Science & Technology

Population-based epidemiological studies provide new opportunities for innovation and collaboration among researchers addressing pressing global-health concerns.

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, has confirmed the discovery of the most distant supernova ever detected, a huge cosmic explosion that took place 10.5 billion years ago.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science have demonstrated the feasibility of their “organ-on-a-chip” platform in studying how drugs are transported across the human placental barrier.

Penn senior Kevin Chen will study abroad at the University of Cambridge's Churchill College with a scholarship from the Winston Churchill Foundation.

In many modern animated movies, the trick to achieving realistic movements for individual characters and objects lies in motion-capture technology. This process often involves someone wearing a tracking suit covered in small, colored balls while a camera captures the position of those colored balls, which is then used to represent how the person is moving.

Prevailing theories about evolution state that belief in the concept is tied only to a person’s politics, religion or both. But according to new research, whether Americans accept or reject the subject also depends on how well they understand it.  

Performance can be enhanced by as much as 15 percent, according to a study by Penn neuroscientists published in Nature Communications. It is the first time such a connection has been made.

As part of a breast-cancer diagnosis, doctors analyze the tumor to determine which therapies might best attack the malignancy. But for patients whose cancer is triple-negative — that is, lacking receptors for estrogen, progesterone and Her2 — the options for treatment dwindle. Triple-negative cancers, or TNBC, also tend to be more aggressive than other cancer subtypes.

Current computer systems represent bits of information — the 1’s and 0’s of binary code — with electricity. Circuit elements, such as transistors, operate on these electric signals, producing outputs that are dependent on their inputs.

Network science examines how the actions of a system’s individual parts affect the behavior of the system as a whole. Some commonly studied networks include computer chip components and social media users, but University of Pennsylvania engineers are now applying network science to a much older system: the human body.