Science & Technology

Each of your cells contains two copies of 23 chromosomes, one inherited from your father and one from your mother. Theoretically, when you create a gamete — a sperm or an egg —  each copy has a 50-50 shot at being passed on. But the reality isn’t so clearcut.

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.

When Lisa Tran set out to investigate patterns in liquid crystals, she didn’t know what to expect. When she first looked through the microscope, she saw dancing iridescent spheres with fingerprint-like patterns etched into them that spiraled and flattened as the solution they were floated in changed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.