Science & Technology

One way to learn about climate change is to read about it, exploring the scientific literature, perusing science news and combing through reams of relevant data. Another way is to experience it firsthand.

For many people with advanced Type 2 diabetes, taking insulin is a regular part of their routine, helping them control their blood sugar by signaling the metabolism of glucose. But recently, researchers have been investigating GLP-1, a peptide that gets activated when people eat, triggering insulin through a more natural pathway.

Imagine you’re in a restaurant, hungry, anxious and a bit irritable awaiting your food order to arrive at the table. The server exits the kitchen with a tray full of steaming plates and a flood of relief washes over you.

Whether drinking beer, eating ice cream or washing the dishes, it’s fair to say that many people come across foam on a day-to-day basis. It’s in everything from detergents to beverages to cosmetics. Outside of everyday life, it has applications in areas such as firefighting, isolating toxic materials and distributing chemicals.

Dentists rely on composite materials to perform restorative procedures, such as filling cavities. Yet these materials, like tooth enamel, can be vulnerable to the growth of plaque, the sticky biofilm that leads to tooth decay.

They could make up the shortfall if efforts begun by the Obama Administration — increasing vehicle fuel economy standards and proposing the Clean Power Plan — are not carried out as planned.

In mammals, including humans, the cells that contract the heart muscle and enable it to beat do not regenerate after injury. After a heart attack, there is a dramatic loss of these heart muscle cells and those that survive cannot effectively replicate.

While Penn alumnus William Fry was studying abroad in Germany, he came across a common problem in software development.

Some paleontologists travel far and wide to seek new fossils — to the desert Southwest of the United States, remote regions of China or the farthest tip of Argentina. University of Pennslyvania student Jack Stack, on the other hand, made his first paleontological discoveries much closer to home.At home, in fact.

Dropping a smartphone on its glass screen, which is made of atoms jammed together with no discernible order, could result in it shattering. Unlike metals and other crystalline materials, glass and many other disordered solids cannot be deformed significantly before failing and, because of their lack of crystalline order, it is difficult to predict which atoms would change during failure.