Through
11/26
Science & Technology
Penn Immunologists Find a Molecule That Puts the Brakes on Inflammation
PHILADELPHIA — We couldn’t live without our immune systems, always tuned to detect and eradicate invading pathogens and particles. But sometimes the immune response goes overboard, triggering autoimmune diseases like lupus, asthma or inflammatory bowel disease.
Penn Researcher Part of $1.5 Million Grant to Reduce Gene Sequencing Costs
PHILADELPHIA — A collaboration between researchers at Columbia University and Marija Drndić of the University of Pennsylvania has been awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant for a project aimed at reducing the cost of genome sequencing.
Queer Bioethics Comes to Life at Penn
PHILADELPHIA — It’s not every day that a new academic discipline is born. But that’s exactly what happened in 2010, when the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality and Gender Identity — or “Queer Bioethics,” for short — came to life at the University of Pennsylvania.
As World’s Most Powerful Digital Camera Records First Images, Penn Team Gears Up to Study Dark Energy
Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. On Sept. 17, that ancient starlight found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, captured and recorded it for the first time.
Top 20 at TED
Having garnered more than 3.5 million viewers, a TED talk featuring Penn Engineering professor Vijay Kumar on the making of flying autonomous robots by Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab, has become one of the most watched TED videos to date.
Morris Arboretum’s Weekday Lecture Series, Connections Beyond Our Garden, Returns
PHILADELPHIA -- Morris Arboretum’s mid-week afternoon series continues this fall with three talks designed to stimulate and enrich, whether you are a gardener or not. The selected speakers will take you beyond the garden, to their world in the arts, humanities, sciences, sustainability, ornithology and travel.
Compound Derived From a Mushroom Lengthens Survival Time in Dogs With Cancer, Penn Vet Study Finds
PHILADELPHIA — Dogs with hemangiosarcoma that were treated with a compound derived from the Coriolus versicolor mushroom had the longest survival times ever reported for dogs with the disease. These promising findings offer hope that the compound may one day offer cancer patients — human and canine alike — a viable alternative or complementary treatment to traditional chemotherapies.
Penn Team Finds Key Molecules Involved in Forming Long-term Memories
PHILADELPHIA — How does one’s experience of an event get translated into a memory that can be accessed months, even years later? A team led by University of Pennsylvania scientists has come closer to answering that question, identifying key molecules that help convert short-term memories into long-term ones.
Penn Researchers Make First All-optical Nanowire Switch
PHILADELPHIA — Computers may be getting faster every year, but those advances in computer speed could be dwarfed if their 1’s and 0’s were represented by bursts of light, instead of electricity.
Penn Dental Welcomes Class of 2016 With White Coat Ceremony
WHO: Dean Denis Kinane, School of Dental Medicine, Dean Afaf Meleis, School of Nursing Dean Emeritus D.
In the News
Scientific American
Grumpy voters want better stories. Not statistics
In a Q&A, PIK Professor Duncan Watts says that U.S. voters ignored Democratic policy in favor of Republican storytelling.
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WHYY (Philadelphia)
Climate policy under a second Trump presidency
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences discusses how much a president can do or undo when it comes to environmental policy.
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Technical.ly Philly
A sneak peek inside Penn Engineering’s new $137.5M mass timber building
Amy Gutmann Hall aims to be Philadelphia’s next big hub for AI and innovation while setting a new standard for architectural sustainability.
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Salon.com
Exxon CEO wants Trump to stay in Paris climate accord
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences voices his concern about the possibility that the U.S. could become a petrostate.
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Interesting Engineering
Superhuman vision lets robots see through walls, smoke with new LiDAR-like eyes
Mingmin Zhao of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and colleagues are using radio signals to allow robots to “see” beyond traditional sensor limits.
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Associated Press
Amid Earth’s heat records, scientists report another bump upward in annual carbon emissions
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that total carbon emissions including fossil fuel pollution and land use changes such as deforestation are basically flat because land emissions are declining.
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The Wall Street Journal
How can we remove carbon from the air? Here are a few ideas
Jennifer Wilcox of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Weitzman School of Design says that the carbon-removal potential of forestation can’t always be reliably measured in terms of how much removal and for how long.
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Associated Press
California air regulators approve changes to climate program that could raise gas prices
Danny Cullenward of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Weitzman School of Design says that many things being credited in California’s new climate program don’t help the climate.
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Times of India
Self shocks turn crystal to glass at ultralow power density: Study
A collaborative study by researchers from the School of Engineering and Applied Science has shed new light on amorphization, the transition from a crystalline to a glassy state at the nanoscale.
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The Independent
Climate scientists fear Trump will destroy progress in his second term – and the outcome could be ‘grim’
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that a second Trump term and the implementation of Project 2025 represents the end of climate action in this decade.
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