened. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists have been doing something similar with living things, exploring how and why certain genes have changed over generations.

Katherine Unger Baillie ・November 1, 2017

Inspired by how geometry influences physical systems such as soft matter, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have revealed surprising insights into how the physics of molecules within a cell affect how the cell behaves.

Evan Lerner, Ali Sundermier ・October 31, 2017

If you ask any physicist to identify the biggest mystery in their field, dark matter would probably be toward the top of the list. It makes up about 80 percent of the mass of the universe, but because it doesn’t emit light or energy, it’s proven nearly impossible to detect since it was first proposed in 1933.

October 27, 2017

Cancer of the pancreas is a deadly disease, with a median survival time of less than six months. Only one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer survives five years past the diagnosis. The reason is the cancer’s insidiousness; tumor cells hide deep inside the body, betraying no symptoms until late in the disease, when the cancer has almost invariably spread to other organs.

Katherine Unger Baillie ・October 27, 2017

The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science has established the Intel Center for Wireless Autonomous Systems. The research group, made possible by a three-year, $1.5 million gift from Intel, will investigate how robots and other machines can best wirelessly communicate with each other in high-stakes situations.

Evan Lerner, Ali Sundermier ・October 18, 2017

Autoimmune diseases tend to strike women more than men and having multiple X chromosomes could be the main reason why. While a process called X chromosome inactivation serves to balance out gene dosage between males and females, some genes on the “inactive X” chromosome in immune cells can sometimes escape this process, giving women an extra dose of immunity-related gene expression.

Katherine Unger Baillie ・October 18, 2017

In a blink of an eye, an octopus can transform from a colorful creature to a drab pile of rocks and plant life, indistinguishable from the surface it’s perched on.  This camouflage relies on specialized pigment organs, but what makes the octopus unique among animals is its ability to change the texture of its skin.

Evan Lerner, Ali Sundermier, Tom Fleischman ・October 18, 2017

Masao Sako of the University of Pennsylvania was on vacation with his family when he got the news. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, had made a fifth detection of gravitational waves, which expand and contract space time.

Ali Sundermier October 16, 2017