Science & Technology

Penn Electric Racing has taken home top honors at an international competition.

Though they graduated mere weeks ago, five members of Penn’s Class of 2015 have already begun projects destined to make a profound impact on individuals and communities around the world, with support from the President’s Engagement Prizes.

Despite their ubiquity in consumer electronics, rare-earth metals are, as their name suggests, hard to come by. Mining and purifying them is an expensive, labor-intensive and ecologically devastating process.

Picking things up and putting them down is a mainstay of any kind of manufacturing, but fingers, human or robotic, are not always best for the task at hand.    

For diabetics, a quick prick of the finger can give information about their blood glucose levels, guiding them in whether to have a snack or inject a dose of insulin. Point-of-care glucose meters, or glucometers, are also used in the veterinary world to monitor cats and dogs with diabetes or pets hospitalized for other reasons.

Stress during the first trimester of pregnancy alters the population of microbes living in a mother’s vagina. Those changes are passed on to newborns during birth and are associated with differences in their gut microbiome as well as their brain development, according to a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers.

By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone In any textbook diagram, a group of red blood cells, skin cells or nerve cells will typically be identical in size. But, just as no two people are quite the same height and weight, in a population of real cells there are larger and smaller individuals.

Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould is famous for describing the evolution of humans and other conscious beings as a chance accident of history. If we could go back millions of years and “run the tape of life again,” he mused, evolution would follow a different path. 

Marketers have said for years that Americans give up their data online, on apps and in stores because of the benefits they receive, such as discounts or special offers.  But a new national survey from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication rebuts this claim and offers a new explanation: resignation.

In 1913 in Southern California, two 241-mile-long electric lines began carrying power from hydroelectric dams in the Sierra Nevada to customers in Los Angeles—a massive feat of infrastructure. In 1923, power company Southern California Edison upgraded the line to carry 220,000 volts, among the highest voltage lines in the world at the time.