Science & Technology

clockwise) Nyasha Zimunhu, Fahmida Lubna, Celestina Saven, Sanjana Hemdev, Sabrina Green and Sydney Kariuki

‘I Look Like an Engineer’

For the third year in a row, Penn Engineering’s Advancing Women in Engineering program, dedicated to recruiting, retaining and promoting all female-identified students in the School, participated in the “I Look Like an Engineer” social media movement.

From Penn Engineering ・

Karen Goldberg, left, and Drew Newman, right.

The alternative fuel life of everyday items

Researchers in the Goldberg Group, including Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research, and Drew Newman, doctoral candidate in chemistry, focus on alternative fuel sources for items that are part of everyday life.

From OMNIA ・

Eighteen-wheeler truck driving on the highway at dusk.

The infrastructure bill could fix trucking for the long haul

As the country explores major infrastructure investments, urban truck ports have the potential to increase the fuel efficiency of trucks, reduce air pollution, and improve the lives of truckers who deliver our critical goods.

From Kleinman Center for Energy Policy ・

drawing of diverse group of people

The use and misuse of race in health care

In a Q&A, PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, the Perelman School of Medicine’s Giorgio Sirugo, and Case Western Reserve University’s Scott Williams shed light on the “quagmire” of race, ethnicity, genetic ancestry, and environmental factors and their contribution to health disparities.

Katherine Unger Baillie ・



In the News


ABC News

Philadelphia doctor develops rapid COVID test with results on smartphone

A team of researchers led by Ping Wang of the Perelman School of Medicine is developing a more accurate rapid test for COVID-19 that uses smart phone cameras. “The PCR is great. It's sensitive, but at the same time it's only residing in the core laboratories,” she said. “So, you can't really do PCR at home for most settings.”

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The Washington Post

Facebook is like chairs. No, telephones. No, cars. No …

Zachary Loeb, a doctoral candidate in the School of Arts & Sciences, spoke about Facebook’s attempts to compare the platform to simpler, less threatening technologies. “There used to be this utopian aura where they had been trying to act as though they were the latest in the stream of these transformative [communication] technologies,” he said.

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The Scientist

Signaling dynamics fine-tune gene expressiong

Lukasz Bugaj of the School of Engineering & Applied Science comments on a systematic and quantitative look at how gene information is transmitted and what can influence the amount of expression.

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Philadelphia Business Journal

Penn spinout Cogwear gets funding to develop ‘anxiety thermometer’ headband

Cogwear, a startup based at the Penn Center for Innovation and founded by PIK Professor Michael Platt and former postdoc Arjun Ramakrishnan, is developing a wearable device that monitors mental health.

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Wired

Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn?

Aaron Roth of the School of Engineering and Applied Science spoke about his research on machine unlearning, which seeks to answer the question, “Can we remove all influence of someone’s data when they ask to delete it but avoid the full cost of retraining from scratch?”

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Forbes

COVID’s forgotten hero: The untold story of the scientist whose breakthrough made the vaccines possible

Vaccine technology developed by Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó of the Perelman School of Medicine relies on a lipid delivery system created by Ian MacLachlan, a Canadian scientist.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

Prizewinning photo by Penn biologist called metaphor for ‘spiraling crisis’ in the ocean

Kristen Brown, a postdoc in the lab of Katie Barott at the School of Arts & Sciences, won a contest with a photo she took while researching coral reefs.

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Discover Magazine

We’re not alone: Animals suffer from mental health issues too

Carlo Siracusa of the School of Veterinary Medicine said, that while dogs certainly experience mental health issues like anxiety, their experiences differ from humans’ because they can’t plan for the future. “They’re not worrying if their buddies at the dog park are making fun of them,” he said. “Dogs aren’t obsessed in their thoughts like humans—as far as we know. They’re unlikely to be depressed in human terms.”

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Salon.com

Your dog has a rich interior life it's not telling you about

James Serpell of the School of Veterinary Medicine spoke about how dogs interact with and interpret the world around them, from barking to licking to sniffing. “While we derive most of the information about the world around us through our eyes and ears, dogs can access an additional layer of information via their noses that we are essentially ‘blind’ to,” he said.

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USA Today

Fact check: 62-mile-wide mega comet unlikely to hit Earth, will just pass by it in 2031

Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about the giant comet they recently discovered. “There is no possibility of this thing getting any closer to Earth than Saturn gets,” said Bernstein.

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